Bob Ezrin pt 1

Most of them are done okay, but you have ventured into other areas and I certainly know that you are literally the straw that stirs to drink. You make things happen, You make music rising happen. You made a lot of other things. We'll get into some of that, but right now you are aware of Bob. Right now, I'm in Toronto, which you know, which is where jan and I came. We were we were actually in the Bahamas when things started to blow up. I was writing for the book,

you know that. I was that I've been threatening to write for years, so I was writing and then, um, you know, one night, she just said, you know, I don't I don't think we ought to get stuck here. This could be very bad. So we came up to Toronto, um, where we have a home, and and then they shut all the borders. I was going to head back down to Nashville, but that's just not gonna happen for a while. How much time do you spend? Weird? How much time are you in Toronto and Nashville on the road at

this point in time? Yes? Yes? Okay? Someone, uh, you know what to listen. Um, I love I love our home here in Toronto and um and I love our place in the Bahamas because it's just a little place. But I love the ocean and just looking out my window at the ocean every morning is beautiful. But I love I love Nashville for working and um and and living too. Do you know it's a happening city, as you know, a lot of people. They're doing some really

exciting and interesting things. And it's really easy to work there. It's perhaps the easiest place I've ever recorded. Amplify that for us. Well, you know, first of all, um, it's a it's a music recording town. So New York is a music town, but it's a music offices town. And business town. There is a lot of music going on there that's being recorded, but it isn't the backbone of the whole place, whereas you know, Nashville was really uh,

it's really got three industries. It's got insurance, healthcare and music as the primary industries of Nashville. And and in in Nashville there are studios every fifty paces. It's it's quite remarkable. At least thing you know in my neighborhood, like the two doors down as a studio across the street directly as the studio it's Ron Fair Studio. Ron moved there, and right behind him is uh is Blackbird, which is maybe the biggest studio in Nashville and certainly

the largest mic collection in Nashville, possibly the world. And and you've got to uh, you have a cadre of really professional session musicians, like the top of the food chain. And these these were all people who you know, they became virtuosic and uh and probably a genre was too small for them. And and and yet if you're not in a band or or doing something as a recording artist,

it's hard to make a lot of money. But they discovered that their talents are very valuable to people like me, and and country artists who are solo artists, and and pop singers who don't have a band, and things like that.

So we hire these people to make the music. And and you can get a band together of people who are literally the best, the best at their instrument in the world in Nashville and I often do you know, I often have like an amazing group of players who are relatively unknown to the outside world, but who in the music world are legendary. So we have a we have a room full of legends. Okay, just a little deeper, because the session musician world has died in Los Angeles.

Can these people you've called to do sessions? Can they make a living in Nashville being session people? Oh, they can make a very good living in Nashville being session musicians. Some of them are, you know, some of them are making a significant amount of money. Others are having to augment that with you know, other forms of playing, like going out on the road with certain artists or playing, um,

you know, after hours and at shows within Nashville. But you can make a living in Nashville and not be the featured performer, which is hard to say about just about any place else. And there's lots of them. They come from all over the world there, you know, Like on the first session, the first um uh you know, first session that I did in Nashville where I used session players, one of the guitar players was a kid from Russia who was like a shredder. He was an

awesome guitar player. But he found, you know, that he could actually make a living coming to Nashville. He was an insane reader and and uh and he had a great memory, and he found he found a part for himself right away. And and there are some drummers in that town that uh, you know, I would put up against the greatest drummers and the greatest bands that we've ever seen. And and the same thing with you know,

keyboard players. And and if you need someone to play a sack butt as you often do, but you can pick up the musicians directory and there's a dude in Nashville who can play the sack but you know, or and or there's a there's a woman who can clog dance if you need the sound of you know, dancing on your record. You know. Um, so there's anything you can think of, Like one day I was producing somebody, and I just had this crazy notion. It was the sort of crossover track. And this was before um this

was before Mumford and Sons. But I had this idea that I really wanted to hear lead banjo on this pretty rocking track. So I called Bela Fleck. I said, Bella, what are you doing this afternoon? He said, well, I you know, I got a meeting at five o'clock on music Row, but I'm not busy. Now what's up? And I said, can you come over? I I need a banjo solo. He was there within an hour, and the and the people I was working with when he walked in the door, they just looked at me like, you

gotta be kidding. But but that's the town that it is. Emmy Lou Harris loves to do backing vocals really for example, yes, she's and and you know and and there's lots of uh, you know, very well known people who who I mean? Vince Gill plays lead guitar on one of the Alice Cooper Cooper tracks from an album years ago. You know, I invited Vince to come on and he shredded. He was unbelievable. He was so good that that Alice's touring band,

which has you know, professional shredders in it. They could not cop his solo, so that song never went into never went into the show. Okay, you certainly, as we go deeper, have been in many genres, but you're most famous for the rock genre. Nashville was historically a country town. Uh is it more types of music and Nashville now or the players can do everything. How does your work

meld with the Nashville scene. Most of the players, as I said, there are people who come from elsewhere, and a lot of them, including Dan Huff, who's one of the top producers of all time in Nashville. Um, you know, they come from rock bands that maybe didn't you know, didn't quite make it, or they did make it and then they stopped, or they come from jazz, or they come from classical. There's a great string player in Nashville

that can do anything you can think of. You you need anything that's got strings on it, he can play it. And he's a classical violinist who moved to Nashville and now he's doing country fiddle and and but at the same time he can do heart anger fiddle, which is a Norwegian instrument. He can play cello and it's just anything you want. So um. So you have players who are very versatile. Okay, Certainly in the old days for all the cockers like us, you know, you have to

practice in order to break into the scene. Supposedly Dwayne Almond took his guitar even to the bathroom. Certainly you have the elite players in Nashville. But do you think this is a problem today where people can promote their music online, that they're not as skilled in their instruments as they once were. I don't think that's quite true. I think that the operative words are their own instrument. And what's happened in the world is that instruments have

changed and kids play. They play computers, they play um sequencers, they they play drum machines and pads and samplers and anything they can get their hands on. And they make these very crafty, uh compositions that you know, they show that they can play their medium, whatever that medium might be. And I think they're easily as good as any kid who is wood shedding on lead guitar when I was sixteen or seventeen years old and then bleeding into another

element where we have commonality. Now you talk to a lot of these great players, and it turns out they learned how to play in school. Like Nathan East, he learned how to play in school. I know that something you have a great affinity for. Can you tell us

about that? I think that in cultures where music was ingrained as a part of learning experience, and where people were actually taught how to express themselves using music, that you who ended up with people who had um you know, not just a greater affinity for the for the art form, but a different way of seeing and thinking and hearing and expressing, you know, a different way of speaking. They found out they don't have to use words, they use

sound and stuff. And once you start practicing a new language, once you really get into it, it becomes like an infection. You can't get rid of it. You dream about it, you think about it, you live with it all the time. And we're missing that in North America now, we're missing that in in a way that many European nations are. You know, they still have I mean, why are the Swedes so successful in America in pop music? Why is

why is worldwide pop music defined by Swedish people? It's because they have a phenomenal music education system and it goes beyond their regular school, beyond high school. There's a post graduate uh, whole set of postgraduate schools that you can go to to learn about songwriting and produce, sing and and uh and how to get better at the instrument that you play. Here in in North America, we've got, like, you know, a few schools that people can go to

where this is true. But for the most part, music has been removed. It's no longer considered to be UM an essential course. It's considered to be an elective. And you know that with shrinking budgets and school boards that are just trying to make ends meet, the first stuff that goes is the you know, are all the electives, especially the ones that require equipment and investment. So music education has hurt a lot in North America since that became true. When I was a kid, music was one

of the courses I had to take. By the way, so was art and so was literature. In not in not helping the entire child to evolve that uh, communicating emotional passionate little being, and not in allowing them the all the expression that's at their at their disposal. Naturally, while we're trying to teach them, we're kind of copyholding them into a much much grayer, less exciting existence, and you end up with a bunch of people who sit in the corner and look down, whether it's at their

cell phone or their keyboard or whatever. What we really want is people who get together and uh and share and sing together and play together and create things together. Because what we need right now is to create a whole new world. Actually, you're not going to do that with You're not gonna do that with small thinkers. What do you need mean in terms is you talking about specifically about music or the world at large? A whole

new I mean the world at large. I mean when you look at what's going on in the United States, when while we're talking, there are riots in the streets of twenty five cities in the United States. Is a reaction to an on camera murder, the death of someone that we all got to watch. I'll tell you a little story, so I don't want to throw anybody under the bus. In fact, I'll just say that when in a situation where I was commenting on the video of Eric Garner being strangled to death um to someone who

was in the healthcare business. I'll just leave it that general, I just said, I just I just looked at it in complete disbelief, and my stomach was turning. And I looked at the guy and I just went, can you believe that? And he goes, no, man, he says, you know, my friends, the policeman, he won't even go in their neighborhoods anymore. And I just turned to the guy and I just said, are you shipping me? You're a healthcare professional,

and that's what you got out of this. You're a person who supposedly dedicated to saving human life, and that's what you got out of this picture. And at that moment, I mean, I just realized that we have a systemic endemic disease in our culture. And it's not just America. People like to point fingers in America, but for you know, it's it's happening any place where the predominant culture was white and uh, Northern European even more so than Southern. Now.

