Rik Emmett built his reputation as the incredible guitarist for the band Triumph, but he has solidified it with a stellar and varied solo career. His first three solo records, Absolutely, Ipso Facto, and The Spiral Notebook, took the style he was known for in Triumph and began to move into the jazz-flavored, multi-dimensional sound of his later solo work. His latest release Diamonds serves as a best-of compilation for those three foundational releases. Recently, Rik took some time to talk about Diamonds, his health, and much more!
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On his current health – I was never really in a bad way because they caught it this prostate cancer and they caught it kind of early and the urologist that I had, he was a surgeon and he goes, “Well, let’s cut it out”. I go, “Well, I’m taking some prednisone for some arthritis. Maybe I’m not a great candidate for surgery.” He goes, “Okay, well, we’ll send you for radiology”. So I went. I did the course, the four weeks of it. The only thing is it’s an inconvenience more than anything, but, the process itself is pretty straightforward. It only takes about five minutes appointment when you get there. I decided I’d go public about it because I felt like it’s an important thing to get middle-aged men to understand that you have to start monitoring your PSA and just checking it and being aware of the fact that if you live long enough as a man, you’re likely going to get prostate cancer. If they do autopsies on 90 year old men, they’ve got prostate cancer. Men didn’t usually live that long, so it’s a modern kind of a problem, but there are modern solutions. You have to kind of be willing to say, “All right, I’ll keep monitoring and checking and, and I’ll be a good boy, I’ll take the treatment”. I have now every reason to expect that I’ll be fine. I have other problems that are way worse. My arthritis keeps me from being able to be as nimble as I used to be. I’m never going to stop playing, but, I’ve had to start trying to figure some things out that way because there’s other things when you turn 70 that start going wrong too.
On why he chose to put together a compilation of those three records – Well, the simple answer is that Duke Street Records gave me the master’s back. I had the temerity to ask Andy Hermant, “Hey man, can I have my master’s back?” And he went, “Yeah, sure. Send me a one-page agreement and I’ll sign it”. So that was the start of it. Then here’s this guy, Greg Campbell, that has Merch in Motion and he’s representing my merch rights online and stuff. He goes, “Hey, I got this label thing. I’m doing with Vic Branco. It’s called Music in Motion, and we’re looking for stuff. How about a compilation from then? “I went, “Okay, how about the hard rock stuff from those?”
Now, your intro, you mentioned, you said “hard rock” things. I started out trying to rock hard. Then the second album I tried to move away from it, the label said, not just the label, but my manager and the distributor more, Universal, they said, “Oh, wait, wait, hard rock. Where’s the hard rock? You got to rock hard”. So there are tracks there like “Rainbow Man” and “Straight Up”, that was the second wave of recording for Ipso Facto. That was much heavier and more electric guitar-oriented, but I was starting to move away from that then. Then the third album, Spiral, it was literally a singer-songwriter record, because the music business had kind of moved on and left me behind, the crummy old Rick Emmett. The guy that was in Triumph, a guy that was like an 80’s rocker. No, no, no, we’re playing grunge now. We’re on to Seattle.
So, I was old, too old for the music business. That happens, there’s no reason to sit around and weep and cry about it. You just go, “Okay, I’ll accept that”. But for the compilation, we decided, “Hey, the vinyl crowd, they might want to have thicker tracks, more band stuff going on”. There’s some really meaty stuff that had gone on on the Absolutely and Ipso Facto records and America hadn’t really got an opportunity to hear a lot of it because the Charisma label had gone bankrupt when Absolutely came out. So it kind of just flushed its way down the toilet and it didn’t get any promotion or marketing beyond the initial kind of bump that a couple of tracks got So it was like they never heard “Drive Time” and deep tracks like “Drive Time” and “Stand and Deliver” from that album. There’s some nice serious ensemble hard rock stuff going on there Then there’s some pretty meaty songwriting stuff that kind of carries over and through the three albums that I went, “Hey, give them another chance, another kick at the can, a second life. Why not?” So I went, “Yeah, sure. Let’s do it”. So voila Diamonds.
On if he rediscovered some of the music putting Diamonds together – Jeff, I am the kind of guy that I move on, I do something and I’m onto the next thing. We were having a conversation about stuff that I made 30-40 years ago, and an album that got mastered a long time ago, blah, blah, blah. There’s another album in the can, there’s a poetry book in the can, I wrote a book about making the album, it’s in the can, I’m ready to move on to new things.
