Canadian hard rockers April Wine are currently in the midst of a U.S. – Canadian tour with reformed fellow north-of-the-border rockers Triumph. The tour began in April with a couple shows in Florida, followed by a full tour across Canada. The two bands are currently on an eastern-midwestern U.S. run currently scheduled to wrap up in Boston on June 6, with a rescheduled Montreal show ending the tour in their home country on June 10.
April Wine formed in the late 60s in Nova Scotia, and with the addition of Myles Goodwyn on vocals and guitar (who eventually became the band’s primary songwriter and main vocalist), released their self-titled debut album on Aquarius Records in 1971. The band released six albums 1971 – 1977 during the ‘Aquarius years’, achieving first-division gold & platinum success in their native Canada but, other than scoring a minor U.S. hit in 1972 with a grooving cover of Hot Chocolate’s “You Could Have Been a Lady”, mainstream American success did not follow.
That started to change in 1977 when the band added third guitarist Brian Greenway, signed to Capitol Records in the States, and scored an American hit which the raucous boogie-rocker “Roller” (from seventh studio album First Glance), which began a string of success for April Wine in the U.S. and internationally. The ‘classic lineup’ of the band (Goodwyn, Greenway, bassist Steve Lang, guitarist Gary Moffet and hard-hitting bald-headed drummer Jerry Mercer) struck U.S. gold with the chunkier guitar rock of 1979’s Harder … Faster, which featured blazing rocker “I Like to Rock”.
They followed up with the platinum-selling 1981 LP The Nature of the Beast, which spawned the hits “Just Between You and Me” and a guitar-harmony-fueled cover of Lorence Hud’s “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”, amongst a host of killer deep tracks. Although Power Play in 1982 didn’t have the rock-solid consistency of songs and big sales of Beast, it featured some real highlights like “Anything You Want, You Got It” and the earworm “Enough is Enough”. In-band tensions after the 1984 Animal Grace record led to a farewell tour and live album (One for the Road, 1985).
But the farewell was only for the classic lineup, and since the early 90s Goodwyn and Greenway have toured regularly (and released albums less regularly) with various lineups, until Goodwyn retired from the road in 2023 due to health reasons, picking his own replacement, Marc Parent, before sadly passing away in late 2023. The current lineup (Greenway, Parent, bassist Richard Lantheir and drummer Roy Nichol) continues to rip it up on the road, and I spoke with longtime guitarist Brian Greenway gearing up for a gig opening for Triumph in New Jersey.
John Moore: You’re currently touring with Triumph. You guys are in New Jersey now?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, today we’re in Camden. Sitting in the bus. We got here this morning. I woke up in the parking lot! It’s really nice to be back up north again from Florida and Texas. No humidity. It feels like home on a May day, you know, late May. It feels good.
John Moore: You guys finished a whole run through Canada before you got back to the States here, right?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, we did Eastern Canada, we did Halifax, Moncton, Hamilton, Ottawa, Toronto. We were going to do Montreal, but the local hockey team got in the playoffs, so we were postponed until June the 10th.
John Moore: I was looking at some set lists to sort of prepare for today’s interview, and it seems like you do a different set list in Canada that you’ve been doing in the States. Is that intentional?
Brian Greenway: It is intentional because all the albums between, the first album right up until First Glance was on Aquarius Records and only distributed in Canada. So, UK, Europe, United States, they didn’t have those in the stores and they weren’t being played on radio. They’d be played here and there. With the exception of “Could Have Been a Lady”, that got a lot of airplay back in the early 70s. But other than that, those are songs that are very well known in Canada, but down here, nobody knows what they are.
John Moore: I did notice that you’re switching up the set list ever so slightly in the dates here in the States. Is that something you’re doing every night?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, the guys were getting bored. They said they want to play something different after three or four weeks. I said, okay. The other night we put “Could Have Been a Lady” in. Or if someone’s not feeling good and they don’t feel like, you know, their voice is going in harmony, we’ll switch it up, so that’s not a problem.
John Moore: How long are you getting on the Triumph Tour?
Brian Greenway: 45 minutes.
John Moore: Which leads to the obvious question: this band has been going since 1971, you have, 15 or 16 albums. How on earth do you decide 45 minutes worth of music from all those records?
Brian Greenway: Uh, the Ouija board! Just kidding. For all intents and purposes, when we play the US, UK, and Europe, the three main albums that everybody knows there are First Glance, Harder … Faster, and The Nature of the Beast. So those are the songs that we do, from those albums. And we can’t do all of them either, but these are the obvious ones that people really want to hear. And if you play the hits, you’re gonna have people responding.