I was in a cab once and the driver told me in Toronto that more different languages are spoken in Toronto than any other berg on the planet. So one has to ask, you know, we are really inward looking in the United States. To someone who is certainly traveling a lot in both countries, what is the same or different about Canada? How much time do we have about but we don't have two hours to talk about Canada. No, I didn't think so, but you know what, look, I

was in l A during the riots. I actually went to work in the basement of the First Amy Church and watts UH for months after the riots, um and working on food distribution and other things where I thought my efforts be more useful than being in a studio making rock records. At that time, it was a critical moment, wasn't it. It was a moment where we really thought

we may lose our town altogether. And then we have this organization called Rebuild l A, which I also took part in, and at least we recognized at the time that we were facing massive UH, institutional and structural problems within our society. We tried to change them. I'm saddened by what I see now because it's clear, UH the evidence shows we failed in Canada. The primary difference in Canada is that there wasn't a slave trade in Canada.

There were slaves in the East Coast, by the way, there were whole colonies of slaves, and the people don't even know about Nova Scotia UM. And there are still little townships that are just they're all black, they're all African Canadian UM. But primarily the the people UH who came from the West Indies and came from Africa came here of their own volition, and they, you know, they came to make a good life for themselves and for their families and defind their fortune, just like everybody else.

And this is a nation of immigrants all the way around. So the Canadians have tried to be what they have referred to as a multicultural society. Sometimes it works really well. Sometimes it doesn't work very well at all. There's a guy on TV on CTV UM who does an entertainment show and he is UM, an African Canadian. I guess I would call him he maybe UH a West Indian Canadian originally, but he refers to himself as a black man.

He's a black man. Who saw that video and who was then on the Canadian version of the View the next day and they asked him how he felt he started up being a media guy. He started off saying I'm fine and things. You know, it's really terrible. We have to work and so, and then slowly but surely he began to fall apart and then he lost words, and he said, you know me, I've never at a loss for words. And then he started to cry, and then he started to say, you know, I don't want

to be this guy. I don't want to be the angry black man. But the truth is I am. I'm an angry black man because I have to watch what I say, what I look like, what I do every time I enter a room. And that's up here, you know where people like to think that we're okay. It's everywhere. Uh, it's worse in the United States because there's more polarization right now in the US than I've ever seen anywhere.

I mean, you know, I've I lived in I've lived in the United States and million an American citizen for decades and decades. I'm a student of America. I love America. You know, I chose it. It didn't choose me. So I came. I came because I wanted to be there and and because I wanted to be active, and I wanted to be political and I wanted to get involved. So for me, it's very difficult to see where we

are right now. For me after after being a member of SNICK, after marching, after you know, as I say, working in the basement of the First aim E Church, after after working with mentoring and after school programs, and all the time and energy that I put in, to have to admit to myself that a lot of this was really not for anything at all. Okay, let's talk about music in the era of chaos. Certainly when you started out in the folk scene in Toronto, you're aware

of that folk music drove protests. Certainly ten years later, eight years later, we had literally fifty years ago Kent State, we had Crossbasels, Nash and Young, Ohio. What is music's place? Where is music relative to the cutting edge of culture and all these problems today? Listen, I think music has always been the voice of the people. It's a it's an easy way to communicate and and and it has been since we were private primitive beings and didn't even

have words. We just sing out and somebody would would repeat it back to us, and we knew we had a friend. So music has always been at the forefront of everything always and it's always told the news. It's always had the news before the news was news. It was I was growing up. It was a pretty comfortable but very white environment. My dad was the first Jewish doctor allowed on staff at the Toronto General Hospital. That

that happened in the middle fifties. In Toronto until the sixties, we had restricted clubs where there were no Jews, no Blacks, no not I think not even Catholics allowed, And in

Canada had residential schools. These are things where they would take First Nation's children from their families, out of their tribe, put them in a church run school so they could learn to be white and Protestant or Catholic or whatever the religio and was of the school, and they would not let them go home, and they wouldn't let them speak their own language. They called them residential schools. The

last one was closed in the early nineties. So there was always here a voice that had to be heard, and the only way it could be heard was through all what would you would call sort of underground or alternative media, and it was coming out of music. That was the place. You couldn't see it on TV. You would certainly wouldn't get it in, you know, in nice establishments or or proper society. You got it on the streets.

You got it in on Yorkville Avenue, which during the sixties, during the middle sixties and late sixties was kind of the third leg of the folk stool. There was Greenwich Village, the gas Light District, and Yorkville Village where everyone played and people came from all over to do it. My uncle was a half owner in a club on Yorkville, which was a terrific advantage for me as a kid.

You know. He in fact, he played a really large role in my life and and in turning me onto all kinds of music and and stereo equipment and all that sort of stuff. He was a cool dude. But he had this club called the Penny Farthing where I would play in the basement with braces on my teeth badly to four or five people who couldn't afford to

sit in the main room. And and upstairs there were artists going through, like this beautiful blonde girl from out West called Joni Anderson, who had just come to Toronto, had not yet married Chuck Mitchell, had just found out she was pregnant. When I spoke to Joni about it, she said, did you know I was pregnant? I said, I would have married you anyway. I was, you know, I was so but she was older than me. You know that she wasn't looking at at the kid with

the braces in the basement. But you know, jose Feliciano played his first North American gig in that room and lots of other people. And the next door there was a band called um the I think the band was called the Minor Bird, and that was Neil Young Rick James, and they were a soul band. They like horns and and dance moves and everything. And at a couple of doors down from there, and then we had a band called the Sparrow, which was John k Uh and Mars

Bonfire who went on to become Stepan Wolf. But but around the corner, these two um African American folk singers called Joe and Edtie played their first Canadian gig. They came up there. They were protest singers, like in the real sense of the word. They had a song on the radio called There's a Meeting here Tonight. I don't know if you remember that. You may be too young. We've talked about it before, so that's all I know. It, okay,

so um. And they had stories to tell, and they spoke with a Southern drawl, and they were just from another planet. Were listening to them play at the same time. My uncle also discovered Lonnie Johnson in the in the in the men's toilet of a Chicago hotel where he had been hiding out for almost twenty years from a fraternity. My uncle, the lawyer, said him, you know, Lonnie, there is a statue of limitations. But he wouldn't believe him.

He didn't want to come out of the toilet. So my uncle said, okay, I'm gonna bring you to Canada. They can't extradite you from Canada for a paternity student. So he came and they built him a club across the street from from the Penny Farthing, the main club. They called it Lonnie's Place, where he played the last three and a half or four years of his life. He died in Drew And I used to go over there and watch him play and and and he would

tell stories. But but I mean, this was a living this was an emblem and a kind of you know, human diorama almost right there in front of you of the American South and the African American experience in the American South as as told through the Blues. And so what role do his music play like I wouldn't have known any of that. What role do his music play? How does the edge? Let me be very specific, we had the riot you mentioned earlier. The light went off

over my head. Everything nice Ta was saying, everything n w A we're saying was true. Uh, can we point to a similar situation in today's music? Wow? You know, I don't want to be the old guy who's complaining about what what you know, the new artists are doing or not doing. I find an absence of community in pretty much everything. It's not just music. But um, I don't find people standing up. I don't find people speaking out.

I hear very little that that makes you sit back and catch your breath because it is so powerful and relevant. I haven't heard of I haven't heard a song like the Hurricane, you know, in I don't know decades. And is that because us we've become so self centered? And maybe you know, and maybe the President of the United States is the perfect you know, the perfect representation of it. He's our avatar. He's an avatar of all of our worst impulses. We're all we're all uh narcissistic, we're all

self involved. We're all me first and then everything else after. And everybody wants to get rich. Like I don't see the same uh political compulsion firing music up now that I did when I was a kid. Like most of these people that I'm talking about, and people that are very famous now and got famous then, they just wanted to be heard and they wanted to speak out against

fill in the blank. Okay, And what do you think, even though it's hard to predict, will be the result of the today's protests in cities is supposed to the localized riots in Los Angeles in the nineties. Well, it can go. It can go one of two ways, Bob. This can be Uh, this could be the cathartic moment. This could be the moment where everyone realizes how desperate a situation this is for the African American population, just

the non white population of America, but particularly them. Since the first African was brought to the to American shores in chains and given an animal name, So maybe that's what happens that we all learn um and and then we topple the people who are driving division and and driving us away from being able to solve our cultural and social problems. And we elect somebody who's actually got a heart and is empathetic and will will help change occur.

