Bob Ezrin Interview on CBC

Photo from CBC

CBC recently published an article on legendary Canadian record producer Bob Ezrin on the occasion of his upcoming awarding of the Governor General's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement. This article caught my attention given that I am a big fan of Mr. Ezrin's work over the past 50 years. Bob Ezrin first came to my attention in late 1984 as an 11-year old boy who discovered the Kiss album Destroyer. A friend of mine was really into Kiss at the time. I wasn't. I actually thought that their whole kabuki act was incredibly silly. But, my friend was into them so I thought that I would at least give one of their albums a try. I borrowed a copy of Destroyer and put it on the turntable, hoping that no one would notice me listening to it. Three words: Detroit Rock City. 

That first track was cinematic and grand in both its storytelling and music. From the introduction, to the main character getting in his car and driving away, to the car crash at the end and then the immediate lead-in to the next track, I was blown away. This was so much better than I thought it would be. I kept listening, eventually devouring the entire album. I'd listen to tracks over and over again. For an 11-year old just starting to develop a deeper knowledge of popular music, this was a revelation. But why was this album so good compared to the other Kiss albums that I started digging into (much to the chagrin of those around me)? As I was to discover, the answer was one man: Bob Ezrin. 

I saw his name on the back of the liner notes: Produced by Bob Ezrin for Migration Records. I really didn't have any idea what that meant or what a record producer actually does. I had seen credits like this on the liner notes of albums that I had been into by Elton John (Produced by Gus Dudgeon) and Billy Joel (Produced by Phil Ramone) but I really didn't know the key role that these people played in these recordings, just that they seemed to be key contributors to lots of hit records. As my knowledge of popular music expanded though, it became clear that Bob Ezrin had done a lot more work than just the Destroyer album. This guy had been integral to the career of Alice Cooper in the 1970s and had worked on seminal albums by artists such as Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd (The Wall, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and The Division Bell).

In the early 1990's I started to get into Alice Cooper and I dug into the band's earlier albums: Love it to Death, School's Out, and Billion Dollar Babies. All of these were produced by Bob Ezrin and it became clear to me that he was someone with a very sophisticated understanding of music, including pop, rock, classical, and stage musicals. When Pink Floyd's Division Bell album came out in 1994 and I picked up a copy I was convinced - Ezrin was a genius and I became a total devotee of his work. I picked up as many of his productions as I could. But, this was before the World Wide Web and getting information on Bob was really difficult.

As time went on though, more and more about him became available online including both written and video interviews. More of the music that he worked on became available too. The story of his career and life came into full view and I was intrigued, inspired, and sometimes just shook my head. In a nutshell, Bob Ezrin was truly a boy genius who, for better or worse, grew up fast. He skipped grades in school (gifted and bored!), became a father at 17, and went on to find his way into the world of record production at the relatively young age of 19 through a relationship that he developed with legendary Canadian record producer Jack Richardson. Oh... I almost forgot to mention that he is a classically trained pianist through The Royal Conservatory of Music. I won't outline Ezrin's whole story here - there are lots of resources and interviews that do that incredibly well (check out the two part interview that Bob Leftsetz did with Ezrin a few years ago: Part 1. Part 2). CBC also did a great audio interview recently.

I will say though that, like all of us, his life has had it's share of extreme highs and extreme lows and I find all of this very humanizing and inspiring. From a rapid career rise in the early 1970s to some incredible lows in the early 1980s (and yes substance abuse plays a role like it did for many in the music industry at this time) to a career renaissance in the early 1990s and beyond, Bob's life is something that I just find incredibly fascinating. I hope that someday he will find the inspiration and time to write an autobiography that is detailed and leaves only the most salacious details out. I would definitely buy it.

As this long-form video interview by Ian Hanomansing of CBC demonstrates, at 76 Bob Ezrin shows no signs of slowing down. He's still making music and he recently decided to move back to Canada after nearly four decades residing in the United States due to a conflict between his values and the current political climate in the U.S. I think this is great and I hope that more talented and successful Canadians will find their way back. For decades we've been losing too many of our best and brightest to bigger horizons in the U.S. Thank you for coming home Mr. Ezrin. And... please get to writing those memoirs!