Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sex Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is legendary music producer, philanthropists, the straw
Speaker 1: that stirs the drink, Bob Ezra Bob. That's very funny.
Speaker 1: I've never had that intro people, the straw that stirs
Speaker 1: the drake, like all the people. That's what they said
Speaker 1: about Reggie Jackson when he joined the Yankees. He said
Speaker 1: that about himself. And you're so different from other record
Speaker 1: producers in that especially people who started when you started.
Speaker 1: Most of them are done okay, but you have ventured
Speaker 1: into other areas and I certainly know that you are
Speaker 1: literally the straw that stirs to drink. You make things happen,
Speaker 1: You make music rising happen. You made a lot of
Speaker 1: other things. We'll get into some of that, but right
Speaker 1: now you are aware of Bob. Right now, I'm in Toronto,
Speaker 1: which you know, which is where jan and I came.
Speaker 1: We were we were actually in the Bahamas when things
Speaker 1: started to blow up. I was writing for the book,
Speaker 1: you know that. I was that I've been threatening to
Speaker 1: write for years, so I was writing and then, um,
Speaker 1: you know, one night, she just said, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think we ought to get stuck here.
Speaker 1: This could be very bad. So we came up to Toronto, um,
Speaker 1: where we have a home, and and then they shut
Speaker 1: all the borders. I was going to head back down
Speaker 1: to Nashville, but that's just not gonna happen for a while.
Speaker 1: How much time do you spend? Weird? How much time
Speaker 1: are you in Toronto and Nashville on the road at
Speaker 1: this point in time? Yes? Yes? Okay? Someone, uh, you
Speaker 1: know what to listen. Um, I love I love our
Speaker 1: home here in Toronto and um and I love our
Speaker 1: place in the Bahamas because it's just a little place.
Speaker 1: But I love the ocean and just looking out my
Speaker 1: window at the ocean every morning is beautiful. But I
Speaker 1: love I love Nashville for working and um and and
Speaker 1: living too. Do you know it's a happening city, as
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of people. They're doing some really
Speaker 1: exciting and interesting things. And it's really easy to work there.
Speaker 1: It's perhaps the easiest place I've ever recorded. Amplify that
Speaker 1: for us. Well, you know, first of all, um, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a music recording town. So New York is
Speaker 1: a music town, but it's a music offices town. And
Speaker 1: business town. There is a lot of music going on
Speaker 1: there that's being recorded, but it isn't the backbone of
Speaker 1: the whole place, whereas you know, Nashville was really uh,
Speaker 1: it's really got three industries. It's got insurance, healthcare and
Speaker 1: music as the primary industries of Nashville. And and in
Speaker 1: in Nashville there are studios every fifty paces. It's it's
Speaker 1: quite remarkable. At least thing you know in my neighborhood,
Speaker 1: like the two doors down as a studio across the
Speaker 1: street directly as the studio it's Ron Fair Studio. Ron
Speaker 1: moved there, and right behind him is uh is Blackbird,
Speaker 1: which is maybe the biggest studio in Nashville and certainly
Speaker 1: the largest mic collection in Nashville, possibly the world. And
Speaker 1: and you've got to uh, you have a cadre of
Speaker 1: really professional session musicians, like the top of the food chain.
Speaker 1: And these these were all people who you know, they
Speaker 1: became virtuosic and uh and probably a genre was too
Speaker 1: small for them. And and and yet if you're not
Speaker 1: in a band or or doing something as a recording artist,
Speaker 1: it's hard to make a lot of money. But they
Speaker 1: discovered that their talents are very valuable to people like me,
Speaker 1: and and country artists who are solo artists, and and
Speaker 1: pop singers who don't have a band, and things like that.
Speaker 1: So we hire these people to make the music. And
Speaker 1: and you can get a band together of people who
Speaker 1: are literally the best, the best at their instrument in
Speaker 1: the world in Nashville and I often do you know,
Speaker 1: I often have like an amazing group of players who
Speaker 1: are relatively unknown to the outside world, but who in
Speaker 1: the music world are legendary. So we have a we
Speaker 1: have a room full of legends. Okay, just a little deeper,
Speaker 1: because the session musician world has died in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: Can these people you've called to do sessions? Can they
Speaker 1: make a living in Nashville being session people? Oh, they
Speaker 1: can make a very good living in Nashville being session musicians.
Speaker 1: Some of them are, you know, some of them are
Speaker 1: making a significant amount of money. Others are having to
Speaker 1: augment that with you know, other forms of playing, like
Speaker 1: going out on the road with certain artists or playing, um,
Speaker 1: you know, after hours and at shows within Nashville. But
Speaker 1: you can make a living in Nashville and not be
Speaker 1: the featured performer, which is hard to say about just
Speaker 1: about any place else. And there's lots of them. They
Speaker 1: come from all over the world there, you know, Like
Speaker 1: on the first session, the first um uh you know,
Speaker 1: first session that I did in Nashville where I used
Speaker 1: session players, one of the guitar players was a kid
Speaker 1: from Russia who was like a shredder. He was an
Speaker 1: awesome guitar player. But he found, you know, that he
Speaker 1: could actually make a living coming to Nashville. He was
Speaker 1: an insane reader and and uh and he had a
Speaker 1: great memory, and he found he found a part for
Speaker 1: himself right away. And and there are some drummers in
Speaker 1: that town that uh, you know, I would put up
Speaker 1: against the greatest drummers and the greatest bands that we've
Speaker 1: ever seen. And and the same thing with you know,
Speaker 1: keyboard players. And and if you need someone to play
Speaker 1: a sack butt as you often do, but you can
Speaker 1: pick up the musicians directory and there's a dude in
Speaker 1: Nashville who can play the sack but you know, or
Speaker 1: and or there's a there's a woman who can clog
Speaker 1: dance if you need the sound of you know, dancing
Speaker 1: on your record. You know. Um, so there's anything you
Speaker 1: can think of, Like one day I was producing somebody,
Speaker 1: and I just had this crazy notion. It was the
Speaker 1: sort of crossover track. And this was before um this
Speaker 1: was before Mumford and Sons. But I had this idea
Speaker 1: that I really wanted to hear lead banjo on this
Speaker 1: pretty rocking track. So I called Bela Fleck. I said, Bella,
Speaker 1: what are you doing this afternoon? He said, well, I
Speaker 1: you know, I got a meeting at five o'clock on
Speaker 1: music Row, but I'm not busy. Now what's up? And
Speaker 1: I said, can you come over? I I need a
Speaker 1: banjo solo. He was there within an hour, and the
Speaker 1: and the people I was working with when he walked
Speaker 1: in the door, they just looked at me like, you
Speaker 1: gotta be kidding. But but that's the town that it is.
Speaker 1: Emmy Lou Harris loves to do backing vocals really for example, yes,
Speaker 1: she's and and you know and and there's lots of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, very well known people who who I mean?
Speaker 1: Vince Gill plays lead guitar on one of the Alice
Speaker 1: Cooper Cooper tracks from an album years ago. You know,
Speaker 1: I invited Vince to come on and he shredded. He
Speaker 1: was unbelievable. He was so good that that Alice's touring band,
Speaker 1: which has you know, professional shredders in it. They could
Speaker 1: not cop his solo, so that song never went into
Speaker 1: never went into the show. Okay, you certainly, as we
Speaker 1: go deeper, have been in many genres, but you're most
Speaker 1: famous for the rock genre. Nashville was historically a country town.
Speaker 1: Uh is it more types of music and Nashville now
Speaker 1: or the players can do everything. How does your work
Speaker 1: meld with the Nashville scene. Most of the players, as
Speaker 1: I said, there are people who come from elsewhere, and
Speaker 1: a lot of them, including Dan Huff, who's one of
Speaker 1: the top producers of all time in Nashville. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: they come from rock bands that maybe didn't you know,
Speaker 1: didn't quite make it, or they did make it and
Speaker 1: then they stopped, or they come from jazz, or they
Speaker 1: come from classical. There's a great string player in Nashville
Speaker 1: that can do anything you can think of. You you
Speaker 1: need anything that's got strings on it, he can play it.
Speaker 1: And he's a classical violinist who moved to Nashville and
Speaker 1: now he's doing country fiddle and and but at the
Speaker 1: same time he can do heart anger fiddle, which is
Speaker 1: a Norwegian instrument. He can play cello and it's just
Speaker 1: anything you want. So um. So you have players who
Speaker 1: are very versatile. Okay, Certainly in the old days for
Speaker 1: all the cockers like us, you know, you have to
Speaker 1: practice in order to break into the scene. Supposedly Dwayne
Speaker 1: Almond took his guitar even to the bathroom. Certainly you
Speaker 1: have the elite players in Nashville. But do you think
Speaker 1: this is a problem today where people can promote their
Speaker 1: music online, that they're not as skilled in their instruments
Speaker 1: as they once were. I don't think that's quite true.
Speaker 1: I think that the operative words are their own instrument.
Speaker 1: And what's happened in the world is that instruments have
Speaker 1: changed and kids play. They play computers, they play um sequencers,
Speaker 1: they they play drum machines and pads and samplers and
Speaker 1: anything they can get their hands on. And they make
Speaker 1: these very crafty, uh compositions that you know, they show
Speaker 1: that they can play their medium, whatever that medium might be.
Speaker 1: And I think they're easily as good as any kid
Speaker 1: who is wood shedding on lead guitar when I was
Speaker 1: sixteen or seventeen years old and then bleeding into another
Speaker 1: element where we have commonality. Now you talk to a
Speaker 1: lot of these great players, and it turns out they
Speaker 1: learned how to play in school. Like Nathan East, he
Speaker 1: learned how to play in school. I know that something
Speaker 1: you have a great affinity for. Can you tell us
Speaker 1: about that? I think that in cultures where music was
Speaker 1: ingrained as a part of learning experience, and where people
Speaker 1: were actually taught how to express themselves using music, that
Speaker 1: you who ended up with people who had um you know,
Speaker 1: not just a greater affinity for the for the art form,
Speaker 1: but a different way of seeing and thinking and hearing
Speaker 1: and expressing, you know, a different way of speaking. They
Speaker 1: found out they don't have to use words, they use
Speaker 1: sound and stuff. And once you start practicing a new language,
Speaker 1: once you really get into it, it becomes like an infection.