That might happen, or we may find that with more and more destruction of private property that people start worrying about themselves again and they start leaning to the law and order ticket. We've seen it so many times before. And he stands up and says, I'm the only one that can save you. Like all these governors, these democrats, these people, they're you know, they're just a bunch of wet noodles. They should be thrown out of office. And when we need here is some angry you know, we

need some vicious dogs and big guns. And as much as I would hate that that might be the result, I fear that it may be. Well, that's certainly what happened in sight with Nixon getting elected. But let's go back to Toronto. So your father was a doctor. How many kids in the family, um, five biological kids and three adopted. I have to ask the three were adopted, what was the motivation what happened there. I think it's under the heading of some guys never learned. Um. No,

it's just my parents were professional parents. They loved it. They love being parents, They love raising children. And when my youngest of the first five, my youngest sister had her butt mitzvah, which means she was thirteen years old, my mom started to have sort of advance um emptiness syndrome before she ever left home, but she really started to she she just pined for another baby, and so

they they adopted a young boy named Michael. Michael came to us with UM, a terminal illness, and we didn't know that. He came to us with a chronic disease that had something to do with my dad specialty, not entirely but close. It was a form of leukemia, something with which you are very familiar and UM, but we didn't know it at first. He just was a baby boy that was delivered and he was happy and he

seemed great. But then he started to get these bony protrusions and his body in certain places and his eyes started a bulge, and my dad began to know but couldn't tell anyone what he suspected was going on, and he was on a mad tear to get somebody on the world, anybody, a specialist, anyone that could help figure out how to save this child, because the preponderance of outcome was outcomes, uh, was that they would die but

before their second birthday. If they got through their second birthday, then they had, um, you know, a fifty chance of maybe ever making into age ten. So this is what he lived with. Anyway, I don't want to drag this out, but the bottom line is, um, we couldn't save him. And and and here's a lesson for everybody who does music for a living or anything else. I was on my way to Chicago to work on Killer. We were recording at our c A there and I got snowed

in into Detroit. Our flight got diverted and I was left in Detroit airport and uh, and I heard my name paged. I knew Michael was sick. I didn't want to go. Actually I knew he was really sick. And my dad said. My dad was kind of a workaholic. To my dad said, you have an obligation, you have work. There are people waiting for you. You must go. So I said, okay, but um, I didn't feel great about it. So I heard my name page in my heart just sank,

and I went and picked up the page. It turned out to be the guy that was running Paramount Records at the time, to whom I had delivered Detroit record by you know, Mitch Rider in the band Detroit, and he wanted to talk about a single. But he freaked me out so badly that I screamed at him on the phone and I just don't you ever call me like that again, I will, you know, And I hung up on him, and I apologized later, but it just blew my mind. I was so and then I was relieved, Oh,

thank god, it's all it's not Michael, It's okay. I go on to Chicago, and sure enough, two nights later, um, I get a call from Alan McMillan, who was uh Jack Richardson's partner and my boss at that time, and he's said, I think you should probably come home and and so I went into the studio and I was kind of like I was in a daze. I didn't know what to think and I didn't know what to do. The the manager of the studio was a really wise

wonderful man named Dick Forber. He took me out in the hallway and he said, listen, nobody ever died for one of a rock and roll record. He said, you get on that plane and go home. And that may have been the most valuable lesson I've learned in my adult life. Nobody ever died for one of one of these things. And when it's important and your family's at stake, or someone's health, or or you can or or there's a riot going on and you need to go, you need to go. You need to go. You'll get a

chance to finish later. And and we did. And you know, Killer was a big hit for Alice Cooper and stuff. But yeah, that was a big deal. So then Michael died. Michael passed away, and literally one week after, as we were sitting around the table, Jewish people have Shiva, and when Shiva is over, you do this. You do this ritual if you walk out the back door of your house and you walk back in the front door. Basically you're leaving the grief behind and you're walking into your

new life. The phone rang. Seriously, we were sitting at him. My dad goes picks up the phone, he's talking for about fifty minutes. He comes back and he's white as a sheet and he looks at all of us and he said, that was a lawyer who just called me, who had heard about Michael and what had happened. And he says, there's a little girl for for adoption and do we want her? And everybody at the table was like, hell yeah, and and my mom started to cry, and we all, you know, we all sort of jumped up

and down. And that's my little sister Ranana, who you know, has three beautiful girls of her own, and and and um. And then after her came Judith. So that how we ended up with eight kids. Long story in the hierarchy. Where are you in the eight children? I'm the oldest, You're the oldest. Usually all the hopes and dreams were in the oldest and all the focus. Was that true in your family? Well, I think the hopes and dreams were in me, yes, because you know, you're the first

of everything. You're the first kid, the first grandkid for my grandparents and all that stuff. So yes, people they I was you know, I was the magic child. You know I could do no wrong and all that stuff. But I I proved them wrong very soon thereafter. You know, I started. I was not a well behaved child. I was a happy kid, and I was always sweet to people. But I found a way around anything I didn't want to do, and particularly school, which I hated. I thought

school was so slow and uh. And I was not going to be a doctor like my dad wanted me to be, or a lawyer like my uncle was. I was just I wanted to be. Actually, I wanted to be an act her. I started because my brothers and I we were We were kid actors at the CBC when I was eight and they were they were five and a half. We started doing television. Went together. Okay. One of the great things about this place is it's it's like, you know, it's like a little village the

whole country. Everybody knows everybody. So my my dad's best friend was a doctor married to uh, a Balennesian dancer, and only in Canada would the hot show on Saturday night be Baldesian dancing starring Garbett Roberts and and in as. I don't think she called herself style but at the time, but she was married to doctor. So anyway, so she said, do the kids ever want to come and see the studios.

And my dad took my brothers, who are redheaded twins, identical twins, and he took up and they used to dress the same, you know, they like people did with twins in the fifties and sixties. They dressed them up the same, and and and we were in all singing, all dancing family. We were the Jewish Von Trapps of Toronto. And so you know, they went to to take a tour of the CBC and the producers of the Billy

O'Connor show. Billy O'Connor was an Irish tenor who had the show after the Dance Show on Saturday nights and he was the number one variety show in Canada. So the producers came walking out of their students. They see these two little redheads and they go, oh my god, they look just like Billy. They're like miniature versions. They don't sing, do they. And my dad goes five, six, seven, eight boys breaking I I don't want a girl jock.

So they got the gig. Then they became the uh special guest star on on a Billy O'Connor um Christmas Special. And then those guys just turned my dad and say, got any more those at home? And that's what that's how it happened. You said you were a singing, dancing family. Explain that. Okay again, And I don't want to make this all about being Jewish, but but I do want to say that, don't worry people like people hate you anyway for being Jewish. Yeah, I've already been there. I'll

tell someday. I'll tell you the stories from school. But um, uh, you know, we there's a lot of song and a lot of there's a lot of music involved in in religious ceremonies, in in festivals and families getting together every Friday night with Shabbat. There's you sing things, you sing everything, and so there's always music. But also my dad played uh jazz bass in a big band in Canada to works way through medical school. And my mom was was concert level pianist who was too shy to play in

public except in front of the family. So we would get together. My mom would play, my dad would play, and and uh, and we'd sing these you know, sort of old fashioned songs altogether as a family, and we'd sing in harmonies and all this well isn't a formal thing. It was just what we did and when the relatives came. Every time the relatives came, my dad would wake us up, literally would come, you know, stumbling down the stairs in

our pjs. We're being the sleep out of our eyes and and really complaining what he would say, this moment will never come again. That's so okay, alright, so we gotta sick. So we would sick three or four songs. I would have to do a routine, and then we could we would be allowed to go back to bed. Okay, we're your parents born in Canada? Yes, and so their parents came from the Old Country. Yes, um my my. My mom's father was born in Canada, but only just only,

I mean his family had only just arrived. Her mother was born in Russia and um, and came at the age of three. Okay, so you're growing up, are you a popular kid? Well, you know, I they skipped me from grade one to grade three because I was whereas as we say in America, from first grade the third grade. Um, because I was I was getting the lessons too quickly and they didn't think that that year in between was going to be um valuable to me. So they moved

me ahead, thinking they were doing me a favor. That's not a favor, because what it meant was I was a year younger than everybody all the time. And so I hit puberty last you know, I was still I had the same experience. I know what you're talking about, did you. Yeah, I was a little fat kid. Everybody picked on, you know, and and and it was really when I learned to play the guitar and saying that, um, that I created a popularity for myself by showing up

at parties and being the kind of tortured artist. You know. I tried it on the piano, but it's hard to carry a piano from party to party. Um. So you know, if I picked up the guitar and um, and the girls loved it, and I just thought, well, this is cool. So how did you did your parents give you piano lessons? Of course we were a Jewish family, had exactly why I know, okay? And then how many years did you take piano lessons? I started? Uh, I started piano lessons

at the age of five, So I did I did you? Absolutely? There would be three there were six of us at once, three on each piano. Oh wow, Oh that's like Dr T Williger's you know, did you ever do you ever see The five Thousand Fingers of Dr T? With Okay, you gotta look this up because it is for anybody in the music business, anybody who plays, or anybody who

