Rik Emmett: Triumph Won’t Make Rock Hall Due to ‘Huge Prejudice’

Rik Emmett believes Triumph has never gotten serious consideration for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame due to a lingering “huge prejudice” against band’s like his.

The Canadian rocker laid out his reasoning during a recent interview with Misplaced Straws.

“In the United States, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame politically… I mean, we were on RCA Records, which was — of the seven major labels, they were number six. And then we sued them, and we lost, and then we moved to MCA, and they were the seventh largest. They were the smallest and they had the least impact of all the labels,” Emmett explained, noting the lack of industry clout supporting his band.

READ MORE: The First Rock Act of Each Decade to Be Inducted Into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

“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?’” he continued. “We never did go quadruple platinum. We struggled to get gold up to platinum, and it would eventually happen with some of the records, but not very many of them. And 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. There’s probably nothing in their catalog that was under five or six times platinum. They deserve to be in there; they really do.”

Rik Emmett Points a Finger at Jann Wenner

With more than 15 million albums sold, Triumph’s commercial success is certainly nothing to scoff at, and numerous Hall of Fame inductees have had lower career numbers. Still, as Emmett sees it, his band and Foreigner have both been ignored for the same reason.

“There was a huge prejudice that [Rolling Stone and Hall of Fame co-founder] Jann Wenner [had]. It bled throughout the entire board of that thing, which was, ‘No, we’re only gonna recognize the truly great, and the thing that defines truly great is what I say is truly great,’” Emmett declared.

Wenner was removed from the Hall’s board of directors last September after comments made about women and black musicians. He said neither could “articulate” themselves well enough to be included in his book which was touted as a “visit to the Mount Olympus of rock.”

“And he thought Foreigner and Rush and Styx and Triumph, he thought all that stuff was crap,” Emmett went on, “And he would hire writers to write stuff in Rolling Stone that would say, ‘Yeah, these bands are shit. They’re terrible. They’re crap.’ And so that became sort of the standard thing of, ‘Yeah, well, no, we’re not gonna put them in the Hall of Fame. They’re shitty.’ There you go.”