Speaker 1: You can't get rid of it. You dream about it,
Speaker 1: you think about it, you live with it all the time.
Speaker 1: And we're missing that in North America now, we're missing
Speaker 1: that in in a way that many European nations are.
Speaker 1: You know, they still have I mean, why are the
Speaker 1: Swedes so successful in America in pop music? Why is
Speaker 1: why is worldwide pop music defined by Swedish people? It's
Speaker 1: because they have a phenomenal music education system and it
Speaker 1: goes beyond their regular school, beyond high school. There's a
Speaker 1: post graduate uh, whole set of postgraduate schools that you
Speaker 1: can go to to learn about songwriting and produce, sing
Speaker 1: and and uh and how to get better at the
Speaker 1: instrument that you play. Here in in North America, we've got, like,
Speaker 1: you know, a few schools that people can go to
Speaker 1: where this is true. But for the most part, music
Speaker 1: has been removed. It's no longer considered to be UM
Speaker 1: an essential course. It's considered to be an elective. And
Speaker 1: you know that with shrinking budgets and school boards that
Speaker 1: are just trying to make ends meet, the first stuff
Speaker 1: that goes is the you know, are all the electives,
Speaker 1: especially the ones that require equipment and investment. So music
Speaker 1: education has hurt a lot in North America since that
Speaker 1: became true. When I was a kid, music was one
Speaker 1: of the courses I had to take. By the way,
Speaker 1: so was art and so was literature. In not in
Speaker 1: not helping the entire child to evolve that uh, communicating
Speaker 1: emotional passionate little being, and not in allowing them the
Speaker 1: all the expression that's at their at their disposal. Naturally,
Speaker 1: while we're trying to teach them, we're kind of copyholding
Speaker 1: them into a much much grayer, less exciting existence, and
Speaker 1: you end up with a bunch of people who sit
Speaker 1: in the corner and look down, whether it's at their
Speaker 1: cell phone or their keyboard or whatever. What we really
Speaker 1: want is people who get together and uh and share
Speaker 1: and sing together and play together and create things together.
Speaker 1: Because what we need right now is to create a
Speaker 1: whole new world. Actually, you're not going to do that
Speaker 1: with You're not gonna do that with small thinkers. What
Speaker 1: do you need mean in terms is you talking about
Speaker 1: specifically about music or the world at large? A whole
Speaker 1: new I mean the world at large. I mean when
Speaker 1: you look at what's going on in the United States,
Speaker 1: when while we're talking, there are riots in the streets
Speaker 1: of twenty five cities in the United States. Is a
Speaker 1: reaction to an on camera murder, the death of someone
Speaker 1: that we all got to watch. I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: little story, so I don't want to throw anybody under
Speaker 1: the bus. In fact, I'll just say that when in
Speaker 1: a situation where I was commenting on the video of
Speaker 1: Eric Garner being strangled to death um to someone who
Speaker 1: was in the healthcare business. I'll just leave it that general,
Speaker 1: I just said, I just I just looked at it
Speaker 1: in complete disbelief, and my stomach was turning. And I
Speaker 1: looked at the guy and I just went, can you
Speaker 1: believe that? And he goes, no, man, he says, you know,
Speaker 1: my friends, the policeman, he won't even go in their
Speaker 1: neighborhoods anymore. And I just turned to the guy and
Speaker 1: I just said, are you shipping me? You're a healthcare professional,
Speaker 1: and that's what you got out of this. You're a
Speaker 1: person who supposedly dedicated to saving human life, and that's
Speaker 1: what you got out of this picture. And at that moment,
Speaker 1: I mean, I just realized that we have a systemic
Speaker 1: endemic disease in our culture. And it's not just America.
Speaker 1: People like to point fingers in America, but for you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's happening any place where the predominant culture was
Speaker 1: white and uh, Northern European even more so than Southern. Now.
Speaker 1: I was in a cab once and the driver told
Speaker 1: me in Toronto that more different languages are spoken in
Speaker 1: Toronto than any other berg on the planet. So one
Speaker 1: has to ask, you know, we are really inward looking
Speaker 1: in the United States. To someone who is certainly traveling
Speaker 1: a lot in both countries, what is the same or
Speaker 1: different about Canada? How much time do we have about
Speaker 1: but we don't have two hours to talk about Canada. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't think so, but you know what, look, I
Speaker 1: was in l A during the riots. I actually went
Speaker 1: to work in the basement of the First Amy Church
Speaker 1: and watts UH for months after the riots, um and
Speaker 1: working on food distribution and other things where I thought
Speaker 1: my efforts be more useful than being in a studio
Speaker 1: making rock records. At that time, it was a critical moment,
Speaker 1: wasn't it. It was a moment where we really thought
Speaker 1: we may lose our town altogether. And then we have
Speaker 1: this organization called Rebuild l A, which I also took
Speaker 1: part in, and at least we recognized at the time
Speaker 1: that we were facing massive UH, institutional and structural problems
Speaker 1: within our society. We tried to change them. I'm saddened
Speaker 1: by what I see now because it's clear, UH the
Speaker 1: evidence shows we failed in Canada. The primary difference in
Speaker 1: Canada is that there wasn't a slave trade in Canada.
Speaker 1: There were slaves in the East Coast, by the way,
Speaker 1: there were whole colonies of slaves, and the people don't
Speaker 1: even know about Nova Scotia UM. And there are still
Speaker 1: little townships that are just they're all black, they're all
Speaker 1: African Canadian UM. But primarily the the people UH who
Speaker 1: came from the West Indies and came from Africa came
Speaker 1: here of their own volition, and they, you know, they
Speaker 1: came to make a good life for themselves and for
Speaker 1: their families and defind their fortune, just like everybody else.
Speaker 1: And this is a nation of immigrants all the way around.
Speaker 1: So the Canadians have tried to be what they have
Speaker 1: referred to as a multicultural society. Sometimes it works really well.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it doesn't work very well at all. There's a
Speaker 1: guy on TV on CTV UM who does an entertainment
Speaker 1: show and he is UM, an African Canadian. I guess
Speaker 1: I would call him he maybe UH a West Indian
Speaker 1: Canadian originally, but he refers to himself as a black man.
Speaker 1: He's a black man. Who saw that video and who
Speaker 1: was then on the Canadian version of the View the
Speaker 1: next day and they asked him how he felt he
Speaker 1: started up being a media guy. He started off saying
Speaker 1: I'm fine and things. You know, it's really terrible. We
Speaker 1: have to work and so, and then slowly but surely
Speaker 1: he began to fall apart and then he lost words,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know me, I've never at a
Speaker 1: loss for words. And then he started to cry, and
Speaker 1: then he started to say, you know, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be this guy. I don't want to be the
Speaker 1: angry black man. But the truth is I am. I'm
Speaker 1: an angry black man because I have to watch what
Speaker 1: I say, what I look like, what I do every
Speaker 1: time I enter a room. And that's up here, you
Speaker 1: know where people like to think that we're okay. It's everywhere. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's worse in the United States because there's more polarization
Speaker 1: right now in the US than I've ever seen anywhere.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I've I lived in I've lived
Speaker 1: in the United States and million an American citizen for
Speaker 1: decades and decades. I'm a student of America. I love America.
Speaker 1: You know, I chose it. It didn't choose me. So
Speaker 1: I came. I came because I wanted to be there
Speaker 1: and and because I wanted to be active, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to be political and I wanted to get involved.
Speaker 1: So for me, it's very difficult to see where we
Speaker 1: are right now. For me after after being a member
Speaker 1: of SNICK, after marching, after you know, as I say,
Speaker 1: working in the basement of the First aim E Church,
Speaker 1: after after working with mentoring and after school programs, and
Speaker 1: all the time and energy that I put in, to
Speaker 1: have to admit to myself that a lot of this
Speaker 1: was really not for anything at all. Okay, let's talk
Speaker 1: about music in the era of chaos. Certainly when you
Speaker 1: started out in the folk scene in Toronto, you're aware
Speaker 1: of that folk music drove protests. Certainly ten years later,
Speaker 1: eight years later, we had literally fifty years ago Kent State,
Speaker 1: we had Crossbasels, Nash and Young, Ohio. What is music's place?
Speaker 1: Where is music relative to the cutting edge of culture
Speaker 1: and all these problems today? Listen, I think music has
Speaker 1: always been the voice of the people. It's a it's
Speaker 1: an easy way to communicate and and and it has
Speaker 1: been since we were private primitive beings and didn't even
Speaker 1: have words. We just sing out and somebody would would
Speaker 1: repeat it back to us, and we knew we had
Speaker 1: a friend. So music has always been at the forefront
Speaker 1: of everything always and it's always told the news. It's
Speaker 1: always had the news before the news was news. It
Speaker 1: was I was growing up. It was a pretty comfortable
Speaker 1: but very white environment. My dad was the first Jewish
Speaker 1: doctor allowed on staff at the Toronto General Hospital. That
Speaker 1: that happened in the middle fifties. In Toronto until the sixties,
Speaker 1: we had restricted clubs where there were no Jews, no Blacks,
Speaker 1: no not I think not even Catholics allowed, And in
Speaker 1: Canada had residential schools. These are things where they would
Speaker 1: take First Nation's children from their families, out of their tribe,
Speaker 1: put them in a church run school so they could
Speaker 1: learn to be white and Protestant or Catholic or whatever
Speaker 1: the religio and was of the school, and they would
Speaker 1: not let them go home, and they wouldn't let them
Speaker 1: speak their own language. They called them residential schools. The
Speaker 1: last one was closed in the early nineties. So there
Speaker 1: was always here a voice that had to be heard,
Speaker 1: and the only way it could be heard was through
Speaker 1: all what would you would call sort of underground or
Speaker 1: alternative media, and it was coming out of music. That
Speaker 1: was the place. You couldn't see it on TV. You
Speaker 1: would certainly wouldn't get it in, you know, in nice
Speaker 1: establishments or or proper society. You got it on the streets.