always wanted to play. This is a must see movie, The five Thousand Fingers of Doctor T. And the bottom line is Dr Twilliger is a very is an aggressive music teacher, and the kid who is taking lessons from him falls asleep at the piano and this is his nightmares, very psychedelic and it really a brilliant commentary on so many things about music. Anyway, So yes, we took lessons. I learned that we learned. Can you read music at this point in time? Yes, I can, but I'm not

a very good reader. I'm I'm a slow reader. I can read and I can write, but I'm not like I mean that some people can can read fly ship and play it right. You know what? I worked with Long Long, who is concert pianist um doing um a record with him and the two cellos, and we wrote a part for him that was so complicated it looked like rachmaninof it just was like, as I say, fly shit on the page. I sent it to him in advance and we could practice and and little did I

know that he never practices. He's just a lazy bum. So he he um, that's not true. He's a genius. He's not a lazy bum. He doesn't have to practice. He showed up in the studio, put this thing a fly ship, up on the piano and just sat there and just whipped it out. It was like it was insane. I couldn't believe that anybody could say, read that and not make a mistake. That's not me. I have to take my time. What inspired you to pick up the guitar? I told you I needed. I needed to be able

to sing my songs to girls. You know, when they came to my house, I could sing them at the piano. So you were writing songs at this point in time, Well, you know, I was writing or I was picking songs from the you know, the the public repertoire that we're very um moving. Let's say in a polite way that they would they would be motivating of young women to to perhaps look at me in a different light. Okay, so you were a child actor. You said you were not good in school at what point do you say,

maybe I'll try this music thing. Well, everything in my life has actually been a reaction to something else. It's it's not that I said to myself, I'm going to be in the music business. You know. I did play, and I wanted to play. My uncle had a club so I could play in the club. Then I got together with my cousin Nancy, and we had a little duo.

We were the Messengers and uh and and we were pretty good, except that we lost the high school talent show against the band called the Twin Tone four, which was the leader of which was Ivan Reitman and and and Ivan and I have never forgotten that, you know, and I've really never forgiven him for it. But but anyway, so you know, so I would do that. I love playing on stage. That was really great. I didn't know that that was going to be a career on any level.

I was still trying to get into um acting, I was still trying to write movies. I was trying to do anything that had to do with with theater. I love theater so much and um and that's how I got into music business. I was actually doing a play, a musical review. I was the script editor, not the music guy. The music director of the show was Al McMillan, and they decided one day that they wanted a rock

kay uh score to the show. They wanted this would be and and so at that exact same time, Michael Cole, who you also know, one of the great promoters of all time, who was my teenage buddy. Uh and I we co managed a band called Chorus. Now. He thought that that meant booking them in clubs, and I thought that that meant working on their material. So we were both wrong. Neither of us had any idea what a manager was. But this was a great start. So we

we put them. We shoehorned them into this musical review and Alan Alan was going through some stuff at the time, and and Uh and I loved the man. I just thought he was wonderful. He actually came to live with us for a while and I just said, listen, I got you. I'll take it from here. Let me I'll put the material in and I'll work it up with a band, and then when you come back, you'll see and if it doesn't work, you can redo it whatever

you'd like. So in the band Icarus, the lead singer and writer was a guy named Eddie Schwartz who wrote hit me with your best shot, and um and so uh you know, and and then we had to go find material. So I went and I drove to Ottawa and met with Bruce Cockburn and a couple of other artists that were up there, and and um. And a guy who was helping me find material was a man named Adam Mitchell, who had played in a band called the Poppers, and he went on to be a fairly

famous producer in his own right. Um. Anyway, we found the music, we did the thing, and it sounded great. When Alan came back, he looked at me and he said, I want you to meet my partner. He could use a guy like you. So I thought, okay, they need a manager. So I went for the meeting with Jack Richardson, who was Alan's partner in a company called Nimbus nine.

At the time they were doing uh um, Jack was producing the Guests Who and they had the number one record in the world an American Woman, which was number one everywhere. So I to the office and Jack was very nice, very polite, very down to earth, you know, fatherly kind of guy, and said, so you know what, what what do you want to do? And I said, well, I want to be a manager and he said really, so what does that? What does that mean? And so I explained him how it's working on their material, making

songs better. He said, you don't want to be a manager, he said, you want to be a producer. And that's how it all started, just doing a little backfill traditionally in a Jewish family, and I would know the children have to go to college. So what happened with that? Well, you know, sometimes you're the windscreen and sometimes you're the bug, right, sometimes you're Louisville slugger. But okay, yeah, but you know what happened to college was I went. I started. I

wasn't taking anything useful. It was all sort of you know, I was taking Italian and economics how does that work? And uh? And philosophy and but there was a drama club which I joined, and I convinced the dean of the college to give me five thousand dollars in nineteen sixties seven to buy a film camera and to start a film club. The college that I went to was the first ever video teaching college in Canada, probably in

North America. So what that means is they would do lectures. Um, they would they would record them, they shoot them for television, and then they would be able to play them in the lecture halls all across the country. So this was

a big thing. And uh, the technicians who worked at TV part of the college, I got to know them all because I started this video film club thing and I used to pay them out of the money that the dean gave us to stay after school and teach us how to edit, how to shoot, how to do graphics and all that sort of stuff. So and after a while, after about five months, I got so good at it that they just said to me, you know, when did you just come and work with us? So

I did, And that was the end of your school career. Yes, I left. I after as a student became staff. And uh, didn't you also get married at a very young age? Yeah? I got married at seventeen. Um, we we got pregnant at when I was just sixteen and she was seventeen, and then we had to get married. So we got married at seventeen. And when I say we had to get married, we did decide. We did decide to do it. There was the option offered to us, particularly by um

Marlene's mom. You know that, you know, we could think about terminating, but but we couldn't think about terminating. So for whatever reason, maybe it's just child childhood idealism. I don't know, but I know that if that had never happened, I'm I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I don't know what I'd be, but it wouldn't be this because all of that forced me to, um try to find a way to make a living. And that's a

that's an amazing motivator. You know when when you've got a wife and a child and you've got to figure out how to feed him, Uh, you start doing things you never thought you you or you may never have thought you would do. I sold encyclopedias. I became friends with Buddy Abrams, who was the greatest encyclopedia salesman in history. He was a guy who started Encyclopedia Britannica door to door.

He didn't start the encyclopedia, he started the door to door part, and as the guy who started it, he got an override on every set of Encyclopedia Britannic as that sold in the world. Now, being from a Jewish family. You guys had one, and you probably had an set of the Americans Encyclopedia and the Great Books of the Western World. Right, these were all you know. We were suckers for anything that had to do with knowledge and culture.

Buddy Abrams became my friend, and he became my friend because he was my dad's patient and he loved my dad, but he really loved me. He was He gave me the other great lesson of my life. When we were playing chess, which he liked to do. I was sort of saying, I don't know what I'm gonna do when I grow up. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. I said, I don't really know what I want to do. And he said, well, let me tell you, some kid, no one with your education, your looks, and your background

will ever starve past that. He got nothing to be afraid of. And I was like, WHOA, that's heavy ship. But you know what, He's right, I'm never gonna starve. I'm smart. I'm going to figure out a way. I transition from being a naturally unsure teenager, especially being the young one, the fat one, the the other one. All the time I was unsure, I was never the captain of the hockey team. I was never that guy, so

I was unsure of where I would fit in. But once I assimilated that, it changed my approach and then I became like, I don't I don't have to worry. I'll try this one. This could work, and if that doesn't, I'll try that one. And so it went. Now. Buddy Abrahams was married to a woman from Hawaii named Momolani Reeves, who had been married to a half Chinese, half American guy. She was Hawaiian and also herself half Chinese. She had two sons, Sammy and Victor, who were like my heroes.

They were in their twenties. They were like sumo wrestlers, big guys, and they smoked dope. I've never seen anyone smoked dope. It was so cool. But they were Hawaiian, you know, and they smoked dope and they looked like, yeah, they looked like foo manshoe guys and sumo wrestler bodies. Sammy moved to Beirut, where he met a model, tall, beautiful, blonde um English woman um named Patricia, but she called herself Patrick and they got married and they had a baby.

