“I’ve always gravitated toward things that are heavy,” says Bob Ezrin, “whether that’s heavy metal, heavy ‘orchestral,’ or heavy themes.”
For fans familiar with Ezrin’s work, that self-assessment will come as no surprise. For nearly 40 years the veteran producer has applied his trademark dramatic touch to some of the most important albums of our times. In the ’70s alone, Ezrin manned the boards for a string of classics, including Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979) Lou Reed’s Berlin (1973), and the original Alice Cooper Group’s triumphant run of Love It to Death (1971), Killer (1971), School’s Out (1972), and Billion Dollar Babies (1973).
In the following interview, Ezrin offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of those very albums.
You first saw the Alice Cooper Group at a very early stage in their career. What was it about the band that convinced you they had potential?
Well, first of all, you have to understand that I was just 19 years old at the time. And like most kids of the ’60s, I was used to rock music being played by angry young men with beards and T-shirts and jeans, talking about social issues or their own securities. The band hit the stage like a group of theatrical ghouls, who sort of walked out with their instruments and props and amazing lights and proceeded to do a show that was as much theater as it was rock music. The show took us through all kinds of strange little twilight zone-like short stories involving a variety of twisted characters and weird tales. By the end of it, they had given us basically an hour and a half of theatrical and musical experience. And I thought, this is the future of rock music.
Alice has said that you were their "George Martin," in the sense that you tightened up the band and stripped away anything that seemed extraneous.
Oh yes, that was done, at least. We sometimes did complete reconstructive surgery. We would come up with ideas and then take those ideas right down to the bare chassis—the first chord progression, and three lines of melody—and rebuild an entire song around that. Or we might do that with one great riff, as with “School’s Out,” for example. Out of that one guitar riff we crafted an entire song in the rehearsal studio.
There’s a song called “Reflected,” on the band’s first album, that has a catchy melody but sounds tentative. You later transformed that song into “Elected.” How was that was done?
Well, we were nothing if not brave and sort of macho about our approach to music. The idea for “Elected” sprang out of a casual conversation where we jokingly said, “Why don’t we run Alice for president?” It was such a horrible field of candidates, and we were so disappointed with what was going on in America at the time, we thought that would be a great irony. And of course we all looked at each other and thought, “Why not?” [laughs] We started thinking about what to do with the idea, and someone suggested we could make “Reflected” into “Elected" We took the song and made it brasher, or “brassier.” We made it speak like a hunting call.
Around this same time, in 1973, you produced Lou Reed’s Berlin album. That album has grown in critical stature through the years.
Actually, critically speaking, that album was highly acclaimed when it came out. There was a Rolling Stone article that called it the Sgt. Pepper’s of the ’70s. But it didn’t have a radio-friendly single, so it never got the exposure that it should have, and therefore didn’t have the commercial success that we had hoped for. The truth is, we might have had to sacrifice on the artistic side to get that exposure, in a way that maybe we would have regretted later on. I’m entirely satisfied with that album. I think it’s one of the best and most complete pieces of work I’ve ever been involved with.
Legend has it that Berlin was a real nightmare to make.
It was indeed a nightmare to make. Much of that came from the otherworldly nature of the world of Lou Reed. Lou Reed is a true New York artist, with all the trappings that go along with that. He had a coterie of strange friends, and a lifestyle that was weird to a simple Canadian boy like myself. There was a lot of exotic stuff going on around me that kind of undermined my sense of familiarity and comfort.
Keep in mind that with Alice Cooper, I was really just dealing with a bunch of regular guys who happened to wear makeup when they went on-stage. Their lifestyle was very All-American. I understood the way they liked to live, the way they partied, and the way they liked to work. Lou, on the other hand, was an artist with a capitol “A.” His milieu included some of the most cutting edge and eclectic artists of the time, and their whole approach to everything―from their art to their living―was foreign to me, and somewhat scary. That made it tough.
You used children’s voices on that album, which is something you’ve often done through the years. How did that idea originate?
That came from an innate sense of theatricality. I feel that if you want something to be vocally chilling, or kind of otherworldly, one way to do that is to use the voices of children. That's not something I myself discovered. That’s something that’s been done in choral music for many years.
The other thing is, if you want to touch people, most people respond to the sound of a child, for whatever reason. Whether it’s children laughing or children crying, that seems to be more touching than hearing the very same thing coming out of the mouth of an adult. In all the cases where I’ve used kids, it’s been for dramatic effect.
Did the members of Pink Floyd know ahead of time that you were going to add the voices of children to “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”?
They knew I was doing a lot of work on the track. They were sort of just letting me do whatever I wanted to. Roger [Waters'] attitude was, “Go ahead and waste your time doing a lot of silly stuff; in the end it’s going to be the way I hear it.” [laughs] In the case of that song, that meant one verse and one chorus, then ‘out’. But what I literally did was, I copied the track. If you listen to it, you can hear that it’s verse one and chorus one, played again, exactly the same. I made verse two and chorus two, and I put kids on that. I found a drum fill that wasn’t particularly good, that was just there to sort of join up the pieces, and put some kids on the second half, and extended the song that way.
Is it true that you wrote a screenplay for The Wall as you were recording, to serve as a guide?
Yes. Actually, we had all this material from Roger, and the general sense of the story. The one we started out with wasn’t the one we ended up with, but it was close. What I did was to take the story, and the material we had, and write out acts and scenes, where each scene was a song. And I described, with language, what the song was, and what it did, and how it sounded, and what the segue would be from that song into the next. It might be something like, “Cut to the sound of a bomb falling, and before the bomb hits the ground, cut to a baby crying.” It was very much written like a film script.
Was there much resistance on the part of Waters about Gilmour getting more involved?
I worked very hard at bringing Dave into the process of making the record. At the outset it was sort of Roger’s project, and sort of all about Roger. But Dave has a sense of melody, and an emotional side, that’s different from Roger’s. Dave is more of a romantic, and sometimes a little more accessible. “Comfortably Numb” was a song that Dave had written under a different title, and with a different verse. The chorus was very melodic and very beautiful. He brought that demo in, and after I heard it I said, “Okay, this is just awesome. We’ve got to finish it.” I gave it to Roger to finish, and he was at first reluctant, because it wasn’t his. But very quickly he took it home and started working on it. He hit that magical moment where he realized if he started with that [sings “Hello hello hello ...”], he was onto something really special. Two days later he came back with this phenomenal approach to the verse, and the song came together.
You've worked with lots of elite artists who are used to being told that everything they do is terrific. How do you handle that?
That’s always a challenge. One of the ways you deal with it is to make sure the person you’re working with has a similar level of respect for you. I certainly understand that I’m not infallible. But by the same token, I know that I have a level of experience and ability that’s different from the average civilian. I am smarter than the average bear, because I’ve been doing this for a long time, and have made a craft out of it. That’s why you hire a guy like me.