Speaker 1: You got it in on Yorkville Avenue, which during the sixties,
Speaker 1: during the middle sixties and late sixties was kind of
Speaker 1: the third leg of the folk stool. There was Greenwich Village,
Speaker 1: the gas Light District, and Yorkville Village where everyone played
Speaker 1: and people came from all over to do it. My
Speaker 1: uncle was a half owner in a club on Yorkville,
Speaker 1: which was a terrific advantage for me as a kid.
Speaker 1: You know. He in fact, he played a really large
Speaker 1: role in my life and and in turning me onto
Speaker 1: all kinds of music and and stereo equipment and all
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. He was a cool dude. But
Speaker 1: he had this club called the Penny Farthing where I
Speaker 1: would play in the basement with braces on my teeth
Speaker 1: badly to four or five people who couldn't afford to
Speaker 1: sit in the main room. And and upstairs there were
Speaker 1: artists going through, like this beautiful blonde girl from out
Speaker 1: West called Joni Anderson, who had just come to Toronto,
Speaker 1: had not yet married Chuck Mitchell, had just found out
Speaker 1: she was pregnant. When I spoke to Joni about it,
Speaker 1: she said, did you know I was pregnant? I said,
Speaker 1: I would have married you anyway. I was, you know,
Speaker 1: I was so but she was older than me. You
Speaker 1: know that she wasn't looking at at the kid with
Speaker 1: the braces in the basement. But you know, jose Feliciano
Speaker 1: played his first North American gig in that room and
Speaker 1: lots of other people. And the next door there was
Speaker 1: a band called um the I think the band was
Speaker 1: called the Minor Bird, and that was Neil Young Rick James,
Speaker 1: and they were a soul band. They like horns and
Speaker 1: and dance moves and everything. And at a couple of
Speaker 1: doors down from there, and then we had a band
Speaker 1: called the Sparrow, which was John k Uh and Mars
Speaker 1: Bonfire who went on to become Stepan Wolf. But but
Speaker 1: around the corner, these two um African American folk singers
Speaker 1: called Joe and Edtie played their first Canadian gig. They
Speaker 1: came up there. They were protest singers, like in the
Speaker 1: real sense of the word. They had a song on
Speaker 1: the radio called There's a Meeting here Tonight. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you remember that. You may be too young.
Speaker 1: We've talked about it before, so that's all I know. It, okay,
Speaker 1: so um. And they had stories to tell, and they
Speaker 1: spoke with a Southern drawl, and they were just from
Speaker 1: another planet. Were listening to them play at the same time.
Speaker 1: My uncle also discovered Lonnie Johnson in the in the
Speaker 1: in the men's toilet of a Chicago hotel where he
Speaker 1: had been hiding out for almost twenty years from a fraternity.
Speaker 1: My uncle, the lawyer, said him, you know, Lonnie, there
Speaker 1: is a statue of limitations. But he wouldn't believe him.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to come out of the toilet. So
Speaker 1: my uncle said, okay, I'm gonna bring you to Canada.
Speaker 1: They can't extradite you from Canada for a paternity student.
Speaker 1: So he came and they built him a club across
Speaker 1: the street from from the Penny Farthing, the main club.
Speaker 1: They called it Lonnie's Place, where he played the last
Speaker 1: three and a half or four years of his life.
Speaker 1: He died in Drew And I used to go over
Speaker 1: there and watch him play and and and he would
Speaker 1: tell stories. But but I mean, this was a living
Speaker 1: this was an emblem and a kind of you know,
Speaker 1: human diorama almost right there in front of you of
Speaker 1: the American South and the African American experience in the
Speaker 1: American South as as told through the Blues. And so
Speaker 1: what role do his music play like I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: known any of that. What role do his music play?
Speaker 1: How does the edge? Let me be very specific, we
Speaker 1: had the riot you mentioned earlier. The light went off
Speaker 1: over my head. Everything nice Ta was saying, everything n
Speaker 1: w A we're saying was true. Uh, can we point
Speaker 1: to a similar situation in today's music? Wow? You know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be the old guy who's complaining
Speaker 1: about what what you know, the new artists are doing
Speaker 1: or not doing. I find an absence of community in
Speaker 1: pretty much everything. It's not just music. But um, I
Speaker 1: don't find people standing up. I don't find people speaking out.
Speaker 1: I hear very little that that makes you sit back
Speaker 1: and catch your breath because it is so powerful and relevant.
Speaker 1: I haven't heard of I haven't heard a song like
Speaker 1: the Hurricane, you know, in I don't know decades. And
Speaker 1: is that because us we've become so self centered? And
Speaker 1: maybe you know, and maybe the President of the United
Speaker 1: States is the perfect you know, the perfect representation of it.
Speaker 1: He's our avatar. He's an avatar of all of our
Speaker 1: worst impulses. We're all we're all uh narcissistic, we're all
Speaker 1: self involved. We're all me first and then everything else after.
Speaker 1: And everybody wants to get rich. Like I don't see
Speaker 1: the same uh political compulsion firing music up now that
Speaker 1: I did when I was a kid. Like most of
Speaker 1: these people that I'm talking about, and people that are
Speaker 1: very famous now and got famous then, they just wanted
Speaker 1: to be heard and they wanted to speak out against
Speaker 1: fill in the blank. Okay, And what do you think,
Speaker 1: even though it's hard to predict, will be the result
Speaker 1: of the today's protests in cities is supposed to the
Speaker 1: localized riots in Los Angeles in the nineties. Well, it
Speaker 1: can go. It can go one of two ways, Bob.
Speaker 1: This can be Uh, this could be the cathartic moment.
Speaker 1: This could be the moment where everyone realizes how desperate
Speaker 1: a situation this is for the African American population, just
Speaker 1: the non white population of America, but particularly them. Since
Speaker 1: the first African was brought to the to American shores
Speaker 1: in chains and given an animal name, So maybe that's
Speaker 1: what happens that we all learn um and and then
Speaker 1: we topple the people who are driving division and and
Speaker 1: driving us away from being able to solve our cultural
Speaker 1: and social problems. And we elect somebody who's actually got
Speaker 1: a heart and is empathetic and will will help change occur.
Speaker 1: That might happen, or we may find that with more
Speaker 1: and more destruction of private property that people start worrying
Speaker 1: about themselves again and they start leaning to the law
Speaker 1: and order ticket. We've seen it so many times before.
Speaker 1: And he stands up and says, I'm the only one
Speaker 1: that can save you. Like all these governors, these democrats,
Speaker 1: these people, they're you know, they're just a bunch of
Speaker 1: wet noodles. They should be thrown out of office. And
Speaker 1: when we need here is some angry you know, we
Speaker 1: need some vicious dogs and big guns. And as much
Speaker 1: as I would hate that that might be the result,
Speaker 1: I fear that it may be. Well, that's certainly what
Speaker 1: happened in sight with Nixon getting elected. But let's go
Speaker 1: back to Toronto. So your father was a doctor. How
Speaker 1: many kids in the family, um, five biological kids and
Speaker 1: three adopted. I have to ask the three were adopted,
Speaker 1: what was the motivation what happened there. I think it's
Speaker 1: under the heading of some guys never learned. Um. No,
Speaker 1: it's just my parents were professional parents. They loved it.
Speaker 1: They love being parents, They love raising children. And when
Speaker 1: my youngest of the first five, my youngest sister had
Speaker 1: her butt mitzvah, which means she was thirteen years old,
Speaker 1: my mom started to have sort of advance um emptiness
Speaker 1: syndrome before she ever left home, but she really started
Speaker 1: to she she just pined for another baby, and so
Speaker 1: they they adopted a young boy named Michael. Michael came
Speaker 1: to us with UM, a terminal illness, and we didn't
Speaker 1: know that. He came to us with a chronic disease
Speaker 1: that had something to do with my dad specialty, not
Speaker 1: entirely but close. It was a form of leukemia, something
Speaker 1: with which you are very familiar and UM, but we
Speaker 1: didn't know it at first. He just was a baby
Speaker 1: boy that was delivered and he was happy and he
Speaker 1: seemed great. But then he started to get these bony
Speaker 1: protrusions and his body in certain places and his eyes
Speaker 1: started a bulge, and my dad began to know but
Speaker 1: couldn't tell anyone what he suspected was going on, and
Speaker 1: he was on a mad tear to get somebody on
Speaker 1: the world, anybody, a specialist, anyone that could help figure
Speaker 1: out how to save this child, because the preponderance of
Speaker 1: outcome was outcomes, uh, was that they would die but
Speaker 1: before their second birthday. If they got through their second birthday,
Speaker 1: then they had, um, you know, a fifty chance of
Speaker 1: maybe ever making into age ten. So this is what
Speaker 1: he lived with. Anyway, I don't want to drag this out,
Speaker 1: but the bottom line is, um, we couldn't save him.
Speaker 1: And and and here's a lesson for everybody who does
Speaker 1: music for a living or anything else. I was on
Speaker 1: my way to Chicago to work on Killer. We were
Speaker 1: recording at our c A there and I got snowed
Speaker 1: in into Detroit. Our flight got diverted and I was
Speaker 1: left in Detroit airport and uh, and I heard my
Speaker 1: name paged. I knew Michael was sick. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to go. Actually I knew he was really sick. And
Speaker 1: my dad said. My dad was kind of a workaholic.
Speaker 1: To my dad said, you have an obligation, you have work.
Speaker 1: There are people waiting for you. You must go. So
Speaker 1: I said, okay, but um, I didn't feel great about it.
