Bob Ezrin pt 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sex Podcast.
My guest today is legendary music producer, philanthropists, the straw
that stirs the drink, Bob Ezra Bob. That's very funny.
I've never had that intro people, the straw that stirs
the drake, like all the people. That's what they said

(00:28):
about Reggie Jackson when he joined the Yankees. He said
that about himself. And you're so different from other record
producers in that especially people who started when you started.
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,

(00:49):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:13):
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,

(02:34):
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

(02:55):
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.

(03:17):
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,

(03:39):
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,

(04:01):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:46):
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

(05:07):
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

(05:28):
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

(05:50):
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

(06:10):
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

(06:32):
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?

(06:54):
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

(07:16):
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

(07:37):
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

(08:01):
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

(08:22):
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

(08:45):
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,

(09:09):
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

(09:31):
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

(09:51):
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

(10:12):
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.

(10:34):
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

(10:57):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:39):
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

(12:02):
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

(12:25):
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,

(12:47):
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

(13:09):
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,

(13:32):
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,

(13:53):
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.

(14:15):
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

(14:40):
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

(15:01):
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

(15:24):
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

(15:46):
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

(16:07):
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

(16:27):
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

(16:48):
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

(17:10):
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

(17:30):
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

(17:53):
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,

(18:14):
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

(18:35):
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

(18:57):
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

(19:19):
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

(19:43):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:25):
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

(20:48):
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

(21:09):
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

(21:32):
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

(21:57):
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

(22:22):
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

(22:43):
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

(23:04):
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

(23:24):
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

(23:45):
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

(24:08):
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

(24:35):
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

(24:59):
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.

(25:21):
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

(25:43):
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.

(26:05):
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

(26:27):
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

(26:51):
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

(27:11):
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

(27:32):
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

(27:53):
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

(28:18):
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

(28:39):
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

(29:00):
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

(29:24):
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

(29:48):
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.

(30:11):
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

(30:32):
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

(30:56):
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

(31:17):
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

(31:38):
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.

(32:01):
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.

(32:22):
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,

(32:43):
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.

(33:04):
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

(33:24):
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

(33:49):
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.

(34:14):
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.

(34:41):
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,

(35:02):
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

(35:22):
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,

(35:44):
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

(36:05):
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,

(36:30):
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,

(36:51):
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

(37:12):
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.

(37:35):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:21):
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,

(38:46):
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?

(39:07):
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

(39:28):
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

(39:52):
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

(40:13):
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

(40:34):
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

(40:55):
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.

(41:18):
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,

(41:39):
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

(41:59):
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

(42:19):
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

(42:42):
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

(43:04):
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

(43:25):
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

(43:46):
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

(44:08):
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

(44:29):
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

(44:52):
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,

(45:12):
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

(45:33):
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?

(45:54):
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,

(46:19):
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

(46:40):
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,

(47:02):
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.

(47:24):
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,

(47:47):
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

(48:10):
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

(48:33):
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,

(48:54):
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

(49:16):
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

(49:39):
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

(50:01):
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

(50:22):
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.

(50:45):
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

(51:06):
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

(51:29):
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

(51:49):
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

(52:12):
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

(52:36):
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.

(53:00):
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

(53:23):
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,

(53:44):
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

(54:07):
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

(54:33):
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,

(54:55):
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

(55:15):
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.

(55:39):
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

(56:00):
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

(56:23):
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.

(56:44):
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

(57:06):
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,

(57:28):
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

(57:51):
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,

(58:12):
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

(58:34):
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

(58:57):
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,

(59:17):
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

(59:40):
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

(01:00:05):
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

(01:00:26):
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

(01:00:48):
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,

(01:01:09):
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.

(01:01:31):
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,

(01:01:55):
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.

(01:02:15):
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

(01:02:39):
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

(01:03:02):
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

(01:03:23):
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

(01:03:45):
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

(01:04:06):
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

(01:04:28):
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

(01:04:51):
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

(01:05:13):
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

(01:05:34):
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

(01:05:56):
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

(01:06:16):
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,

(01:06:38):
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,

(01:06:59):
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,

(01:07:21):
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

(01:07:47):
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

(01:08:08):
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

(01:08:29):
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

(01:08:51):
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

(01:09:13):
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

(01:09:33):
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

(01:09:55):
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.

(01:10:16):
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.

(01:10:38):
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

(01:11:00):
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

(01:11:20):
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

(01:11:42):
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

(01:12:03):
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,

(01:12:24):
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

(01:12:47):
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

(01:13:10):
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?

(01:13:33):
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

(01:13:54):
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,

(01:14:18):
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

(01:14:39):
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,

(01:15:02):
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

(01:15:22):
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

(01:15:44):
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

(01:16:04):
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

(01:16:25):
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

(01:16:46):
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

(01:17:06):
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

(01:17:29):
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

(01:17:52):
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

(01:18:13):
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

(01:18:34):
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

(01:18:54):
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.

(01:19:19):
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

(01:19:39):
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.

(01:20:01):
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

(01:20:21):
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,

(01:20:41):
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

(01:21:02):
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

(01:21:25):
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,

(01:21:48):
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

(01:22:08):
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

(01:22:31):
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

(01:22:52):
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

(01:23:13):
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

(01:23:33):
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

(01:23:54):
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

(01:24:14):
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

(01:24:36):
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

(01:25:01):
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

(01:25:23):
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

(01:25:46):
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,

(01:26:09):
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

(01:26:29):
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

(01:26:51):
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

(01:27:13):
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.

(01:27:38):
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

(01:27:58):
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,

(01:28:19):
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.

(01:28:39):
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

(01:29:01):
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,

(01:29:21):
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

(01:29:41):
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

(01:30:04):
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

(01:30:26):
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

(01:30:48):
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

(01:31:08):
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

(01:31:30):
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

(01:31:52):
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,

(01:32:14):
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

(01:32:38):
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

(01:32:59):
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

(01:33:19):
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,

(01:33:44):
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

(01:34:07):
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,

(01:34:32):
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

(01:34:52):
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

(01:35:14):
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

(01:35:36):
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

(01:35:57):
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

(01:36:20):
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

(01:36:42):
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

(01:37:04):
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

(01:37:27):
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

(01:37:47):
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

(01:38:08):
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

(01:38:30):
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

(01:38:51):
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

(01:39:12):
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

(01:39:32):
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

(01:39:53):
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

(01:40:16):
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

(01:40:37):
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

(01:41:00):
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,

(01:41:25):
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

(01:41:47):
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.

(01:42:07):
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