John Moore: Did you ever tour with Triumph back in the day? In the 70s or early 80s or anything like that?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, early, mid-70s, we did some shows in Texas with them, San Antonio, where Texas loves Canadian bands. Triumph and April Wine, no exception. Yeah, we did. And then I didn’t see them [Triumph] for many years, as nobody did, because they just stopped playing. 30 years later, they decided, okay, it’s time to do another gig.
John Moore: It’s sort of interesting. I think both Triumph and April Wine kind of broke in America in like the San Antonio area. In retrospect, do you think there were regional successes for April Wine? For example, I’m in upstate New York in Albany, and I’ll be honest, I don’t remember you guys ever playing Albany back in the day. I know you’re big in the Buffalo area, but did you ever really play elsewhere in New York?
Brian Greenway: We only went where there was an offer and, you know, people say, well, why didn’t you play here? I say, well, you’ve got to have the promoter. You have to have an offer to go. You just don’t show up and say, unless you want to take the chance of renting a hall and doing all the promotion yourself. That just doesn’t happen in this business. That’s not the way it goes. Local promoters make it work, you know, hire the band to come in and play. The band just doesn’t phone up the city and say we want to play there. You’ve got to have the promoter doing it. So nobody wanted to do us in Albany or Schenectady or any of those places, New York City even, Long Island.
Now, with Triumph, we’re going to those places the first time [the band are playing Jones Beach on Long Island on June 5]. You’re gonna be creating an audience base for us, I hope, and that’s everywhere we’ve been. It’s setting the standard for the revival bands, as they’re calling us, out here doing it.
John Moore: Another upcoming New York show is in Darien Center, New York, which is in the Buffalo area, where you guys have a pretty big crowd already.
Brian Greenway: Yeah, Buffalo is a place we’ve played a few times outdoors and playing in the streets. Good crowds, good hockey teams.
John Moore: I wanted to ask you about a record that I personally discovered April Wine on when I was a kid. It was a live compilation album, Monsters of Rock [recorded at the first Castle Donington Monsters of Rock Festival in England on August 16, 1980]. I’ve got a copy of it right here to show you. I don’t know if you remember this.
Brian Greenway: Oh, yeah!
John Moore: You guys appeared on the record with [live version] the song “I Like to Rock”. That was a festival where you played with a bunch of sort of big metal bands of the day, the Scorpions, Rainbow, Riot, Saxon, Judas Priest. What are your memories of that festival and that day?
Brian Greenway: Pick up the cover again and turn it to the front or the back, whatever it is. There’s four pictures. And you see, I think we’ll see you’ll see April Wine with the red amplifiers and white cloth on … and sort of bright reddish clothing other than everybody else [who are] in black. And it was a heavy metal festival. It was the last gig that Cozy Powell was playing with Rainbow. It had rained very much before the day of the festival, at least when we were there.
And people had days of rain and drunkenness, and the amphitheater grass came down to the front of the stage, and so all the water and the mud did too. So we went on stage with our red and white amplifiers, and representing the colors of Canada, and some of us were wearing white and red clothing. We were a real target for all these people that were dressed in black, because we stood out like a dandelion on a lawn, you know? So they were throwing all kinds of mud. There was big splatters everywhere. That’s what I remember about that.
John Moore: Well, you know, the song that’s on the compilation, “I Like to Rock”, it sounds like you guys were going down well on the day.
Brian Greenway: We were! But we were the lighter side band for that day, especially in our little colors.
John Moore: But you guys did pretty well in England, right? Another thing I did to sort of prepare for the interview is to watch that live video Hammersmith Odeon in 1981 [Live in London, recorded on January 27, 1981, with Diamond Head as opening act], which you can order online, it seemed like you guys had a pretty full house there, right in the middle of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Were you considered more of a metal band in England?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, they sold us as a heavy metal band, which we were not, but then again, back then, it was the beginning of heavy metal, and it’s nowhere what heavy metal is now. I mean, it was heavy metal was Uriah Heep, Scorpions, Saxon people like that, you know? But, not us. I didn’t think, you know, in Canada, in the United States, we weren’t considered heavy metal. We were a hard rock band.
John Moore: But you can see why metal fans liked April Wine – with the ripping guitar solos, you had a three-guitar attack going on there. Watching that Hammersmith ’81 video, it was just amazing, not only how many great songs you guys had, but just the guitar playing, from all three of you, was fantastic.