Speaker 1: So I heard my name page in my heart just sank,
Speaker 1: and I went and picked up the page. It turned
Speaker 1: out to be the guy that was running Paramount Records
Speaker 1: at the time, to whom I had delivered Detroit record
Speaker 1: by you know, Mitch Rider in the band Detroit, and
Speaker 1: he wanted to talk about a single. But he freaked
Speaker 1: me out so badly that I screamed at him on
Speaker 1: the phone and I just don't you ever call me
Speaker 1: like that again, I will, you know, And I hung
Speaker 1: up on him, and I apologized later, but it just
Speaker 1: blew my mind. I was so and then I was relieved, Oh,
Speaker 1: thank god, it's all it's not Michael, It's okay. I
Speaker 1: go on to Chicago, and sure enough, two nights later, um,
Speaker 1: I get a call from Alan McMillan, who was uh
Speaker 1: Jack Richardson's partner and my boss at that time, and
Speaker 1: he's said, I think you should probably come home and
Speaker 1: and so I went into the studio and I was
Speaker 1: kind of like I was in a daze. I didn't
Speaker 1: know what to think and I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: The the manager of the studio was a really wise
Speaker 1: wonderful man named Dick Forber. He took me out in
Speaker 1: the hallway and he said, listen, nobody ever died for
Speaker 1: one of a rock and roll record. He said, you
Speaker 1: get on that plane and go home. And that may
Speaker 1: have been the most valuable lesson I've learned in my
Speaker 1: adult life. Nobody ever died for one of one of
Speaker 1: these things. And when it's important and your family's at stake,
Speaker 1: or someone's health, or or you can or or there's
Speaker 1: a riot going on and you need to go, you
Speaker 1: need to go. You need to go. You'll get a
Speaker 1: chance to finish later. And and we did. And you know,
Speaker 1: Killer was a big hit for Alice Cooper and stuff.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was a big deal. So then Michael died.
Speaker 1: Michael passed away, and literally one week after, as we
Speaker 1: were sitting around the table, Jewish people have Shiva, and
Speaker 1: when Shiva is over, you do this. You do this
Speaker 1: ritual if you walk out the back door of your
Speaker 1: house and you walk back in the front door. Basically
Speaker 1: you're leaving the grief behind and you're walking into your
Speaker 1: new life. The phone rang. Seriously, we were sitting at him.
Speaker 1: My dad goes picks up the phone, he's talking for
Speaker 1: about fifty minutes. He comes back and he's white as
Speaker 1: a sheet and he looks at all of us and
Speaker 1: he said, that was a lawyer who just called me,
Speaker 1: who had heard about Michael and what had happened. And
Speaker 1: he says, there's a little girl for for adoption and
Speaker 1: do we want her? And everybody at the table was like,
Speaker 1: hell yeah, and and my mom started to cry, and
Speaker 1: we all, you know, we all sort of jumped up
Speaker 1: and down. And that's my little sister Ranana, who you know,
Speaker 1: has three beautiful girls of her own, and and and um.
Speaker 1: And then after her came Judith. So that how we
Speaker 1: ended up with eight kids. Long story in the hierarchy.
Speaker 1: Where are you in the eight children? I'm the oldest,
Speaker 1: You're the oldest. Usually all the hopes and dreams were
Speaker 1: in the oldest and all the focus. Was that true
Speaker 1: in your family? Well, I think the hopes and dreams
Speaker 1: were in me, yes, because you know, you're the first
Speaker 1: of everything. You're the first kid, the first grandkid for
Speaker 1: my grandparents and all that stuff. So yes, people they
Speaker 1: I was you know, I was the magic child. You
Speaker 1: know I could do no wrong and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: But I I proved them wrong very soon thereafter. You know,
Speaker 1: I started. I was not a well behaved child. I
Speaker 1: was a happy kid, and I was always sweet to people.
Speaker 1: But I found a way around anything I didn't want
Speaker 1: to do, and particularly school, which I hated. I thought
Speaker 1: school was so slow and uh. And I was not
Speaker 1: going to be a doctor like my dad wanted me
Speaker 1: to be, or a lawyer like my uncle was. I
Speaker 1: was just I wanted to be. Actually, I wanted to
Speaker 1: be an act her. I started because my brothers and
Speaker 1: I we were We were kid actors at the CBC
Speaker 1: when I was eight and they were they were five
Speaker 1: and a half. We started doing television. Went together. Okay.
Speaker 1: One of the great things about this place is it's
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, it's like a little village the
Speaker 1: whole country. Everybody knows everybody. So my my dad's best
Speaker 1: friend was a doctor married to uh, a Balennesian dancer,
Speaker 1: and only in Canada would the hot show on Saturday
Speaker 1: night be Baldesian dancing starring Garbett Roberts and and in as.
Speaker 1: I don't think she called herself style but at the time,
Speaker 1: but she was married to doctor. So anyway, so she said,
Speaker 1: do the kids ever want to come and see the studios.
Speaker 1: And my dad took my brothers, who are redheaded twins,
Speaker 1: identical twins, and he took up and they used to
Speaker 1: dress the same, you know, they like people did with
Speaker 1: twins in the fifties and sixties. They dressed them up
Speaker 1: the same, and and and we were in all singing,
Speaker 1: all dancing family. We were the Jewish Von Trapps of Toronto.
Speaker 1: And so you know, they went to to take a
Speaker 1: tour of the CBC and the producers of the Billy
Speaker 1: O'Connor show. Billy O'Connor was an Irish tenor who had
Speaker 1: the show after the Dance Show on Saturday nights and
Speaker 1: he was the number one variety show in Canada. So
Speaker 1: the producers came walking out of their students. They see
Speaker 1: these two little redheads and they go, oh my god,
Speaker 1: they look just like Billy. They're like miniature versions. They
Speaker 1: don't sing, do they. And my dad goes five, six, seven,
Speaker 1: eight boys breaking I I don't want a girl jock.
Speaker 1: So they got the gig. Then they became the uh
Speaker 1: special guest star on on a Billy O'Connor um Christmas Special.
Speaker 1: And then those guys just turned my dad and say,
Speaker 1: got any more those at home? And that's what that's
Speaker 1: how it happened. You said you were a singing, dancing family.
Speaker 1: Explain that. Okay again, And I don't want to make
Speaker 1: this all about being Jewish, but but I do want
Speaker 1: to say that, don't worry people like people hate you
Speaker 1: anyway for being Jewish. Yeah, I've already been there. I'll
Speaker 1: tell someday. I'll tell you the stories from school. But um, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we there's a lot of song and a
Speaker 1: lot of there's a lot of music involved in in
Speaker 1: religious ceremonies, in in festivals and families getting together every
Speaker 1: Friday night with Shabbat. There's you sing things, you sing everything,
Speaker 1: and so there's always music. But also my dad played
Speaker 1: uh jazz bass in a big band in Canada to
Speaker 1: works way through medical school. And my mom was was
Speaker 1: concert level pianist who was too shy to play in
Speaker 1: public except in front of the family. So we would
Speaker 1: get together. My mom would play, my dad would play,
Speaker 1: and and uh, and we'd sing these you know, sort
Speaker 1: of old fashioned songs altogether as a family, and we'd
Speaker 1: sing in harmonies and all this well isn't a formal thing.
Speaker 1: It was just what we did and when the relatives came.
Speaker 1: Every time the relatives came, my dad would wake us up,
Speaker 1: literally would come, you know, stumbling down the stairs in
Speaker 1: our pjs. We're being the sleep out of our eyes
Speaker 1: and and really complaining what he would say, this moment
Speaker 1: will never come again. That's so okay, alright, so we
Speaker 1: gotta sick. So we would sick three or four songs.
Speaker 1: I would have to do a routine, and then we
Speaker 1: could we would be allowed to go back to bed. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're your parents born in Canada? Yes, and so their
Speaker 1: parents came from the Old Country. Yes, um my my.
Speaker 1: My mom's father was born in Canada, but only just only,
Speaker 1: I mean his family had only just arrived. Her mother
Speaker 1: was born in Russia and um, and came at the
Speaker 1: age of three. Okay, so you're growing up, are you
Speaker 1: a popular kid? Well, you know, I they skipped me
Speaker 1: from grade one to grade three because I was whereas
Speaker 1: as we say in America, from first grade the third grade. Um,
Speaker 1: because I was I was getting the lessons too quickly
Speaker 1: and they didn't think that that year in between was
Speaker 1: going to be um valuable to me. So they moved
Speaker 1: me ahead, thinking they were doing me a favor. That's
Speaker 1: not a favor, because what it meant was I was
Speaker 1: a year younger than everybody all the time. And so
Speaker 1: I hit puberty last you know, I was still I
Speaker 1: had the same experience. I know what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: did you. Yeah, I was a little fat kid. Everybody
Speaker 1: picked on, you know, and and and it was really
Speaker 1: when I learned to play the guitar and saying that, um,
Speaker 1: that I created a popularity for myself by showing up
Speaker 1: at parties and being the kind of tortured artist. You know.
Speaker 1: I tried it on the piano, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: carry a piano from party to party. Um. So you know,
Speaker 1: if I picked up the guitar and um, and the
Speaker 1: girls loved it, and I just thought, well, this is cool.
Speaker 1: So how did you did your parents give you piano lessons?
Speaker 1: Of course we were a Jewish family, had exactly why
Speaker 1: I know, okay? And then how many years did you
Speaker 1: take piano lessons? I started? Uh, I started piano lessons
Speaker 1: at the age of five, So I did I did you? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: There would be three there were six of us at once,
Speaker 1: three on each piano. Oh wow, Oh that's like Dr
Speaker 1: T Williger's you know, did you ever do you ever
Speaker 1: see The five Thousand Fingers of Dr T? With Okay,
Speaker 1: you gotta look this up because it is for anybody
Speaker 1: in the music business, anybody who plays, or anybody who
Speaker 1: always wanted to play. This is a must see movie,
Speaker 1: The five Thousand Fingers of Doctor T. And the bottom
Speaker 1: line is Dr Twilliger is a very is an aggressive
Speaker 1: music teacher, and the kid who is taking lessons from
Speaker 1: him falls asleep at the piano and this is his nightmares,
Speaker 1: very psychedelic and it really a brilliant commentary on so
Speaker 1: many things about music. Anyway, So yes, we took lessons.