But to answer your question, I go back and I listen to that stuff and almost every single one of them was a surprise for me on one level or another. I was doing an interview earlier and one of the guys was gonna play the song, the “Pendulum”, which sort of was an add-on track to the Diamonds thing and I went, “Oh yeah, the “Pendulum””. So when Greg Campbell had said, “Oh, I want to add in that track”, I went, “Maybe I should listen to it”. I hadn’t listened to it in decades. I went, “Oh, yeah, this was a weird little thing. This is great. This has got some clever little things that are going on and textures and stuff”. Because I remember making the record, Andy Hermant, the guy that ran the label, he was a recording engineer by trade, built studios and things. Andy stuck his nose in and he said, “Well, where’s all the ear candy? ” I went, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Well, you make a record, you write a song, you record it, you’ve got basic kind of bed tracks and you’ve got the song up and running”. He said, “But then you got to do stuff on a record that makes it so that from an audio point of view, it’s really interesting. There’s things that are happening in the stereo spectrum. There’s things that are happening in the depth of the record”. And I went, “Oh, yeah. Okay. No, I get you”. So “Pendulum” is in your ear candy. Kind of a lot of those Spiral Notebook songs are like that.
It was a treat for me when I listened to “The Hardest Part” and I went, “Oh, yeah, that guitar solo on the tag where we just let it run, there’s no edits in that. That’s a one-take, which is blowing my brains out.” Because and those kinds of little things, they’re like, I don’t know what you call them, not watershed moments, but, highlights in your recording, but you move on and you forget them. Then you go, “Oh, yeah, that happened. I remember when that happened.” I listened to even the standard stuff like “Stand and Deliver” and “Drive Time” and “Big Lie”, and the rhythm tracks, the drumming and the bass playing on that there, it’s just outstanding work by those people. Randy Cook, Chris Brockway. It was a great, great rhythm section. So, I’m happy that they’re getting another life. I can’t wait to get a vinyl record in my hands and send it to Randy and say. “Hey, man, listen to this on vinyl. Listen to those fills are just incredible.”
On if he oversaw the remastering – I would love to take credit for that, Jeff, but in truth, that’s Vic Branco is the guy that really and his studio. He’s got it set up for Atmos. He can do those mixes now in, I don’t know, it’s not stereo anymore. It’s like five-way, you know and I went, “Well, there’s too much for me”, I’m an old-school kind of guy. I would give Vic a lot of credit for that. Probably Campbell sticks his nose into it, he probably gets in there. They just played them for me at one point. I just sort of went, “The Rick Emmett seal of approval”. My fist is huge in the screen there. “Yeah, that’s fine by me. Go ahead. It’s excellent. Well done. Move on. Here we go.”
On if the change in music in the 90s let him expand as a musician – That’s a nice way of putting it. The other way of putting it is that the music business didn’t want me anymore. I went, “Okay, you don’t want me, I don’t want you either. I’ll just make my own little indie label and I’ll make my own records in my basement. Thank you very much.” I started out with a. classical guitar record. I’d always wanted to make one my whole life. It’s hard work, man. I had the discipline of writing pieces and then learning how to play them good enough to make a a digital record. Tthat was another thing I decided, “Well, I’m going to verse myself in having the computers and the gear to be able to record digitally”.
I had been a guy that just did everything old school audio, analog before, so, it wasn’t like just the thing of going, “Well, I don’t have to worry anymore about what anybody else thinks. I’ll only worry about making records. If I can sell, I don’t know, a thousand of these, I’ll make enough money that I could, maybe I can afford to do another”. So I did even better than a thousand. Then I went, “Well, now I can add an ensemble. I’ll do a jazz record of arch-top swings, shit that I’ve always wanted to do”. Then they did okay. Jazz doesn’t sell that great, but it did enough that I went, “Okay, now I’ll do a blues record”. The blues record was the easiest one to make and it was kind of the most fun and it sold the most. Then I went, “Okay, let’s just keep going here”.
I got into more singer-songwritery stuff after that, but I mean, you can look back on my catalog and you could say, “Hey Rik, the album you made on your own, Good Faith, does it have a lot of roots in the Spiral Notebook album that you made?” I would say. “Absolutely 100%. Yes”. That’s like when I’m going looking in the mirror and going singer-songwriter. Songwriter more than anything songwriter, focus on that, lean on that. So, it just depends on which part of my personality I decide I want to lean on. I started out singing in a choir church choir when I was seven years old. So I was a singer before I was anything else. Then when I got a guitar, I learned a couple of chords. I was a songwriter. So I was writing songs before I was a guitar player. Then when you start to play guitar, it takes you a long time to get any good at it. I did show early promise.