Uh that Momy and Buddy had never met. Buddy invited me down to their apartment in in uh Fort Lee, New Jersey, right across the river from New York one weekend, and that's when Sammy and Patrick came home with their baby, Kiano. And that's when I met Kiana Yeves. Wow, this is really yeah, that's a good story. And they moved across the street from my school. You know, we were so

close as families. They moved across the street from my studio in Toronto, where I was now a partner in Nimbus nine, and uh and Alice Cooper used to stay there and actually did babysit Keanu Reeves, as he claims very often. Okay, how long did you sell encyclopedias for I? Actually, Uh, I didn't do very well at Encyclopedia, so I didn't last very long. It was like weeks, seriously, like I was terrible and and and I was and then I

tried magazines. I was just terrible. And the reason I was terrible was because I felt really sorry for the person on the other side of the door. I didn't want to do anything to hurt them, and I could see they couldn't really afford to do what I wanted them to do, so I just stepped away. Okay, so what was paying the bills when you were young with

a child? I was writing, uh, sketch material for a show on CBC called Sunday Morning, the producer of which and on to do this musical review and hired me. And that's how I got that gig. So I was doing some comedy writing, and I was playing for Peanuts, you know, in in different little clubs and things. And we were living you and your bride or we were still living at my parents house because we could not afford to move out. And when do you ultimately move

out of your parents house? Um? And we had a roommate, by the way, we we had to have a roommate who was my my buddy from from college, who who did the video club with me and all that sort of stuff. Um, so he be. It was a three bedroom apartment. He got the third bedroom and we moved there when David was too. So I was nineteen and I was starting to make some money. Rick and I. Rick and I by that time, we were staff writers for the CBC. We were writing a show called How's

This for a great title? Good company, Colon. It's our stuff. That took a genius to come up with. I just got Oh my god, and and but that show. The lead actor on that show, singer, actor, singer, dancer, etcetera, was Alan Thick, who became a lifelong friend of mine and and the director of the show went on to do the Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, Tennessee. And that was my first trip to Nashville was to go visit him. But that's a long story, but a good one anyway.

So we were writing this series and and uh, we were comedy writers. We were we were part of a team of about ten writers, I want to say, and uh, and we were so unruly. This is the CBC. These are people come to work in a suit and tie, you know, and there and and they come in at nine in the morning and they go home at six. It's insane. So Rick and I were so crazy, and most of the time on psychedelics of one sort or another.

So we were. We were very unruly, to the extent that the guy across the hall from our office named Alex Trebec complained about us and had us removed. So that we were we were we were the only comedy writing team that had to work after hours. We could only come in after six pm. Unbelievable. It was great. I loved it. How old were you when you had that faithful meeting with Jack Richardson? UM? I had. I

had just turned twenty. The stories the story had been that I was nineteen, and I believed that for the longest onie until I went back and looked at the dates and I was like, no, no, no, that's not possible. So I was twenty. Okay, So he tells your son, you need to be a producer. What's the step after that? Okay? So the next step was um he I you know, he said you want to be a producer, and I

was like, you're gonna have to explain that, sir. So I basically followed him around and he gave me UM one on one classes and what it meant to be. He put you on the payroll. Yes, he hired me, But it wasn't that I wasn't doing anything because I was very good at working on material. I was really good at songs and uh and and in those days not nearly smart enough to know that, um, I should have been a co writer on the stuff I worked on.

But you know, it doesn't matter. It was a fantastic education and I got to work with so many different kinds of people. So I would do Jack's pre production. If there was a band he was working with, he would send me ahead of time. I picked the songs and we'd work on the arrangements and then we would go into the studio with Jack and he would be the guy uh in charge of recording, or he would

come like the last day of rehearsals or something like that. Also, Nimbus also had a partner named Ben McPeek who did UH jingles and and UH commercials for a living. So I used to do sessions for him to like they would have me. Um. I got to do UH sound alike UH material for Coca Cola commercials. Said Okay, this week, we want a Joe Cocker song. So we would come up with a way of doing it's the real thing, you know, Joe Cocker style. And that was a great

training ground too. So you said you followed and took lessons from Jack. Yeah, So we had we had a flight all these places, right, We flew to like I mean, we worked in Munsey, Indiana, believe it or not, and we had a flight up to Chicago and then and then take a card or the Midwest or something, you know. Uh. So I had a lot of hours with Jack. And during that time I had a little notebook and I

just kept asking questions. You know that last session we did you put you put this microphone on the on the tom toms and I didn't see you do that before. Why did you do that? And then he would explain it to me and literally he he went right back to basics, including physics and help me with that. And then at a certain point, about three or three months or so in he said, you know what, I'm gonna

send you to school. So he paid for me to go to the Eastman School of Music to a uh two week um production of course, being run by Phil Ramone and David Green in Rochester. This was in Rochester, New York. It's where I had my first bag of burgers. I never I didn't know such a thing existed. You know, white Castle And if anybody doesn't know about bags of burgers, you should go to your nearest white Castle and not

have them. So yeah, so I went. I went to Rochester, New York, and and uh, Phil and David just kind of they liked me and they took me under their wing. You know, I was a quick study. I got what what it was they were talking about, and I was useful. So I was slave labor because not only was Phil teaching, of course, but he was also using us as slave labor to help him to record a live album with

the Paul Uh Paul Winter Consort. So so you know, I was like an assistant engineer um at a time when um, you know, people like me weren't getting weren't getting paid, so um, so you know that, and that

was an amazing two weeks because I didn't sleep. They had a console then those days that we were working in a track so that a console and eight track machine and tapes of various well known or or or you know, almost well known bands that you could put on and you could sit at the console and you could mix, which is an amazing way to learn, Like the best way if you want to learn how to make a record, start by learning how to mix a record,

because once you start putting bits and pieces together, you can see where the issues are with the recording that should have been attended to, that may not have been attended to because people just didn't know better. So, um, I learned a tremendously like those two weeks for like

two years. Okay, just to stop for a second. Uh. Back in that era, producers and engineers were very different, whereas once we started hitting the mid seventies and lads, there are a lot of people engineers who said they were producers. Where certainly you come from the school where you can work with the material, But to what degree did you have or get engineering chops? Oh? I had

to have them. I mean, um, to what degree? Well, you know, I'm never the I'm never the smartest guy in the room full of engineers that you know, not by a long shot. I just know how stuff works sort of intuitively and instinctively. But a lot of the time it was just a simple matter that I didn't sleep and other people had to, you know. It was just like I can't stop, you know. I would sit at the console after they left. I think that says

with with Phil and David. Being able to sit at that console and actually mix somebody else's stuff with no one else around like that was an amazing experience for confidence building. You get back to Toronto after the two weeks, I get back to Toronto, and very shortly thereafter, Chef Gordon walks into the offices of Nimbus time because he wants that guess who sound for Alice Cooper, which and Alice Cooper, you know, one of the most hated bands

in the world at the time. And and I'm just so grateful that he did, because, you know, he he wanted Jack to produce. And when Jack looked at the pictures of these guys, these five creatures of indeterminate gender and and uh, you know something way out of his very middle of the road will wheelhouse, he just he didn't really want to have anything to do with him. So he actually sent me to New York City to see the man. He said to Chef, being the polite Canadian that he is, and that that I still am

to a much lesser extent um. He you know, he said, he said, well, he didn't just say no. He said, Okay, I'll tell you what I'll send the kid. If the kid likes the band, then I'll come and see the band. And then Chef said that's great, and he left it. Then Jacqueline Community said get rid of them. So they sent me to New York to get rid of to sign somebody else and get rid of Alice Cooper. And it was exactly the opposite. The other person that I went to see didn't move me. I didn't see it.

But going into Max's Kansas City on September eight in following the laser beams out of the subway station at Houston and and and going around the corner and up the stairway into Maxi's Kansas City into a sea of spandex and spider eyes, into a world of uh, you know, jet black hair, black lipstick, black finger nails, and and and hugely high boost. They were like these wraiths, these zombies that were floating across the floor. Nobody spoke. They just sort of had, you know, they had a telepathic

language among them. And they all knew when I entered the room that there was a hippie in their midst. And this was not this would not do, you know. But anyway, they put me at the front table and I watched the show. It was it was beyond inspiring is a you know, an overworked word, but it was inspiring to me because I saw things there that I

had never seen done on a stage. I'd never seen props and lights and sets being used in a rock and roll context like that, in particularly where everybody around was sort of so wraith like, and and yet they all knew the words, and these were songs that had never been released. So the whole thing was like it just knocked my socks off and I want. I went running up to the dressing room and with no authority whatsoever, committed Nimus nine to producing the next Alice Cooper album.

And then when I got back to my hotel, I didn't sleep at all because I knew that this was this was not going to be met with good favor. And so I called Alan McMillan first thing in the morning, and he just goes, get on the first plane back, you get back. So I did, and I came running into the building basically begging for my life. And the first words out of my mouth you don't understand, I said to Jack Richardson, of all people, you don't understand.

This was not rock and roll. There were no T shirts, there were no jeans. They had set some props and lights and stuff, and everybody do the words in spiderizing spandex and everybody looked the same, and it was amazing, and I finally got to the end and I just said, let this wasn't rock and roll, Jack, this is the beginning of a cultural movement. We have to do it. And Jack said, uh, enough already said if you like it so much, you do it. And that stopped me

in my tracks. That was like, you know, I just kind of looked at him and said excuse me, and he's you know, or in Canadian that would have been sorry and uh and uh, and Jack said, yeah, you do it. I'm not doing it. So then I had to walk up you know that, I had to take a walk up the street just to figure out, like did I dare? Like, like, this is real, this is like, this is not being an advanced man for the real guy. This is he's He's gonna make me the real guy.