Speaker 1: I learned that we learned. Can you read music at
Speaker 1: this point in time? Yes, I can, but I'm not
Speaker 1: a very good reader. I'm I'm a slow reader. I
Speaker 1: can read and I can write, but I'm not like
Speaker 1: I mean that some people can can read fly ship
Speaker 1: and play it right. You know what? I worked with
Speaker 1: Long Long, who is concert pianist um doing um a
Speaker 1: record with him and the two cellos, and we wrote
Speaker 1: a part for him that was so complicated it looked
Speaker 1: like rachmaninof it just was like, as I say, fly
Speaker 1: shit on the page. I sent it to him in
Speaker 1: advance and we could practice and and little did I
Speaker 1: know that he never practices. He's just a lazy bum.
Speaker 1: So he he um, that's not true. He's a genius.
Speaker 1: He's not a lazy bum. He doesn't have to practice.
Speaker 1: He showed up in the studio, put this thing a
Speaker 1: fly ship, up on the piano and just sat there
Speaker 1: and just whipped it out. It was like it was insane.
Speaker 1: I couldn't believe that anybody could say, read that and
Speaker 1: not make a mistake. That's not me. I have to
Speaker 1: take my time. What inspired you to pick up the guitar?
Speaker 1: I told you I needed. I needed to be able
Speaker 1: to sing my songs to girls. You know, when they
Speaker 1: came to my house, I could sing them at the piano.
Speaker 1: So you were writing songs at this point in time, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I was writing or I was picking songs
Speaker 1: from the you know, the the public repertoire that we're
Speaker 1: very um moving. Let's say in a polite way that
Speaker 1: they would they would be motivating of young women to
Speaker 1: to perhaps look at me in a different light. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you were a child actor. You said you were
Speaker 1: not good in school at what point do you say,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll try this music thing. Well, everything in my
Speaker 1: life has actually been a reaction to something else. It's
Speaker 1: it's not that I said to myself, I'm going to
Speaker 1: be in the music business. You know. I did play,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to play. My uncle had a club
Speaker 1: so I could play in the club. Then I got
Speaker 1: together with my cousin Nancy, and we had a little duo.
Speaker 1: We were the Messengers and uh and and we were
Speaker 1: pretty good, except that we lost the high school talent
Speaker 1: show against the band called the Twin Tone four, which
Speaker 1: was the leader of which was Ivan Reitman and and
Speaker 1: and Ivan and I have never forgotten that, you know,
Speaker 1: and I've really never forgiven him for it. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: so you know, so I would do that. I love
Speaker 1: playing on stage. That was really great. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that that was going to be a career on any level.
Speaker 1: I was still trying to get into um acting, I
Speaker 1: was still trying to write movies. I was trying to
Speaker 1: do anything that had to do with with theater. I
Speaker 1: love theater so much and um and that's how I
Speaker 1: got into music business. I was actually doing a play,
Speaker 1: a musical review. I was the script editor, not the
Speaker 1: music guy. The music director of the show was Al McMillan,
Speaker 1: and they decided one day that they wanted a rock
Speaker 1: kay uh score to the show. They wanted this would
Speaker 1: be and and so at that exact same time, Michael Cole,
Speaker 1: who you also know, one of the great promoters of
Speaker 1: all time, who was my teenage buddy. Uh and I
Speaker 1: we co managed a band called Chorus. Now. He thought
Speaker 1: that that meant booking them in clubs, and I thought
Speaker 1: that that meant working on their material. So we were
Speaker 1: both wrong. Neither of us had any idea what a
Speaker 1: manager was. But this was a great start. So we
Speaker 1: we put them. We shoehorned them into this musical review
Speaker 1: and Alan Alan was going through some stuff at the time,
Speaker 1: and and Uh and I loved the man. I just
Speaker 1: thought he was wonderful. He actually came to live with
Speaker 1: us for a while and I just said, listen, I
Speaker 1: got you. I'll take it from here. Let me I'll
Speaker 1: put the material in and I'll work it up with
Speaker 1: a band, and then when you come back, you'll see
Speaker 1: and if it doesn't work, you can redo it whatever
Speaker 1: you'd like. So in the band Icarus, the lead singer
Speaker 1: and writer was a guy named Eddie Schwartz who wrote
Speaker 1: hit me with your best shot, and um and so
Speaker 1: uh you know, and and then we had to go
Speaker 1: find material. So I went and I drove to Ottawa
Speaker 1: and met with Bruce Cockburn and a couple of other
Speaker 1: artists that were up there, and and um. And a
Speaker 1: guy who was helping me find material was a man
Speaker 1: named Adam Mitchell, who had played in a band called
Speaker 1: the Poppers, and he went on to be a fairly
Speaker 1: famous producer in his own right. Um. Anyway, we found
Speaker 1: the music, we did the thing, and it sounded great.
Speaker 1: When Alan came back, he looked at me and he said,
Speaker 1: I want you to meet my partner. He could use
Speaker 1: a guy like you. So I thought, okay, they need
Speaker 1: a manager. So I went for the meeting with Jack Richardson,
Speaker 1: who was Alan's partner in a company called Nimbus nine.
Speaker 1: At the time they were doing uh um, Jack was
Speaker 1: producing the Guests Who and they had the number one
Speaker 1: record in the world an American Woman, which was number
Speaker 1: one everywhere. So I to the office and Jack was
Speaker 1: very nice, very polite, very down to earth, you know,
Speaker 1: fatherly kind of guy, and said, so you know what,
Speaker 1: what what do you want to do? And I said, well,
Speaker 1: I want to be a manager and he said really,
Speaker 1: so what does that? What does that mean? And so
Speaker 1: I explained him how it's working on their material, making
Speaker 1: songs better. He said, you don't want to be a manager,
Speaker 1: he said, you want to be a producer. And that's
Speaker 1: how it all started, just doing a little backfill traditionally
Speaker 1: in a Jewish family, and I would know the children
Speaker 1: have to go to college. So what happened with that? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes you're the windscreen and sometimes you're the bug, right,
Speaker 1: sometimes you're Louisville slugger. But okay, yeah, but you know
Speaker 1: what happened to college was I went. I started. I
Speaker 1: wasn't taking anything useful. It was all sort of you know,
Speaker 1: I was taking Italian and economics how does that work?
Speaker 1: And uh? And philosophy and but there was a drama
Speaker 1: club which I joined, and I convinced the dean of
Speaker 1: the college to give me five thousand dollars in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties seven to buy a film camera and to start
Speaker 1: a film club. The college that I went to was
Speaker 1: the first ever video teaching college in Canada, probably in
Speaker 1: North America. So what that means is they would do lectures. Um,
Speaker 1: they would they would record them, they shoot them for television,
Speaker 1: and then they would be able to play them in
Speaker 1: the lecture halls all across the country. So this was
Speaker 1: a big thing. And uh, the technicians who worked at
Speaker 1: TV part of the college, I got to know them
Speaker 1: all because I started this video film club thing and
Speaker 1: I used to pay them out of the money that
Speaker 1: the dean gave us to stay after school and teach
Speaker 1: us how to edit, how to shoot, how to do
Speaker 1: graphics and all that sort of stuff. So and after
Speaker 1: a while, after about five months, I got so good
Speaker 1: at it that they just said to me, you know,
Speaker 1: when did you just come and work with us? So
Speaker 1: I did, And that was the end of your school career. Yes,
Speaker 1: I left. I after as a student became staff. And uh,
Speaker 1: didn't you also get married at a very young age? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I got married at seventeen. Um, we we got pregnant
Speaker 1: at when I was just sixteen and she was seventeen,
Speaker 1: and then we had to get married. So we got
Speaker 1: married at seventeen. And when I say we had to
Speaker 1: get married, we did decide. We did decide to do it.
Speaker 1: There was the option offered to us, particularly by um
Speaker 1: Marlene's mom. You know that, you know, we could think
Speaker 1: about terminating, but but we couldn't think about terminating. So
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, maybe it's just child childhood idealism. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but I know that if that had never happened,
Speaker 1: I'm I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I
Speaker 1: don't know what I'd be, but it wouldn't be this
Speaker 1: because all of that forced me to, um try to
Speaker 1: find a way to make a living. And that's a
Speaker 1: that's an amazing motivator. You know when when you've got
Speaker 1: a wife and a child and you've got to figure
Speaker 1: out how to feed him, Uh, you start doing things
Speaker 1: you never thought you you or you may never have
Speaker 1: thought you would do. I sold encyclopedias. I became friends
Speaker 1: with Buddy Abrams, who was the greatest encyclopedia salesman in history.
Speaker 1: He was a guy who started Encyclopedia Britannica door to door.
Speaker 1: He didn't start the encyclopedia, he started the door to
Speaker 1: door part, and as the guy who started it, he
Speaker 1: got an override on every set of Encyclopedia Britannic as
Speaker 1: that sold in the world. Now, being from a Jewish family.
Speaker 1: You guys had one, and you probably had an set
Speaker 1: of the Americans Encyclopedia and the Great Books of the
Speaker 1: Western World. Right, these were all you know. We were
Speaker 1: suckers for anything that had to do with knowledge and culture.
Speaker 1: Buddy Abrams became my friend, and he became my friend
Speaker 1: because he was my dad's patient and he loved my dad,
Speaker 1: but he really loved me. He was He gave me
Speaker 1: the other great lesson of my life. When we were
Speaker 1: playing chess, which he liked to do. I was sort
Speaker 1: of saying, I don't know what I'm gonna do when
Speaker 1: I grow up. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time.
Speaker 1: I said, I don't really know what I want to do.
Speaker 1: And he said, well, let me tell you, some kid,
Speaker 1: no one with your education, your looks, and your background
Speaker 1: will ever starve past that. He got nothing to be
Speaker 1: afraid of. And I was like, WHOA, that's heavy ship.
Speaker 1: But you know what, He's right, I'm never gonna starve.