Brian Greenway: Well, thank you. Everybody was different [Greenway, Myles Goodwyn, Gary Moffet], you know, and as a player, and that’s what made the chemistry so interesting. Because everybody came from a different style, a different genre of playing, and we put them all together, and … it sounded great. It was nice, because what one person couldn’t do? The other one was proficient at, and vice versa. We could use it … not everybody had to play at the same time. You could come in and out of the song for weight, harmonies.
John Moore: One thing I noticed more in the live video than on the records, although you definitely hear it in songs like “All Over Town”, “Sign of the Gypsy Queen”: you guys did a lot of harmony guitar type playing live with all three guitars, you’re doing harmony solos and things like that.
Brian Greenway: Yeah, that was kind of the style back then, but it’s something that we just fell into as well, not intentionally. It’s just that, hey, we’ve got three guitars, let’s do it that way. it was a little bit of the flavor of the day with Queen, you know, and… look at Molly Hatchet doing a lot of stuff like that with all their guitar army. Having two or three guitars in a band was not uncommon.
John Moore: Was Thin Lizzy, with their harmony guitars, any influence on that sound?
Brian Greenway: I appreciated what they did. I didn’t have many of their records. I just knew them from the radio, you know, and I knew that they had a lot of respect from the audiences. I respect what they did.
John Moore: It’s the 45th anniversary this year is the Nature of the Beast album. Do you have any memories of doing that record or the touring at the time?
Brian Greenway: Oh, yeah. That was a real big tour we did. We had a huge stage that we did in Canada, and in the US as well. In Europe, we did a lot of shows, but we couldn’t take the big stage with us. We played Hammersmith Odeon a couple of times. That was a big place to play in London at the time, as well as the Palladium. We got to play there just last year when we were touring with Uriah Heep.
But was a great run we had with that [The Nature of the Beast]. You know, it was fun watching that – every week we’d have a little gamble of, okay, what’s the single and the album going to be in Cashbox this week? What numbers are they going to go to? You know, there was momentum going. It was fun. It’s like being in a being in the finals, you know, like, okay, let’s get there.
John Moore: A great thing about The Nature of the Beast is it’s really diverse – you’ve got some hard rockers on there, for sure, and then you have “Just Between You and Me”, which is obviously more of a light ballad thing. But one song I wanted to ask about is “Wanna Rock”, which almost sounds like the Ramones.
Brian Greenway: Yeah! Myles would bring in songs out of nowhere, you know? I never knew where his influences really came from, but “Wanna Rock” was just, like … that fast tempo. Yeah. Had it been more distorted, it would have been just like the Ramones. And [then] he’d do takeoffs on Beatles tunes, like slowed down into a ballad. And it worked. But April Wine was always doing those sort of love songs, as I call them, right from the beginning. If you go back to the Forever For Now album [Aquarius Records, 1977], there were some great songs, “Child’s Garden”, or “Wings of Love” [from The Whole World’s Goin’ Crazy, Aquarius Records 1976] that weren’t rock songs at all, but they were very beautifully crafted and recorded.
John Moore: It seemed like when you joined, it definitely got rockier, you know? I mean, look the title of the 1979 album, Harder … Faster, it seemed like when you came in in ‘77, it turned into a harder rock thing. Was that intentional on your part?
Brian Greenway: It did. I mean, I just played what I would play. But Myles was bringing in those songs and they were different than anything else he had brought in before. And I was just interpreting them that way. And so was everybody else. We had definitely had a harder edge when I joined. I don’t know why. Maybe I played more power chords than anybody else and made them hit louder? I have no idea.
I don’t know what Myles was thinking in his head. You know, he played his cards close to his chest. He would bring in the songs, the idea. We would come up with our own parts. We would come up with different arrangements for it all. But he had the gist of the song pretty much like “Roller” when we brought that. He brought that in. We learned that and played it live for about 6 months before we even recorded it. So we road-tested that song. That’s the only one we really ever road-tested.
John Moore: Is that still in the set?
Brian Greenway: Yes, it is. We get everybody up on their chairs, or off their chairs ….
John Moore: Speaking of the anniversary of The Nature of the Beast: is there ever anything unreleased in the vaults or unreleased songs or live recordings? Have you guys ever thought about doing sort of the box set treatment for any of these records?
