Recently, we had the chance to talk to drummer Gil Moore, who many in Toronto and Canada remember from the ’80s rock band Triumph.
He talked about his roots in music, Triumph’s rise and fall and rise again, and the new documentary Triumph: Rock & Roll Machine, showing at TIFF.
HGL: Where did the interest in music come from?
Gil Moore: My mother was an amateur pianist, she had six sisters and two of them were professional pianists, she got interested in music with piano. Peter Goddard (Canadian music journalist), he was my piano instructor, my Miss Jones who comes down the street and gives you lessons, but in my case it was Peter Goddard, who became a lifelong friend and still is.
Peter said I was good, progressing very fast. I got from kindergarten to grade 3 in one year, but I was also obstinate and not really interested in piano. I ended up bailing on piano, just like I bailed on trumpet, and drums were more appealing for some reason or another.
HGL: How did you end up with such a passion for drumming?
Gil Moore: It’s a funny story, actually. At age 13, we’d go to my aunt’s cottage in Port Elgin. My parents made this a ritual as I was a little kid growing up, but by the time I was an early teenager, the Cedar Crescent Casino, which has subsequently burned down, before it burned down, I went with my friend Brad and The Comets were playing. We walked in, we were these little kids, everyone else was like 16 to 20, there was no liquor there, so that wasn’t an issue, and I got as close as I could to the stage.
When I heard a set of drums start rattling, and when I heard the music start playing…it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen and heard, my eyes were the size of apple pies. So yeah, right there is really where the journey began.
HGL: Where did the singing come in?
Gil Moore: I hated singing (laughs). It started because one of my pre-Triumph bands, which were all miserable failures, as with Mike and Rik, we joked about each other’s failures, whose failures were more epic. I think Mike was the most successful because he managed to get jobs, whereas Rik and I can’t even get a job. So, at this particular juncture in my career, my group had a job at Honey Harbour, in the Pavillion, for $125, and my lead singer quit.
We were rehearsing and he got angry and stomped out on us, so we all looked at each other and said, what are we going to do now? There was no way we’re going to miss this gig, so I called a friend of mine, Joe DeNardo, who was playing in a band called The Magic Cycle and, unlike us, they were very commercial, vocal harmonies. Whereas we were playing music that agents would tell us, don’t play that music, no one wants to hear it, they don’t care about your originals; what you guys need to do is buy pink suits, get some great 8x10s, and play cover music, that’s the key to success. We were like, no, no, no, we want to dress like hooligans and play loud, aggressive crap that’s going to offend people.
So, my buddy Joe came over, and I told him we were desperate, we have this job and no singer, so he said, I’ll teach you guys to sing. We were doing “Sookie, Sookie, Sookie” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” and it was determined that because I had no tonal capabilities, I would take over those songs. He said, just do what I do, so we were playing the song, and he was singing right beside me really loud, and I would emulate him, and that was my lesson.
He then moved on to the other band members and gave them a similar lesson. It was kind of like a Spinal Tap/Monty Python outcome; we piled into the back of our van, went to the gig and we conquered. We got our $125, we paid our PA and truck rental, and came back victorious to Toronto and Mississauga.
HGL: When you, Mike Levine, and Rik Emmett finally got together in Triumph, did you know right away you guys had something special?
Gil Moore: We knew right away we were going to make it because we were all such tremendous failures (laughs). When Triumph started to play, something amazing happened. We played at Simcoe District High School in September of 1975, and with my old bands, Rik’s as well, when we used to play, people would go to the smoking area or lavatory. Mike’s bands not so much, they were more proficient, but financially compromised, let’s say.
When we played together as Triumph, after two or three songs, the audience swarmed us with mouths wide open. I’d never seen that unless someone was vomiting. We ended up naming that NGE, which stood for Net Gasp Effect. When we started, there was a tremendous amount of NGE right from the outset, and we levied that by taking any money we made and putting it right back into the production.
HGL: I saw Triumph play a couple of times. You guys were very high energy and a lot of fun. What is playing live like for you, especially at something like the US Festival?
Gil Moore: Well, we approached everything with a bit of humor, which I think was very important. Too many bands take it too seriously, not that we weren’t serious about our craft. We were intent on playing great and becoming great musicians, but we thought there was too much stress in life already, and the role of music was to be uplifting, make people feel positive, and give them inspiration. We engaged in a lot of humor and in our movie, the Trailer Park Boys are right there and we were kind of like Bubbles and the boys as a band. It was our way of dealing with stress with what the road does to you, especially when you play something like the US Festival.
Never turned to drugs and alcohol because of our sense of humor and the loyalty to our audience. We went on stage like a sports team, not high or drunk, like the Toronto Blue Jays or Toronto Raptors. We were going to kill it. We’ve had such tremendous fans over the years, it’s hard to express at this stage how grateful we are to those fans.
HGL: When Triumph split up, you guys were still playing to huge audiences, and it was suddenly over. Now, here we are with a documentary over 30 years later. What were those years in between like for you?