Speaker 1: I'm smart. I'm going to figure out a way. I
Speaker 1: transition from being a naturally unsure teenager, especially being the
Speaker 1: young one, the fat one, the the other one. All
Speaker 1: the time I was unsure, I was never the captain
Speaker 1: of the hockey team. I was never that guy, so
Speaker 1: I was unsure of where I would fit in. But
Speaker 1: once I assimilated that, it changed my approach and then
Speaker 1: I became like, I don't I don't have to worry.
Speaker 1: I'll try this one. This could work, and if that doesn't,
Speaker 1: I'll try that one. And so it went. Now. Buddy
Speaker 1: Abrahams was married to a woman from Hawaii named Momolani Reeves,
Speaker 1: who had been married to a half Chinese, half American guy.
Speaker 1: She was Hawaiian and also herself half Chinese. She had
Speaker 1: two sons, Sammy and Victor, who were like my heroes.
Speaker 1: They were in their twenties. They were like sumo wrestlers,
Speaker 1: big guys, and they smoked dope. I've never seen anyone
Speaker 1: smoked dope. It was so cool. But they were Hawaiian,
Speaker 1: you know, and they smoked dope and they looked like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they looked like foo manshoe guys and sumo wrestler bodies.
Speaker 1: Sammy moved to Beirut, where he met a model, tall, beautiful,
Speaker 1: blonde um English woman um named Patricia, but she called
Speaker 1: herself Patrick and they got married and they had a baby.
Speaker 1: Uh that Momy and Buddy had never met. Buddy invited
Speaker 1: me down to their apartment in in uh Fort Lee,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, right across the river from New York one weekend,
Speaker 1: and that's when Sammy and Patrick came home with their baby, Kiano.
Speaker 1: And that's when I met Kiana Yeves. Wow, this is
Speaker 1: really yeah, that's a good story. And they moved across
Speaker 1: the street from my school. You know, we were so
Speaker 1: close as families. They moved across the street from my
Speaker 1: studio in Toronto, where I was now a partner in
Speaker 1: Nimbus nine, and uh and Alice Cooper used to stay
Speaker 1: there and actually did babysit Keanu Reeves, as he claims
Speaker 1: very often. Okay, how long did you sell encyclopedias for I? Actually, Uh,
Speaker 1: I didn't do very well at Encyclopedia, so I didn't
Speaker 1: last very long. It was like weeks, seriously, like I
Speaker 1: was terrible and and and I was and then I
Speaker 1: tried magazines. I was just terrible. And the reason I
Speaker 1: was terrible was because I felt really sorry for the
Speaker 1: person on the other side of the door. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to do anything to hurt them, and I could
Speaker 1: see they couldn't really afford to do what I wanted
Speaker 1: them to do, so I just stepped away. Okay, so
Speaker 1: what was paying the bills when you were young with
Speaker 1: a child? I was writing, uh, sketch material for a
Speaker 1: show on CBC called Sunday Morning, the producer of which
Speaker 1: and on to do this musical review and hired me.
Speaker 1: And that's how I got that gig. So I was
Speaker 1: doing some comedy writing, and I was playing for Peanuts,
Speaker 1: you know, in in different little clubs and things. And
Speaker 1: we were living you and your bride or we were
Speaker 1: still living at my parents house because we could not
Speaker 1: afford to move out. And when do you ultimately move
Speaker 1: out of your parents house? Um? And we had a roommate,
Speaker 1: by the way, we we had to have a roommate
Speaker 1: who was my my buddy from from college, who who
Speaker 1: did the video club with me and all that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. Um, so he be. It was a three
Speaker 1: bedroom apartment. He got the third bedroom and we moved
Speaker 1: there when David was too. So I was nineteen and
Speaker 1: I was starting to make some money. Rick and I.
Speaker 1: Rick and I by that time, we were staff writers
Speaker 1: for the CBC. We were writing a show called How's
Speaker 1: This for a great title? Good company, Colon. It's our stuff.
Speaker 1: That took a genius to come up with. I just
Speaker 1: got Oh my god, and and but that show. The
Speaker 1: lead actor on that show, singer, actor, singer, dancer, etcetera,
Speaker 1: was Alan Thick, who became a lifelong friend of mine
Speaker 1: and and the director of the show went on to
Speaker 1: do the Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, Tennessee. And that
Speaker 1: was my first trip to Nashville was to go visit him.
Speaker 1: But that's a long story, but a good one anyway.
Speaker 1: So we were writing this series and and uh, we
Speaker 1: were comedy writers. We were we were part of a
Speaker 1: team of about ten writers, I want to say, and uh,
Speaker 1: and we were so unruly. This is the CBC. These
Speaker 1: are people come to work in a suit and tie,
Speaker 1: you know, and there and and they come in at
Speaker 1: nine in the morning and they go home at six.
Speaker 1: It's insane. So Rick and I were so crazy, and
Speaker 1: most of the time on psychedelics of one sort or another.
Speaker 1: So we were. We were very unruly, to the extent
Speaker 1: that the guy across the hall from our office named
Speaker 1: Alex Trebec complained about us and had us removed. So
Speaker 1: that we were we were we were the only comedy
Speaker 1: writing team that had to work after hours. We could
Speaker 1: only come in after six pm. Unbelievable. It was great.
Speaker 1: I loved it. How old were you when you had
Speaker 1: that faithful meeting with Jack Richardson? UM? I had. I
Speaker 1: had just turned twenty. The stories the story had been
Speaker 1: that I was nineteen, and I believed that for the
Speaker 1: longest onie until I went back and looked at the
Speaker 1: dates and I was like, no, no, no, that's not possible.
Speaker 1: So I was twenty. Okay, So he tells your son,
Speaker 1: you need to be a producer. What's the step after that? Okay?
Speaker 1: So the next step was um he I you know,
Speaker 1: he said you want to be a producer, and I
Speaker 1: was like, you're gonna have to explain that, sir. So
Speaker 1: I basically followed him around and he gave me UM
Speaker 1: one on one classes and what it meant to be.
Speaker 1: He put you on the payroll. Yes, he hired me,
Speaker 1: But it wasn't that I wasn't doing anything because I
Speaker 1: was very good at working on material. I was really
Speaker 1: good at songs and uh and and in those days
Speaker 1: not nearly smart enough to know that, um, I should
Speaker 1: have been a co writer on the stuff I worked on.
Speaker 1: But you know, it doesn't matter. It was a fantastic
Speaker 1: education and I got to work with so many different
Speaker 1: kinds of people. So I would do Jack's pre production.
Speaker 1: If there was a band he was working with, he
Speaker 1: would send me ahead of time. I picked the songs
Speaker 1: and we'd work on the arrangements and then we would
Speaker 1: go into the studio with Jack and he would be
Speaker 1: the guy uh in charge of recording, or he would
Speaker 1: come like the last day of rehearsals or something like that. Also,
Speaker 1: Nimbus also had a partner named Ben McPeek who did
Speaker 1: UH jingles and and UH commercials for a living. So
Speaker 1: I used to do sessions for him to like they
Speaker 1: would have me. Um. I got to do UH sound
Speaker 1: alike UH material for Coca Cola commercials. Said Okay, this week,
Speaker 1: we want a Joe Cocker song. So we would come
Speaker 1: up with a way of doing it's the real thing,
Speaker 1: you know, Joe Cocker style. And that was a great
Speaker 1: training ground too. So you said you followed and took
Speaker 1: lessons from Jack. Yeah, So we had we had a
Speaker 1: flight all these places, right, We flew to like I mean,
Speaker 1: we worked in Munsey, Indiana, believe it or not, and
Speaker 1: we had a flight up to Chicago and then and
Speaker 1: then take a card or the Midwest or something, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I had a lot of hours with Jack. And
Speaker 1: during that time I had a little notebook and I
Speaker 1: just kept asking questions. You know that last session we
Speaker 1: did you put you put this microphone on the on
Speaker 1: the tom toms and I didn't see you do that before.
Speaker 1: Why did you do that? And then he would explain
Speaker 1: it to me and literally he he went right back
Speaker 1: to basics, including physics and help me with that. And
Speaker 1: then at a certain point, about three or three months
Speaker 1: or so in he said, you know what, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: send you to school. So he paid for me to
Speaker 1: go to the Eastman School of Music to a uh
Speaker 1: two week um production of course, being run by Phil
Speaker 1: Ramone and David Green in Rochester. This was in Rochester,
Speaker 1: New York. It's where I had my first bag of burgers.
Speaker 1: I never I didn't know such a thing existed. You know,
Speaker 1: white Castle And if anybody doesn't know about bags of burgers,
Speaker 1: you should go to your nearest white Castle and not
Speaker 1: have them. So yeah, so I went. I went to Rochester,
Speaker 1: New York, and and uh, Phil and David just kind
Speaker 1: of they liked me and they took me under their wing.
Speaker 1: You know, I was a quick study. I got what
Speaker 1: what it was they were talking about, and I was useful.
Speaker 1: So I was slave labor because not only was Phil teaching,
Speaker 1: of course, but he was also using us as slave
Speaker 1: labor to help him to record a live album with
Speaker 1: the Paul Uh Paul Winter Consort. So so you know,
Speaker 1: I was like an assistant engineer um at a time
Speaker 1: when um, you know, people like me weren't getting weren't
Speaker 1: getting paid, so um, so you know that, and that
Speaker 1: was an amazing two weeks because I didn't sleep. They
Speaker 1: had a console then those days that we were working
Speaker 1: in a track so that a console and eight track
Speaker 1: machine and tapes of various well known or or or
Speaker 1: you know, almost well known bands that you could put
Speaker 1: on and you could sit at the console and you
Speaker 1: could mix, which is an amazing way to learn, Like
Speaker 1: the best way if you want to learn how to
Speaker 1: make a record, start by learning how to mix a record,
Speaker 1: because once you start putting bits and pieces together, you
Speaker 1: can see where the issues are with the recording that
Speaker 1: should have been attended to, that may not have been
Speaker 1: attended to because people just didn't know better. So, um,
Speaker 1: I learned a tremendously like those two weeks for like
Speaker 1: two years. Okay, just to stop for a second. Uh.