Brian Greenway: Wow, way back, 20 years ago, maybe? I might even say longer than that. We did a four CD set of the hits, the classics, the rock songs, the ballads [The April Wine Collection, Aquarius Records, 1992].
Right now, there’s nothing left in the can. There never really was other than a live album we did in March of 2022, Myles’s last show with the band. And that’s being worked on. It just needs to be released. So one of these days it’s going to be released, but also with Myles passing…the boss left the building, right? So, anybody who had the signing ability to do anything [like that] was suddenly gone, and so now the estate is part of that. The estate’s not settled, so we can’t do anything until the estate’s settled, and then we’ll have a direction of where his daughter wants to take us.
John Moore: Was Myles involved in picking the new lineup or his replacement?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, he was, actually. Marc [Parent, current singer/guitarist], his name had come up in 2014 when he [Myles] was looking to go, but we auditioned some people and it was unfortunate for them, because no one could have passed the audition. Because the song that he was hearing in his head that they would be playing was not the one that they learned. And there was no way they could have learned it because the arrangements changed over the years and no one really thinks [about] that, especially the writer, I guess. So when someone’s not playing what’s inside [Myles’] head, which they could never know what’s inside his head, they’re not doing it right. So we gave up on that.
Marc was going to come in. He couldn’t because he had a couple of young children at that point. Fast forward to 2022, Marc came up again, listening to some of his tapes, Myles liked his guitar playing and singing, and the clincher was when, a friend of Myles’ called him, and Myles was playing a demo tape of Marc in the background, and Myles’ friend said, oh, is that you in the background? Sounds pretty good. He says, no, that’s Marc, the new guy we’re auditioning. So Myles said, yeah, okay. That sold them right there. That works.
I sat down with Marc for three months and worked with him vocally and guitar wise to learn all the parts, not just learn the songs, but how to play the songs as April Wine would play them and little stories here and there. So you felt like you’re inside the song rather than just covering it.
He’s got a lot of energy. I like that. We’re becoming good friends.
John Moore: Has there been ever any talk about new music of any sort, or is that still in limbo with respect to the estate and things like that?
Brian Greenway: Yeah, that’s in limbo, too. We’ve just been trying to get over COVID, and then get Marc in, and then get on these tours to try to establish ourselves once again as an arena band. And play to a lot more people, get our [fan] base wider and wider and wider. So that’s been the game plan last year and this year.
John Moore: And what’s next?
Brian Greenway: What’s next? [The Triumph tour] ends June 10th. We’ve got our own shows this summer. There’s talk of an extension [of the Triumph tour] in the fall. [But] we’re going to take the month of August completely off so everybody can cut the lawn and paint the house. Take the garbage out. We’re playing Vegas, Golden Nugget in September, I think [April Wine are playing a headline show on September 4, 2026 at the Showroom At the Golden Nugget, Las Vegas, NV].
John Moore: So, to conclude: some people reading this may not necessarily know the band. If you were to point a new listener to a particular album or song to say “This is what April Wine is”, what album or albums would you recommend a new listener check out the band with, y’know, what record would you say they should go to the record store and start with?
Brian Greenway: Wow. Maybe go to First Glance [Aquarius/Capitol Records, 1978], because that’s [the one that] got people interested, you know, to follow the band. Then the Harder … Faster album [Aquarius/Capitol Records, 1979], any one of those, but one sort of leads to another. I say a good starting point would be First Glance. You know, if you like the book, go back and read the earlier ones.
John Moore: Similar question – we now live in a spotify or amazon music short-attention span culture where some peoples just listen to a song rather than albums – for a new listener, what song or song would you point them to go onto their phone or smart speaker and pull up and say – you want to check out April Wine, listen to this song, or these couple of songs?
Brian Greenway: Yeah. Okay. “Roller”, “Sign the Gypsy Queen”. Wow. “I Like to Rock”. You know, “Roller”, “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” and “Just Between You and Me”. Those are the three big ones at the end of the show that get people going. But thank God humans like different things, you know, not everybody likes the same thing. You’ve got “All Over Town”, you’ve got “Big City Girls” [both from The Nature of the Beast], you’ve got “Before the Dawn” [from Harder … Faster], you’ve got “Right Down to It” [from First Glance]. Even “21st Century Schizoid Man” [April Wine’s cover of the King Crimson song from the Harder … Faster LP].
April Wine are currently on tour with Triumph, and are playing two New York State shows in June.
June 3 – Darien Center, NY – Darien Lake Amphitheater
June 6 – Wantagh, NY – Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater
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