By the time I was 17 or 18, I had my union card and I was getting work. Part of that was because I was a singer-songwriter guy. So I had this sort of triple threat kind of ability. The guitar came much later, the guitar heroism kind of thing. It ends up dominating, I think some people might say. Eric Clapton, let’s look at him as an example, and they go, well, “Eric Clapton is God”. I go, well, Clapton, actually, he might’ve ended up being a better R&B singer than he (is a guitar player). His guitar playing is a fairly narrow kind of a palette, if you think of those three guys that came out of the Yardbirds, Beck, Clapton, Page. Eric was the narrowest of them all. He was the most old-school blues with a lot of stuff that was, well, okay, but come on now, that’s an Albert King lick, there’s things that he lifted that he kind of stayed with all of his career, which is not to say that he didn’t write good songs that weren’t like that. I’m not putting them down. What about Jimmy Page? Well, he expanded a lot more than Clapton did. Then what about Jeff Beck? Well, he expanded the most. He was the most creative of them all in terms of what he made his hands do on an electric guitar. I had a little bit of all of them, the influence of all of them. But I think in the end, and I’m answering questions you’ve never even asked here, typical of me. I think in the end that the process you go through with your rack of guitars behind you, my rack of guitars behind me you’re really only searching for yourself. That’s what you’re trying to find. Who am I? When I play these notes and I phrase them this way and I play them on this guitar, what story am I telling that I’m perfectly happily content to tell? This is my story. I think eventually you arrive at that as an artist, as a guitar player. For me, happily, I was always arriving at something that I was also a singer and a songwriter, so yeah, okay, I’m done your turn.
On if keeping a positive slant to his songwriting was always important to him – Great question. First of all, let me tell you how lovely it is to get to hear somebody talk about things like the Time Trilogy stuff and have it be meaningful to you even now. Thank you. That’s a wonderful thing. Now, as far as, the motivational inspirational part of what it is that I do. I was in a band that was called Triumph, so that’s where it starts. I was already in the band four years when I wrote “Hold On”. I went, “Oh, well, wait a sec, there’s something happening here. There’s an integration between the name of the band and what the band could be for those people that we play for every night. They get up on their seats and I like this. I really like the feeling of this.” The other guys in the band were like, “Eh, yeah, okay, Rik, whatever”. But I really felt like that. I found something. Now, do I always want to be like a goody-two-shoes that’s always trying to be nice and do something good for people? Am I like a preacher where I go “Oh, I want to preach”? No, I don’t want to do either of those things. You could listen to a lot of Triumph stuff, a lot of Rik Emmett stuff and go, “It’s kind of like he’s preaching. It’s kind of like he’s up there in the pulpit and he’s kind of preaching”, and I would go, “No, that’s true. I can, I see how you can think that”, you know, or you go, “Oh, well, he’s always trying to be so positive, come on, you know, life is crazy and it’s shitty and it’s hard and bad things happen and why doesn’t your music reflect that?” I go, “well, Here’s why. As a creative person”, and this was, why did I become a teacher in a college because I am the kind of person that goes, “Okay, yes, life is hard. Life can be cruel and it can break you. But are you going to get back up on your feet? What’s next? What’s the next thing that happens?” So if I’m going to write a song, am I going to write a song and go, “Black, everything’s black. It’s bleak. It’s bleak and it’s black. That’s everything is horrible. And that’s my song”. I’m just going to make this song a little bleak and black. I would always say my soul, my spirit goes, “Yeah, but what’s next? What are you going to do about it? Because you’re still here. You’re, you’re writing the song. You’re, you’re still, you’re, you’re still picking around a studio with a bunch of guitars. Why not try to say what’s next? ” Then I go, right. So that’s, that’s, and I think that’s the answer to your question. I’m kind of always going. What’s next?
On if he feels Triumph will ever be considered for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – Well, again, I’m going to say thank you for saying what you’re saying and I’m happy to hear it. I think you’re dreaming in technicolor. Your reason is because 1st of all, in Canada, I mean, here’s a truth about Triumph in Canada. We never won a Juno award. We did get to go in the Juno Hall of Fame. But it was really because the Juno, the CARAS people kind of went, “Well, they’ve stuck around, they lasted so long, and they got back together again. They did that. The Industry Hall of Fame took them. The Rock Hall, so, okay, we should give them a Hall of Fame award”. So, you know, we got that. I think it was literally just for persistence,for living long enough. The reason for that was because in the Canadian pool, in the early days, it was like, “Well, you’re not going to win. Rush is going to win”. Of course, Rush is going to win. And then it was more like the Canadian music business had shifted. It was like, “Well, you’re not going to win. Glass Tiger is going to win. You’re not going to win. Platinum Blonde is going to win.” It was like, yeah, okay, things shifted..