Speaker 1: Back in that era, producers and engineers were very different,
Speaker 1: whereas once we started hitting the mid seventies and lads,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people engineers who said they
Speaker 1: were producers. Where certainly you come from the school where
Speaker 1: you can work with the material, But to what degree
Speaker 1: did you have or get engineering chops? Oh? I had
Speaker 1: to have them. I mean, um, to what degree? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm never the I'm never the smartest guy
Speaker 1: in the room full of engineers that you know, not
Speaker 1: by a long shot. I just know how stuff works
Speaker 1: sort of intuitively and instinctively. But a lot of the
Speaker 1: time it was just a simple matter that I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep and other people had to, you know. It was
Speaker 1: just like I can't stop, you know. I would sit
Speaker 1: at the console after they left. I think that says
Speaker 1: with with Phil and David. Being able to sit at
Speaker 1: that console and actually mix somebody else's stuff with no
Speaker 1: one else around like that was an amazing experience for
Speaker 1: confidence building. You get back to Toronto after the two weeks,
Speaker 1: I get back to Toronto, and very shortly thereafter, Chef
Speaker 1: Gordon walks into the offices of Nimbus time because he
Speaker 1: wants that guess who sound for Alice Cooper, which and
Speaker 1: Alice Cooper, you know, one of the most hated bands
Speaker 1: in the world at the time. And and I'm just
Speaker 1: so grateful that he did, because, you know, he he
Speaker 1: wanted Jack to produce. And when Jack looked at the
Speaker 1: pictures of these guys, these five creatures of indeterminate gender
Speaker 1: and and uh, you know something way out of his
Speaker 1: very middle of the road will wheelhouse, he just he
Speaker 1: didn't really want to have anything to do with him.
Speaker 1: So he actually sent me to New York City to
Speaker 1: see the man. He said to Chef, being the polite
Speaker 1: Canadian that he is, and that that I still am
Speaker 1: to a much lesser extent um. He you know, he said,
Speaker 1: he said, well, he didn't just say no. He said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I'll send the kid. If the
Speaker 1: kid likes the band, then I'll come and see the band.
Speaker 1: And then Chef said that's great, and he left it.
Speaker 1: Then Jacqueline Community said get rid of them. So they
Speaker 1: sent me to New York to get rid of to
Speaker 1: sign somebody else and get rid of Alice Cooper. And
Speaker 1: it was exactly the opposite. The other person that I
Speaker 1: went to see didn't move me. I didn't see it.
Speaker 1: But going into Max's Kansas City on September eight in
Speaker 1: following the laser beams out of the subway station at
Speaker 1: Houston and and and going around the corner and up
Speaker 1: the stairway into Maxi's Kansas City into a sea of
Speaker 1: spandex and spider eyes, into a world of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: jet black hair, black lipstick, black finger nails, and and
Speaker 1: and hugely high boost. They were like these wraiths, these
Speaker 1: zombies that were floating across the floor. Nobody spoke. They
Speaker 1: just sort of had, you know, they had a telepathic
Speaker 1: language among them. And they all knew when I entered
Speaker 1: the room that there was a hippie in their midst.
Speaker 1: And this was not this would not do, you know.
Speaker 1: But anyway, they put me at the front table and
Speaker 1: I watched the show. It was it was beyond inspiring
Speaker 1: is a you know, an overworked word, but it was
Speaker 1: inspiring to me because I saw things there that I
Speaker 1: had never seen done on a stage. I'd never seen
Speaker 1: props and lights and sets being used in a rock
Speaker 1: and roll context like that, in particularly where everybody around
Speaker 1: was sort of so wraith like, and and yet they
Speaker 1: all knew the words, and these were songs that had
Speaker 1: never been released. So the whole thing was like it
Speaker 1: just knocked my socks off and I want. I went
Speaker 1: running up to the dressing room and with no authority whatsoever,
Speaker 1: committed Nimus nine to producing the next Alice Cooper album.
Speaker 1: And then when I got back to my hotel, I
Speaker 1: didn't sleep at all because I knew that this was
Speaker 1: this was not going to be met with good favor.
Speaker 1: And so I called Alan McMillan first thing in the morning,
Speaker 1: and he just goes, get on the first plane back,
Speaker 1: you get back. So I did, and I came running
Speaker 1: into the building basically begging for my life. And the
Speaker 1: first words out of my mouth you don't understand, I
Speaker 1: said to Jack Richardson, of all people, you don't understand.
Speaker 1: This was not rock and roll. There were no T shirts,
Speaker 1: there were no jeans. They had set some props and
Speaker 1: lights and stuff, and everybody do the words in spiderizing
Speaker 1: spandex and everybody looked the same, and it was amazing,
Speaker 1: and I finally got to the end and I just said,
Speaker 1: let this wasn't rock and roll, Jack, this is the
Speaker 1: beginning of a cultural movement. We have to do it.
Speaker 1: And Jack said, uh, enough already said if you like
Speaker 1: it so much, you do it. And that stopped me
Speaker 1: in my tracks. That was like, you know, I just
Speaker 1: kind of looked at him and said excuse me, and
Speaker 1: he's you know, or in Canadian that would have been
Speaker 1: sorry and uh and uh, and Jack said, yeah, you
Speaker 1: do it. I'm not doing it. So then I had
Speaker 1: to walk up you know that, I had to take
Speaker 1: a walk up the street just to figure out, like
Speaker 1: did I dare? Like, like, this is real, this is like,
Speaker 1: this is not being an advanced man for the real guy.
Speaker 1: This is he's He's gonna make me the real guy.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if I can do that. And
Speaker 1: then I got halfway down the block and realized that
Speaker 1: nobody with my brains and my looks and blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and I just thought, what have I got to lose?
Speaker 1: This is great. This is the greatest opportunity anyone's ever
Speaker 1: given me. So I came back into the building and
Speaker 1: I went, I'll do it. You'll be proud. So what
Speaker 1: were the next steps. Well, the next steps were that
Speaker 1: I went and rehearsed with them in Pontiac, Michigan. There's
Speaker 1: lots of wonderful stories and you'll read all about it
Speaker 1: in my new book entitled No I don't have a book,
Speaker 1: but when I do have a book, you'll read all
Speaker 1: about it. It was a great leap forward from the
Speaker 1: previous two albums. Okay, they had eighteen, had Caught in
Speaker 1: a Dream, etcetera. How did you make that great leap
Speaker 1: forward in the material? Well, first of all, they that
Speaker 1: material was already written when I came Lucky me. It
Speaker 1: was at a moment where they had had two albums
Speaker 1: to sort of find their way, and then they started
Speaker 1: to write songs, like actual songs, and some of them
Speaker 1: were really good. We had a lot of trash too,
Speaker 1: you know, there was a lot of material that that
Speaker 1: got rejected. But that's the way of every every project
Speaker 1: you ever do. You know, you may go through hundreds
Speaker 1: of bits and pieces to find the ones that you
Speaker 1: really really want to spend time on. So those songs
Speaker 1: once you just mentioned eighteen isn't My Body um, which
Speaker 1: was for me, that was the beginning of everything and
Speaker 1: that and the first song that we worked on, and
Speaker 1: UH and Black ju To they'd already had those, They
Speaker 1: just played them differently they played them. What happened at
Speaker 1: the time was they like they didn't know what you
Speaker 1: had to do to get a song on the radio.
Speaker 1: Neither did I. Honestly, I just did, you know. I
Speaker 1: just did some quick wood shedding, and I had a
Speaker 1: few notes, you know, like Jack would say, well, you
Speaker 1: gotta be under three minutes to thirty is better. So
Speaker 1: I knew stuff like that, right, But I also knew
Speaker 1: that when listening to them play, you know, they'd lose
Speaker 1: me for like three minutes in the middle of a song,
Speaker 1: and then they'd come back and it would be different.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the same as the beginning. And and everybody
Speaker 1: was playing lead all the time. So my job was
Speaker 1: to find the essence of the song, like what you know,
Speaker 1: where's the power? There's always a riff. There's always a
Speaker 1: great riff at the center of an Alice Cooper song,
Speaker 1: whether it's schools Out or whether it's I'm eighteen and
Speaker 1: so where's that? And uh? And what are we singing?
Speaker 1: And what are we singing about? I was too stupid
Speaker 1: to know that words didn't matter. I thought they did,
Speaker 1: and actually turned out I was right. So that's why
Speaker 1: American Woman was such a big hit. It was just
Speaker 1: that phrase, American Woman. So I was really focusing on
Speaker 1: the melody, the sort of central riff and um and
Speaker 1: the rhythm, and and I saw those as three separate
Speaker 1: tracks that this song would run on at the same time,
Speaker 1: and then they had to be coordinated and it had
Speaker 1: to work. They each had to work with the other
Speaker 1: so it would be powerful. And basically what I learned
Speaker 1: from Tchaikovsky is what I applied to Alice Cooper. It's true.
Speaker 1: I know I haven't said that out loud before. It's true. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you you've talked previously in this UH podcast about
Speaker 1: helping write the songs. Did you help write the songs?
Speaker 1: Would you say? Or you were just helping arrange them?
Speaker 1: You know, I did help write the songs that at
Speaker 1: that time, but that considered to be production or you know,
Speaker 1: by anybody, But you know, even me, I thought that
Speaker 1: was production. I thought, okay, so, how how much pre
Speaker 1: production on that first Alice Cooper album? You did? Love
Speaker 1: it to death? And how much time did it take?