And I don't know if I can do that. And then I got halfway down the block and realized that nobody with my brains and my looks and blah blah blah, and I just thought, what have I got to lose? This is great. This is the greatest opportunity anyone's ever given me. So I came back into the building and I went, I'll do it. You'll be proud. So what were the next steps. Well, the next steps were that

I went and rehearsed with them in Pontiac, Michigan. There's lots of wonderful stories and you'll read all about it in my new book entitled No I don't have a book, but when I do have a book, you'll read all about it. It was a great leap forward from the previous two albums. Okay, they had eighteen, had Caught in a Dream, etcetera. How did you make that great leap forward in the material? Well, first of all, they that

material was already written when I came Lucky me. It was at a moment where they had had two albums to sort of find their way, and then they started to write songs, like actual songs, and some of them were really good. We had a lot of trash too, you know, there was a lot of material that that got rejected. But that's the way of every every project you ever do. You know, you may go through hundreds of bits and pieces to find the ones that you

really really want to spend time on. So those songs once you just mentioned eighteen isn't My Body um, which was for me, that was the beginning of everything and that and the first song that we worked on, and UH and Black ju To they'd already had those, They just played them differently they played them. What happened at the time was they like they didn't know what you had to do to get a song on the radio.

Neither did I. Honestly, I just did, you know. I just did some quick wood shedding, and I had a few notes, you know, like Jack would say, well, you gotta be under three minutes to thirty is better. So I knew stuff like that, right, But I also knew that when listening to them play, you know, they'd lose me for like three minutes in the middle of a song, and then they'd come back and it would be different. It wasn't the same as the beginning. And and everybody

was playing lead all the time. So my job was to find the essence of the song, like what you know, where's the power? There's always a riff. There's always a great riff at the center of an Alice Cooper song, whether it's schools Out or whether it's I'm eighteen and so where's that? And uh? And what are we singing? And what are we singing about? I was too stupid to know that words didn't matter. I thought they did, and actually turned out I was right. So that's why

American Woman was such a big hit. It was just that phrase, American Woman. So I was really focusing on the melody, the sort of central riff and um and the rhythm, and and I saw those as three separate tracks that this song would run on at the same time, and then they had to be coordinated and it had to work. They each had to work with the other so it would be powerful. And basically what I learned from Tchaikovsky is what I applied to Alice Cooper. It's true.

I know I haven't said that out loud before. It's true. Okay, so you you've talked previously in this UH podcast about helping write the songs. Did you help write the songs? Would you say? Or you were just helping arrange them? You know, I did help write the songs that at that time, but that considered to be production or you know, by anybody, But you know, even me, I thought that was production. I thought, okay, so, how how much pre production on that first Alice Cooper album? You did? Love

it to death? And how much time did it take? To actually record it. The pre production period was probably an aggregate around um, four weeks, three or four weeks, because we were slow and we were all just learning our craft, right, so it took me a little a little while. That's just this begs the question, you do you have to convince Chep and Coope that you could do it instead of Jack. Well, they kept saying where's Jack,

Where's Jack? And uh, and I kept saying He's coming, He's He's He's coming, and I'm and and uh and he'll he'll love this. And he did come. He came for the recording sessions. He was there in the studio and very much a presence and uh, but um, instead of taking over the console and stepping up to the front and elbowing me to the back uh couch like

like we were doing before, he kicked me forward. And he would basically he would like kick me in the ass, like literally, I have to feel his foot when I was about to do something really stupid, or if I'd done something that was already really stupid. And then we you know, we had this engineer too, called Brian Christian, who was like this this big muscle bound southside Chicago guy, looked like a hitman for the Mob, and he talked like one too, And but he was a great engineer.

He was a Union engineer. This was a Union house, so he had to be really careful, and once in a while I would touch the console, he would slap my hand literally. So on those first four songs, we did four songs to start because Warner Brothers was not convinced that this team could do this, and they didn't know me from Adam, and even though they got Jack richardson, they weren't really sure what that meant. But then they heard the first four songs and then we got that

green light for the rest of the album. And and a little bit of time passed between those first four songs and coming back to the studio. By each time, I was feeling like, you know, my ideas are not valueless. I think I think we're onto something here. So I started being more aggressive, not with the band, but with with Brian and and Jackson. One time Brian slapped my hand. Get your fucking hand off, my counsel, and I said, it's a console, asshole, And I'm the producer on this project.

If I want to touch the console, I'm gonna touch the console and he laughed and it just gave me this the biggest bear hug of my life. And uh, and I was in okay, now I'm in the club, and then it was okay to touch stuff. You know. So the the actual recording, the question about the recording, It took us in uh, in total, three weeks to record an eighteen hours to mix eight hours non stuff. That's a difference. Okay, the record is done. Do you think you have something? Oh? Yeah, I listen, what do

I know? This is my first album? Right, I loved you know, I was just in love with myself. I made it. I survived for openers and and and secondly, you know, like some of the songs were stuck in my head. And also some professional people who do that for a living looked at me and said that's really good. And that all of that combination of stuff made me feel like a you know, like you know this this

is this is good, this is gonna work. And then and then and then you know, I'm a team gets broken out of out of Windsor, Ontario and c KLW. The big a Rosalie Trombley, who was the most important music music director in radio in North America, believe it or not, because coming out of Winstor, Ontario, they beamed

into the Detroit Metroplex. They had a massive audience and uh and Alice Cooper's a Detroit band, and shep was really smart and sent a limousine across the border to go pick Tim her son who later worked for me by the way when grew up. But that's another story. So he went and picked him up by limousine from school and brought him home and gave him the single to give his mom and Tim and Tim and his sister played it and they fell in love with it. They were the ones who said, Mom, you gotta play

this record. And that's how it happened. Just from that point on, we were golden. Okay, Between Love It to Death and Killer Did, what did you work on? Um? Well, I had a couple of things. I mean, right after Love It to Death, Um, I I did a New York record um that nobody ever heard and probably never will for an artist called David MQ. It was a great experience because it was my first time working with orchestra in his studio and and all session players, which

really opened my eyes. UM. And I did that with David Green, who was again a wonderful mentor and teacher. But the record was terrible. And then I did Then I did a record with um uh, Mitch Rider in a band called Detroit out of Detroit. They loved their manager, Barry Kramer, who was also the publisher of Cream magazine.

Um founder and publisher of Cream Magazine. He loved the sound of that Alice Cooper record, and he was the one who decided, you know, for his band for for for Billy it's his real name, Billy Levis, Mitch Rider and the band Detroit. They wanted me, so they hired me. And part of what what I did on that record was a cover of a lou Reid song called rock and Roll? Was that? Was that your idea or their idea? The song itself was I I think, I think, I don't.

I don't know how we you know, I think we sat in a circle and somebody, you know, we picked all the material because Billy was not a writer, right, we had one or two Uh, we didn't have that many originals, so we were doing a lot of cover stuff. Um wasn't my idea? Probably not because because at that time I wasn't really that it wasn't much of a velvet fan. And that's why now, and I wasn't a velvets fan. I didn't. I didn't really know them. Um. I was still just trying to find my way out

of the bulrushes. Man. I was like, I was a folky for you know, it's like five minutes ago I was playing you know, Coomba, Oh my lord, now here I am, you know, saying you know, bodies need their rest, you know. So anyway, you know, we did this thing, and and we had just hired Steve Hunter. In fact, the band picked him up out of a club in Decatur, Illinois while they were doing touring and brought him back to Detroit and just announced him to me. They go,

by the way, this is our new guitar player. And this he was just like ratty looking little guy with coke bottled glasses and and an s G and a teeny little lamp. And he kind of sat in the corner, was very very shy, that kind of played on his own and all that stuff. And one day in the in the middle of rehearsal, I was just I just thought, okay, this,

you know, we gotta do something about this. So I I stopped the rearsul we had we had a double stack of marshals that one of the other guys used, and we hooked him up together, and we brought Steve to the middle of the room and I plugged him into the double stack of marshals. And when we took it, when we went from standby just on, the hum alone was louder than the band had been. And and Steve was like, oh my god, and then he started to

play that. You know, there's nothing quite like having that piece of wood and metal in your hand and being able to make that much noise from it and having such power, you know, the sustain alone, It was just it changed his life. That moment changed his life. He started playing like Hendrix. It was good enough. You know this He didn't just learn at that moment. He had always known it, but he couldn't. He didn't have the

confidence to step out and do it. And then when he heard that sound, it just moved him so much. And everybody from Cream magazine, everybody that was in that whole building, including Dave marsha might be one of the sourest people in music. Dave marsh came running in and went Wow, that's amazing about Steve Hunter. So he was our guy. So when we came to a rock and roll I needed a riff. That's what I had learned.