Year’s later, I did a thing where I did a tour and I did an album with Pavlo and Oscar Lopez. It was like a guitar trio kind of project. We toured the country, and we were up for an instrumental Juno of the year. I said to those guys, I looked at the thing and I said, “We’re never going to win”. They went, “Oh, Rick, you’re so pessimistic”. I go, no, I’m not. I’m actually not professionally, I’m known as an optimist. “The reason that I’m pessimistic about this is”, I go, “There’s a couple of people from Arcade Fire. That did a little offshoot thing. And they have a voting block of a much larger label than the distributor for ours. We’re never going to even get close. We won’t get within sniffing distance politically”. In the United States, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame politically, we were on RCA records. Which was one of the 7 major labels, they were number 6 and then we sued them and we lost. Then we moved to MCA and they were the 7th. They were the smallest and they had the least impact of all the labels. Now, once they combined their publishing division with their record division then they went on this spree where they bought Motown and they just kept acquiring catalogs and they became now the only game in town is Universal, most of the other labels don’t even exist. At the time we were with these small labels and not small, but you know the weakest ones.
So voting-wise, we were never that big. We didn’t sell enough records. We didn’t have enough of a commercial industrial kind of impact to have it be that the people go, “Oh, yeah, well, I remember when they went quadruple platinum”. We never did go quadruple platinum. We struggled to get platinum, to get gold up to platinum, and it would eventually happen with some of the records, but not very many of them. Then you’re in a world where there’s Journey. Well, they went like seven times platinum, 10 times platinum. Oh, there’s Foreigner. There’s some noise this year about Foreigner. I don’t think there’s probably nothing in their catalog that was under five or six times platinum. They deserve to be in there. They really do. There’s a good reason why McCartney is swearing. It’s like they should have been in a long time ago, but there was a huge prejudice that Jann Wenner had. It bled throughout the entire board of that thing, which was, “No, we’re only going to recognize the truly great and the thing that defines truly great is what I say is truly great”. He thought Foreigner and Rush and Styx and Triumph, he thought all that stuff was crap. He would hire writers to write stuff in Rolling Stone that would say, “Yeah, these bands are shit. They’re terrible. They’re crap”. So that became the sort of the standard thing of, “Yeah, well, no, we’re not going to put them in the Hall of Fame. They’re shitty.”
On upcoming plans – I wrote these guitar pieces and recorded them, and then I wrote a book about them. So that’s going to become some sort of a package thing that, maybe by Christmas, I started writing some tunes again with Sam Reed, keyboard player in Glass Tiger. He and I did a Christmas record a long time ago, like a long time ago. Then last year we were going, “Hey, we should do a new one, do another one?” And we went, “Yeah”, we got together and we started writing some things like in the summertime of last year. Then we didn’t make it that year, we never got close. So then lately, we’ve been exchanging emails again. We go, “Hey, we should get that together. Try to get that out this year”. I go, “Yeah, we should”. Whether it’ll happen, who knows? But that’s another thing that’s in the weeds. Then I’m doing a thing with a record label called Alma, where these guys in Music in Motion, they took the, the hard rock tracks, but there’s a whole bunch of softer, singer-songwriter, esoteric kind of stuff, and Alma is much more of a sort of a muso musician oriented kind of a label, and I went “Why don’t you guys take some of these and then we’ll do some new tracks and we could mix some of them in Atmos”, and they’re going, “Ooh, yeah”. The guy that runs that Peter Cardinale, old friend of mine, and he played on some of the songs on some of those records. Peter is, he’s been facing some health issues. So who knows if that’s going to coalesce.
Then let me see what else is happening. That’s enough. Oh, there’s a poetry book that’s in the can and ECW press has that. It’s called Lean Into It or Leaning Into It. I can’t remember. It’s one of the two. Anyhow I don’t know if that’ll make it out this year. It might not, poetry books it doesn’t really matter whenever they put it out, it’s not going to become a bestseller. So that’ll be more of them doing me a favor. I think they’ll make more money on the 10 Telecaster Tales at which point then they’ll go,”Let’s do the poetry book. You, you filled the coffers.”