Gil Moore: The in-between has been different for all three of us. Speaking for myself, I know Rik wanted to do his own music and the only issue at the time was my father had passed away, and I’m an only child, so my motivation was I have to look after my mom. I can’t be Joe Rockstar in some hotel somewhere while my mom is by herself and grieving. I couldn’t do Triumph in 1988-89, so I went into a kind of cocoon.
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Rik was doing his own music thing and Mike was kind of in-between the two of us, it’s just how life works out. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love the Triumph career, but my mom subsequently had a stroke, which meant she needed even more care, so I wasn’t leaving Toronto. I love the studio, I was never cut out to be a guy on stage, anyway.
Before Triumph started, I was into sound and lighting anyway, audio and visual stuff, and I’ve come full circle because I’m back into that now. Paul Dexter and I, we are working on something called MXR Vision, we’re going to have a Triumph tour that’s going to be done in technology that’s going to freak people out.
HGL: Let’s talk about the documentary. How did this film come to be made?
Gil Moore: I called my friend Ron Suter and NBC Universal and said Ron, surely you have some money you want to blow on something crazy (laughs). I told him I wanted to do a documentary, and he asked me why would that be cool. I told him I was a pack rat and had every Triumph recording that ever existed, all the audio and video, even the US Festival. I made a deal so we would retain all the video rights, which no other band did.
So, then I called Triumph’s video director, Don Allan, at Revolver Films and said Don, you have to do the documentary with us. He was all over it, went to Peter Goddard, my old piano teacher, and wrote a treatment of it with Don. We got Revolver Films in the game because they are the kings of rock docs, and Revolver is a little bit different as a film company. He did a sort of flip off to Sam Dunn, who then pulled in Marc Ricciardelli as his co-director. We didn’t know this at the time, but Marc is the greatest editor of all time. I love the guy, and Sam is very, very clever. I didn’t realize this at the time. I disagreed with some of the things he was doing, but I had to learn to sit down and shut up because he’s very good at what he does.
When you have a documentary made about your band or yourself, it feels very intrusive, and you don’t want to reveal some things. I realized, though, that the Triumph documentary would be a total failure if you didn’t get past the veneer and talk about the truth. Some of it was painful, I didn’t want to talk about when we broke up, but I’m glad I did. There were a lot of creative people involved that helped make this happen, and even if they weren’t fans of the band per se, I think they were fans of our journey and how we approached things, especially our sense of humor.
HGL: When you finally sat down and watched the finished film, what was your reaction?
Gil Moore: Shock and awe. I watched it with my wife and my kids, and it’s kind of hard to say, my first reaction was embarrassment because you look at your failures, and the times where you were over the tips of your skis. You write it off as being young punks, being over our heads, but we kind of had to be.
Everyone was telling us when we started that we were going to be failures; we didn’t have a clue, so how do you combat that? Mike and I thought, well, we know we’re not stupid, but it is kind of pervasive and keeps impacting us, so we kind of made it into this running joke by saying, what would Led Zeppelin do? It would kind of spur the conversation to lead us to the promised land, and it actually put us in good stead. We still use it to this day.
HGL: Once the documentary’s filming was over, did the three of you have a chance to sit down and talk about it?
Gil Moore: We all loved it. It was a cathartic experience for all three of us for different reasons. My family had to convince me to love it, the problem is I’m the perfectionist in the band, I never like anything. I don’t mean to be a nattering stream of negativity, but I prefer to call it overly perfectionistic; I just want to keep editing forever.
It’s like how we did songs. Rik would say, Gil, the song is finished, and I’d say no, we need to do it over again (laughs). I drove Rik crazy, and Mike would be in the middle saying, you guys just need to back off, I’ll handle it.
HGL: Boy, does that sound like some Spinal Tap moments right there!
Gil Moore: (laughs) We had some serious Spinal Tap moments in Triumph, let me tell you. We used to talk about Spinal Tap a lot. I love Spinal Tap.
HGL: What are you doing these days? You are still heavily involved in Metalworks Studios, correct?
Gil Moore: Man, I have so much shit going on, you don’t even want to know. Metalworks has blown up over the years, so now we have a private career college with all these amazing students who are learning this industry that I love so much. We have a full-on lighting and audio/visual company called Metalworks Production Group.
Our school has a start-up, an education program to provide free music education to youth worldwide, called Sounds Unite, so we’re incubating that start-up. Then there is the startup we have related to the holographic performances, MXR Vision. In my spare time, I hang out with my kids and my wife. I have no interest in retirement.
I kind of have the best of both worlds right now, honestly. The Triumph whirlwind keeps going, with things like the documentary, next week the Metal Hall of Fame, last year was Canada’s Walk of Fame, and we have a tribute album coming out, an unbelievable collection of talent is on that. While all that is going on, I have what we’ll call a little more serious career going, where we’re trying to move the needle in education in audio/visual technology, and our studios are still booming.
We’ve been really blessed with the talent that has come through Metalworks, like The Weeknd and Drake. I’ve been fortunate and blessed, really, my family has stayed healthy and all this stuff just keeps going, and Triumph is really the gift that keeps on giving. In the end, I’m still that wide-eyed 13-year-old kid at heart.