Good songs had a riff. I needed a good riff, and Steve Hunter came up with Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da da and and so we cut the whole song. We did a fairly good job of it, though I really screwed up the recording of the of the snare drum, which bothers me to this day. Um, but I'm just about to make up for it. Actually, I I just uh stopped mixing rock and roll my new version to do this podcast. That's true. It's the truth, and Steve's on it and

Joe Bonamassa. What a team. Oh my god, they're so good. Anyway, So so we cut this thing and it came out and apparently, um, that was the best cover of any of his songs that lou had ever heard. And that's how I got to work with Lou REI. Okay, but Berlin came out in seventy three and Killer came out at the end of seventy one, so this was so you you know, and me. I think, actually we may have done Killer before we did before I did Detroit, the Detroit album. Okay, so let's go back. Let's go

back to Killer. All I know about Killer was Alice Cooper was a joke. And I read this unbelievable review boxed off in Rolling Stone by Lester It was it was a tragic waste of plastic? Right, was that the one? No? No, this was the one that he said, this is unbelievable. Okay, okay, really I had to look it up. He went on or not, and I literally this. You know, people say they bought albums based on the cover. I never did that. I did, but but the review was so amazing that

I didn't know whether it was a joker real. So I had to buy the album. You Dropped the Needle and first heard of My Wheels, the sound and the humor involved, and then it went into Be My Lover and ultimately Halo of Flies. It was like, unbelievable. So it tell us about the creation of that record. Well, I think that what what that record really did was it it um uh. It incorporated their actual true personalities.

Like the first one, we were trying to be something, we were trying to have a hit record, and we were trying to play by the rules, so to speak. Although there were certain things that we did where, you know, we just weren't going to We just weren't, you know, no matter. You know, people said, black Juju, you can't put that on a record, and we were just like, oh, yeah, we are because it's great and we love it, so it's going. But um, when it came time to kill Her,

it was more to do killer. It was more about, um, the stuff that we hadn't been able to do that if we could figure out a way to do it so that it made a good record. But it's still had the sense of humor, it's still had the theatricality, it's still had these different characters that Alice would play

on stage that we're frowned upon by normal record makers. Right, So so this gave it, you know, we had a broader palette and and and we had leeway, we had license because we had a successful album just behind us. This was only nine months later that we that this thing came out, So so we were already we were riding a wave and people were listening, and that allowed us to do some things that we had never done before, allowed me to start using orchestral instruments that I actually

wrote the parts for. And honest to god, I didn't even know the range of the cello before. I had to call Alan McMillan at the office and go, Alan, like, what's the low note of a cello? So that so I can figure out what to write, you know, and and and and I wrote this, you know, the French horn part uh for um Halo of Flies. I think it was, but I may be wrong which song it is. And but there were two great French horn players, one of which was Dale Clevinger, who was the principal horn

for the Chicago Sympathy. And here he is in the studio with Alice Cooper, and this kid, this hippie from Canada who doesn't know his asked from his elbow, and he looked at the chart, and he looked at me and he said, I don't think that's what you really want me to play. And I said, well, uh, what

do you think I wanted to play? And he did some corrections of accidentals and things that you know that I got wrong, and and and then he played it and I learned right that moment you know what, you know, the power notes for the French horn and stuff like that, all of which goes into the memory bank, all of which at some point in your life becomes useful. Okay, So let's go back to the Lou Reed story. So Lou here's the trans version of rock and roll. It's

the favorite cover he has of his material. So he tracks you, Yeah, he tracks me. They tracked me down um uh Dennis Katz, who was his manager at the time, found me in Toronto and they invited me to come to uh Massey Hall to see who played live the opening act that night. It was a band called Genesis. And I had become friends with the number of the DJs at CHUM FM, which was like our this was our FM er in Toronto, you know, in those days it was experimental radio. They played, the DJs played what

they wanted to play, and they found things. They went to record stores and bought something at four o'clock in the afternoon and it was on the air by ten o'clock at night. So they've been playing Genesis and and I was very impressed with just the complexity of it, the musicianship, everything about it, the the sound of and the sound of of the lead vocal So I wanted to go see this band. So I said to Dennis, look at you know, if you mind, I'd like to

get there in time for the opening act. He said, no, no problem. So we went and we saw a Genesis and by the time Peter Gabriel rose up on an elevator from beneath the stage with a flower on his head, and he'd already sung um Watcher and a couple of other things like by that. By that time, I was just like beyond mesmerized. My jaw was in my lap and it was everything I could do to not just rhapsodized to the to the manager of the guy I'm

really supposed to be seeing about this other band. So I was just trying to be careful and you know, to keep it under control. And then Louis came out and that was another animal altogether. The he would animal is a good term. He was like a feral creature. He owned that stage. He was he was dangerous, he was he was scary, you know, and and uh and and and at the same time, he seemed to be

completely unconcerned with the audience in front of him. He didn't give a ship whether people were clapping not clapping. He was just in his show. So when it was over, I filed it away and I said, I am honored to work with lou Reid. Thank you, Dennis. And to myself, I said, but get me that kid with the flower on his head. Okay. Did you meet Peter Gabriel that evening? No? Okay, so now you make a deal to work with lou Reid.

Tell us the next steps. The next step, Well, the next step was, you know, he came to my house and we met after the show. We went to my house and we sat on the floor of of the living room. Uh. He played guitar and he played me some songs. And I have been doing my research, so before I went to see him, I I by that time then I did know the velvets, and I knew everything he'd written in every album he've done. So he sat down on the floor and he started to play

what he was thinking of for this new project. He wanted an anti transformer. He you know, in a way, the commercial success of Walk on the wild Side really bothered him because it's not who we saw himself as, and people then try to make him a rock star or a pop star, and he did not want that on any level. So he wanted to make an anti Transformer record. And and he started playing me these songs.

They were good, they were lou reed songs, of course they were good, but they didn't seem to have any real point of view and and and I just didn't, you know, for me, they were missing some of the drama and the uh, the evocative qualities of some of

the other things that he had written before. And and so I said to him, you know, look, listen, these are good, but every once in a while, more often than most to anybody else that I've listened to, you tell a whole life in two minutes and forty seconds. And that, to me, that's magic, Like why can't we do something like that but expand it? Because I always find myself saying, what happened to that guy? Or what

happened to those two people? And I said to him, like that song you wrote called Berlin, I've often thought whatever happened to those two people? I said, we should think about doing something like Berlin and make a story out of it. And then I said, wait a minute, we shouldn't think about doing something like Berlin. It's your fucking song. Let's do Berlin. Why don't we do that? Why don't we take Berlin, Why don't we take the beginning of the story, and why don't we take it

to where those two people would have ended up? And he loved that. He was like he just stared at me for a minute, and he just said, give me a few weeks. And I was it and he left. And about four weeks later he came back and played me Caroline says on my on the on the living room floor in that same position, and I got goose flesh. I was like, Wow, this is this is heavy stuff. This is really powerful, and and I said to him,

give me a few weeks. So he gave me the songs and then I went into the studio and for the first time ever in my career, I didn't have a band to work with. I couldn't say try this, play that, do this, do that. I had nothing. I just had me. So I went into the studio we were building. It wasn't even done yet. It just had a piano in the middle of the room. And I sat there at the piano and I just imagined what

the songs ought to be like. And then I started playing them for myself, like like this is how I hear it. I'll say that again, like this is how I hear it, this is this is this is where the base would go, and these are the big shots. Here's the riff, that sort of stuff. And then I got Alan McMillan to come in and I said, Alan, I can't write this down. I'm way too slow and it will disappear before I before I ever get it written, I'll forget. So would you mind please help me with this?

And so he he started writing it down, and then we fleshed it out, and I said, you know what, what if we had an orchestra, Like what if we really had an orchestra and they played you know, Dad at it and and and he started writing that down. It was not like the scene from Amadeus. Alan and I were collaborating. He wasn't stealing, and we were collaborating.

He came up with great ideas. He helped me so much in that moment, so that by the time lou and I got back together, I could sit at the piano and play him the record and he could hear it. He heard it, and he loved it. So we took that the combination of these a couple of weeks for each of us, and we went to London to cut the record, all with studio, well actually all with guest performers, some of them had never done studio work before. It included Steve Hunter, who I loved and could count on

in just about any circle stands. It also concluded the late grade Jack Bruce, who I've I learned to love. He was difficult, but he was amazing. Um. And and I had b. J. Wilson from Procol harm Barry Wilson played his last session on that before he died, uh, you know, an untimely death. And and I had uh Stevie Winwood on on the on the song called the Kids, Stevie Winwood and I played harmoniums facing each other. We were playing pedal harmoniums and playing with each other's part.

And and uh, I know I'm forgetting out the people. And Jean Martinek, who was an amazing musician from Toronto who was also a student of Leghetti. And he's the guy who came up with that atonal choir thing that to sound like the moment of death. Anyway, as you could tell, it was an exciting experience sounds expensive. Was it expensive? It wasn't. No, no, no, no. We worked fast. We were really fast. We did not spend a lot of money. Nobody would give you a lot of money

in those days. Not like Okay, the record comes out into my memory, especially coming after a hit. Reviews were not charitable, they were well, they went both ways. There was one review that said Sergeant Pepper of the seventies, which was completely untrue and and inappropriate. But but the but the reviewer just loved the record to pieces. And then there were others who said that I had destroyed Lou's career and he would never recover. And yeah, so it,

you know, definitely got a reaction that one. Like there was nobody who was on the fence about Berlin. They either loved it or they hated it. But it was also it was also an extremely difficult process for both of us. He was going through a really rough period of time. I I was, you know, I was too young to be able to resist tempta during the making

and things. So I started, I started, you know, doing drugs along with some of the other people, and and uh, and then I suffered when we stopped because I didn't know that you would feel bad afterwards, you know. And I felt horrible and and and also just the emotion, the emotion tied up in it, like every song is a you know, melodrama. And I had to listen to those sounds like it's okay, any listener that wants to complain about listening to Berlin you only had to hear

it once. I had to hear it thousands of times. And those you know, getting the kids, getting the screaming kids, you know, and then making it sound like that. That was you know, it was intense. My I did not torture my children. My son David was uh five and a half I think at the time, and Joshua was like too. And I told David the story. I said, Okay, I want you to go outside and once your pound on the door. I need to record this because I'm doing a story about a kid and his mom is

in the kitchen and she can't hear him. So what I want you to do is is not as hard as you can and you know, mommy, mommy, mommy, until she comes out. He said, okay. So I had a Nagra, a little portable tape machine on the other side of the door, and David starts pounding, yelling mommy. I have a microphone on his side and a microphone on my side, so I got the the real sound of the door pounding, and Joshua had followed him outside. Joshua was like too,

he didn't know what was going on. But and you can even hear him if you ever solo that track where he goes like, but it's after that the mummy like, why are we calling mommy? She's right there, you know. But then he starts yelling and and so then I got the two of them yelling mommy, mommy, pounding, and I took that to the studio and put it through, you know, basically like a cheese grater, to just make

it sound horrible. It's just I just compressed it and distorted it and compressed it more and distorted it more until it was so in your face and so uhverwhelming emotionally that it would bring normal people to tears. And it did, like they were uh one one of one of Loo's assistants went running crying out of the control room when we first played the album. Was Lou happy, and was Lou happy after the record came out. I

think that I think that Lou was um relieved. He was always proud of it, and he didn't like It's Lou he didn't give a ship what the critics said. He didn't care. But it was such a gut wrenching experience for him, one that he never forgot and valued for his entire life, and one that knit us together as as really deep, dear, true friends, like real friends for the rest of his life for you know that.

So he was proud of it, he admired it, but he never wanted to hear it again, he said, he said, he said, let's just walk it away in the closet and uh, and we won't have to do that again now. He ultimately after that goes on the road, probably the stage and a very rock version of all that came before with Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. Did you have anything to do with that? That was my house band.

So that included Penty Gland or Whitey we called him Whitey Gland and per Cash John who had played in The Mandela, and Joey Charowski, who was the keyboard player of The Mandela and was one of the greatest keyboard players I ever worked with until he lost his mind, got married to a woman and ran into the woods and never came back. He actually became a very he actually became a very successful uh lumberman, like seriously anyway, So a forester, that's the word I was looking for.

So yes, So that was kind of my house band. Those guys plus Wagner and Hunter and all of them played on so many different things. I mean Joey and Um and Steve and and Dick as well also played on Peter gabriel solo album and anyway, So yeah, so Lou got lu He liked the sound of those people. He certainly knew what Steve was doing because he had been a fan of Steve since Rock and Roll and U and it may have been Steve that said, hey, look I I'm playing a lot with this group of guys,

you know, like we should get together. I don't know, I don't know who the original idea was, but these were all people that were linked, um basically through Nimbus. Now, ultimately decades later, you did a performance of Berlin. How did that come together? Because Lou, my friend and I were um across the street from his house having a dinner, and and Julian Schnabel, the the artist and film director, walked in and a friend of Luz, but he had

never met me before. And when lu said, you know, this is bob Ezn, he got on his knees in front of the two of us and he held our hands and he just said, now you listen to me. He said, Berlin is why I'm an artist. He said, Berlin is what I played when I started for work, and I still play it and YouTube. You have to

promise me that you will do it live. We'd had that conversation many times in the past, lou and I and we well, we we always came away and saying, yeah, we gotta do it, we gotta do it, and then he would get busy, I'd get busy, and we wouldn't do it. So we said we'll do it, and then

we got busy and didn't do it. But but uh, Susan Feldman, who was the artistic director of St. Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn, which is a really great alternative art stage, a place where a lot of stuff percolates, she called and maybe it was Schnabel who gave her the idea, but she wanted us to do Berlin live at St.

Anne's Lou called me. We conference Schnabel in Schnabel agreed to be uh the show artistic director or designer whatever it wasn't And then it became actually a film that produced by another great friend of mine, Stanley buck fall Um, who I almost got involved with when he was doing the Biosphere and Stanley has UH He's got that film called Spaceship Earth about the biosphair. He was, he was the UH. He owned the marketing rights to all that stuff. So it's a very small world. It's all the all

these roads lead to the same place. So we all decided to do it, and I brought the first first call, Steve, you got to do the show, and then Um. And then we put together a band made up of some of Lou's touring band, his existing touring ban. We had Steve and then some of my people, and and UH and Anthony who is now now unknown, Anthony and Uh and Sharon Jones from Sharon Jones and the dap Kings.

They were the backing vocals. We had a children's choir to do the whole leaghetti segment, and we had a small orchestra on stage, all dressed. We we wanted all the orchestra to be dressed like a like a cocktail band, like a bar mits for a wedding band. They were all in light blue jackets, dinner jackets, and they had little music stands that were the same color. And during rehearsals I had to conduct because lou was just he

hadn't played this stuff in like decades and decades. He kind of knew it, but he was nervous about it, and he wasn't quite sure about entrances and exits and stuff like that. And the band also needed coaching. So I was I was conducting the rehearsals, but as we were getting closer to the you know, opening night, Lue just looked at me. He just goes, You're on stage. And I was saying, you know, that's not really supposed to be my job, and he goes, no, you're on stage.

So I said, okay, I'll be on stage. There was one jacket left. It was an extra large, and I put it on. It looked like I was wearing my dad's dinner jacket, like my dad's powder blue tuxino. And of course now I'm gonna be having my back to the audience. So I said to schnovel. You got to do something on the back of this thing, Like, I can't just be this this sea of bouncing blue on stage. It'll be a terrible distraction. So he wrote the word Berlin down my back on the back of this thing

in paint, and I still have that jacket. It's probably worth like, who knows, half million dollars. He's a very he's a very famous guy. There's in no way I'm selling that you right, Okay, let's go back. Meanwhile, you have what I believe to be your first hit with Schools Out. So tell us how that comes together. Well, eight Team was a hit, and under my wheels, they were just they just weren't number one, but they were all they were fam hits. No, they were am they

were am hits. I don't want to I don't want to argue about their success. Well I can tell you with schools success. Okay, Schools I was a bigger success. I'll give you that. It was, and it was it was eighter really it was. You know, the album Billion Dollar Babies was really what it blew out worldwide. But yeah, Schools Out was amazing. Chef called me up and he said, um, the guys just they're they're working on this idea and it's called schools Out, and we gotta we gotta record this.

This is gonna be a hit. I can tell you this is gonna be hit. We gotta get it done before school ends. And I said, I'm like okay. So I came out to l A and we had that riff, which was Glenn Buxton's riff. And schools out was what Leo Gorsey used to say to Satch and the and the on the Bowery Boys when he would say something stupid, Leo course, slap his hat off his head and go

schools out, Satch, schools out, wake up, you know. So that's where the term schools out came from because Glenn Buxton, the lead guitar player, if anything, he was a Bowery boy in life, in his real life, and sadly he was a tragic Bowery boy who you know, drank himself

to death. But at that time he was he was hot and he was doing you know, he came up with a great riff, like one of the all time most notable guitar riffs and um, and then we started working on you know, what can we do we want to make at school egg and we came up with a no more pencils, no more books, and that that was a really good section to sort of knit helped to knit the song together. And we worked on the lyrics. You know, we we got no class, we got no innocence.

Uh no, but we got no class, we got no principles. I love that, and that's kind of a you know, that's an example of the kind of ironic um double on time that that is in almost all of Alice Cooper's lyric writing. Like I have to say, Bob Dylan said this, and I agree that Alice Cooper is is maybe the most underrated great lyricists in rock. The people don't realize how brilliant his lyrics are. But anyway, so

the song came together. It came very quickly and um and then we had to to then we had to scramble and put together the whole album, which we did again very quickly in New York. Okay, Bob, uh, this is what I think we should do. Why don't we close it for now as the first part and then get back to kiss in Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd, the Wall and Fish and so many of your more recent adventures sound good to you. Oh my god, Bob, you know, yeah, is this talk about slave labor? None

of these victims of Bob Left. It's I want all the listeners to know get paid. To do any of this stuff. We have to give up like hours, sometimes days of our schedule. Some people come by mule train, they have to get all the way out to l A. They're not allowed to record unless they go into this one particular room at a particular time, and they have to give Bob two hours. And so when we add in travel time and all that stuff, it could have

taken me a week to do this. Thankfully, we're actually confined to our quarters, so I was able to do this by remote technology. That's good. I'll do it okay, until next time when we do more with Bob ezritten. It's a Bob Left sense podcasting