Speaker 1: To actually record it. The pre production period was probably
Speaker 1: an aggregate around um, four weeks, three or four weeks,
Speaker 1: because we were slow and we were all just learning
Speaker 1: our craft, right, so it took me a little a
Speaker 1: little while. That's just this begs the question, you do
Speaker 1: you have to convince Chep and Coope that you could
Speaker 1: do it instead of Jack. Well, they kept saying where's Jack,
Speaker 1: Where's Jack? And uh, and I kept saying He's coming,
Speaker 1: He's He's He's coming, and I'm and and uh and
Speaker 1: he'll he'll love this. And he did come. He came
Speaker 1: for the recording sessions. He was there in the studio
Speaker 1: and very much a presence and uh, but um, instead
Speaker 1: of taking over the console and stepping up to the
Speaker 1: front and elbowing me to the back uh couch like
Speaker 1: like we were doing before, he kicked me forward. And
Speaker 1: he would basically he would like kick me in the ass,
Speaker 1: like literally, I have to feel his foot when I
Speaker 1: was about to do something really stupid, or if I'd
Speaker 1: done something that was already really stupid. And then we
Speaker 1: you know, we had this engineer too, called Brian Christian,
Speaker 1: who was like this this big muscle bound southside Chicago guy,
Speaker 1: looked like a hitman for the Mob, and he talked
Speaker 1: like one too, And but he was a great engineer.
Speaker 1: He was a Union engineer. This was a Union house,
Speaker 1: so he had to be really careful, and once in
Speaker 1: a while I would touch the console, he would slap
Speaker 1: my hand literally. So on those first four songs, we
Speaker 1: did four songs to start because Warner Brothers was not
Speaker 1: convinced that this team could do this, and they didn't
Speaker 1: know me from Adam, and even though they got Jack richardson,
Speaker 1: they weren't really sure what that meant. But then they
Speaker 1: heard the first four songs and then we got that
Speaker 1: green light for the rest of the album. And and
Speaker 1: a little bit of time passed between those first four
Speaker 1: songs and coming back to the studio. By each time,
Speaker 1: I was feeling like, you know, my ideas are not valueless.
Speaker 1: I think I think we're onto something here. So I
Speaker 1: started being more aggressive, not with the band, but with
Speaker 1: with Brian and and Jackson. One time Brian slapped my hand.
Speaker 1: Get your fucking hand off, my counsel, and I said,
Speaker 1: it's a console, asshole, And I'm the producer on this project.
Speaker 1: If I want to touch the console, I'm gonna touch
Speaker 1: the console and he laughed and it just gave me
Speaker 1: this the biggest bear hug of my life. And uh,
Speaker 1: and I was in okay, now I'm in the club,
Speaker 1: and then it was okay to touch stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: So the the actual recording, the question about the recording,
Speaker 1: It took us in uh, in total, three weeks to
Speaker 1: record an eighteen hours to mix eight hours non stuff.
Speaker 1: That's a difference. Okay, the record is done. Do you
Speaker 1: think you have something? Oh? Yeah, I listen, what do
Speaker 1: I know? This is my first album? Right, I loved
Speaker 1: you know, I was just in love with myself. I
Speaker 1: made it. I survived for openers and and and secondly,
Speaker 1: you know, like some of the songs were stuck in
Speaker 1: my head. And also some professional people who do that
Speaker 1: for a living looked at me and said that's really good.
Speaker 1: And that all of that combination of stuff made me
Speaker 1: feel like a you know, like you know this this
Speaker 1: is this is good, this is gonna work. And then
Speaker 1: and then and then you know, I'm a team gets
Speaker 1: broken out of out of Windsor, Ontario and c KLW.
Speaker 1: The big a Rosalie Trombley, who was the most important
Speaker 1: music music director in radio in North America, believe it
Speaker 1: or not, because coming out of Winstor, Ontario, they beamed
Speaker 1: into the Detroit Metroplex. They had a massive audience and
Speaker 1: uh and Alice Cooper's a Detroit band, and shep was
Speaker 1: really smart and sent a limousine across the border to
Speaker 1: go pick Tim her son who later worked for me
Speaker 1: by the way when grew up. But that's another story.
Speaker 1: So he went and picked him up by limousine from
Speaker 1: school and brought him home and gave him the single
Speaker 1: to give his mom and Tim and Tim and his
Speaker 1: sister played it and they fell in love with it.
Speaker 1: They were the ones who said, Mom, you gotta play
Speaker 1: this record. And that's how it happened. Just from that
Speaker 1: point on, we were golden. Okay, Between Love It to
Speaker 1: Death and Killer Did, what did you work on? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: I had a couple of things. I mean, right after
Speaker 1: Love It to Death, Um, I I did a New
Speaker 1: York record um that nobody ever heard and probably never
Speaker 1: will for an artist called David MQ. It was a
Speaker 1: great experience because it was my first time working with
Speaker 1: orchestra in his studio and and all session players, which
Speaker 1: really opened my eyes. UM. And I did that with
Speaker 1: David Green, who was again a wonderful mentor and teacher.
Speaker 1: But the record was terrible. And then I did Then
Speaker 1: I did a record with um uh, Mitch Rider in
Speaker 1: a band called Detroit out of Detroit. They loved their manager,
Speaker 1: Barry Kramer, who was also the publisher of Cream magazine.
Speaker 1: Um founder and publisher of Cream Magazine. He loved the
Speaker 1: sound of that Alice Cooper record, and he was the
Speaker 1: one who decided, you know, for his band for for
Speaker 1: for Billy it's his real name, Billy Levis, Mitch Rider
Speaker 1: and the band Detroit. They wanted me, so they hired me.
Speaker 1: And part of what what I did on that record
Speaker 1: was a cover of a lou Reid song called rock
Speaker 1: and Roll? Was that? Was that your idea or their idea?
Speaker 1: The song itself was I I think, I think, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know how we you know, I think we
Speaker 1: sat in a circle and somebody, you know, we picked
Speaker 1: all the material because Billy was not a writer, right,
Speaker 1: we had one or two Uh, we didn't have that
Speaker 1: many originals, so we were doing a lot of cover stuff.
Speaker 1: Um wasn't my idea? Probably not because because at that
Speaker 1: time I wasn't really that it wasn't much of a
Speaker 1: velvet fan. And that's why now, and I wasn't a
Speaker 1: velvets fan. I didn't. I didn't really know them. Um.
Speaker 1: I was still just trying to find my way out
Speaker 1: of the bulrushes. Man. I was like, I was a
Speaker 1: folky for you know, it's like five minutes ago I
Speaker 1: was playing you know, Coomba, Oh my lord, now here
Speaker 1: I am, you know, saying you know, bodies need their rest,
Speaker 1: you know. So anyway, you know, we did this thing,
Speaker 1: and and we had just hired Steve Hunter. In fact,
Speaker 1: the band picked him up out of a club in Decatur,
Speaker 1: Illinois while they were doing touring and brought him back
Speaker 1: to Detroit and just announced him to me. They go,
Speaker 1: by the way, this is our new guitar player. And
Speaker 1: this he was just like ratty looking little guy with
Speaker 1: coke bottled glasses and and an s G and a
Speaker 1: teeny little lamp. And he kind of sat in the corner,
Speaker 1: was very very shy, that kind of played on his
Speaker 1: own and all that stuff. And one day in the
Speaker 1: in the middle of rehearsal, I was just I just thought, okay, this,
Speaker 1: you know, we gotta do something about this. So I
Speaker 1: I stopped the rearsul we had we had a double
Speaker 1: stack of marshals that one of the other guys used,
Speaker 1: and we hooked him up together, and we brought Steve
Speaker 1: to the middle of the room and I plugged him
Speaker 1: into the double stack of marshals. And when we took it,
Speaker 1: when we went from standby just on, the hum alone
Speaker 1: was louder than the band had been. And and Steve
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, and then he started to
Speaker 1: play that. You know, there's nothing quite like having that
Speaker 1: piece of wood and metal in your hand and being
Speaker 1: able to make that much noise from it and having
Speaker 1: such power, you know, the sustain alone, It was just
Speaker 1: it changed his life. That moment changed his life. He
Speaker 1: started playing like Hendrix. It was good enough. You know
Speaker 1: this He didn't just learn at that moment. He had
Speaker 1: always known it, but he couldn't. He didn't have the
Speaker 1: confidence to step out and do it. And then when
Speaker 1: he heard that sound, it just moved him so much.
Speaker 1: And everybody from Cream magazine, everybody that was in that
Speaker 1: whole building, including Dave marsha might be one of the
Speaker 1: sourest people in music. Dave marsh came running in and
Speaker 1: went Wow, that's amazing about Steve Hunter. So he was
Speaker 1: our guy. So when we came to a rock and
Speaker 1: roll I needed a riff. That's what I had learned.
Speaker 1: Good songs had a riff. I needed a good riff,
Speaker 1: and Steve Hunter came up with Da Da Da Da
Speaker 1: Da Da Da Da Da Da Da da and and
Speaker 1: so we cut the whole song. We did a fairly
Speaker 1: good job of it, though I really screwed up the
Speaker 1: recording of the of the snare drum, which bothers me
Speaker 1: to this day. Um, but I'm just about to make
Speaker 1: up for it. Actually, I I just uh stopped mixing
Speaker 1: rock and roll my new version to do this podcast.
Speaker 1: That's true. It's the truth, and Steve's on it and
Speaker 1: Joe Bonamassa. What a team. Oh my god, they're so good. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So so we cut this thing and it came out
Speaker 1: and apparently, um, that was the best cover of any
Speaker 1: of his songs that lou had ever heard. And that's
Speaker 1: how I got to work with Lou REI. Okay, but
Speaker 1: Berlin came out in seventy three and Killer came out
Speaker 1: at the end of seventy one, so this was so
Speaker 1: you you know, and me. I think, actually we may
Speaker 1: have done Killer before we did before I did Detroit,
Speaker 1: the Detroit album. Okay, so let's go back. Let's go
Speaker 1: back to Killer. All I know about Killer was Alice
Speaker 1: Cooper was a joke. And I read this unbelievable review
Speaker 1: boxed off in Rolling Stone by Lester It was it
Speaker 1: was a tragic waste of plastic? Right, was that the one? No? No,
Speaker 1: this was the one that he said, this is unbelievable. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: really I had to look it up. He went on
Speaker 1: or not, and I literally this. You know, people say
Speaker 1: they bought albums based on the cover. I never did that.
Speaker 1: I did, but but the review was so amazing that
Speaker 1: I didn't know whether it was a joker real. So
Speaker 1: I had to buy the album. You Dropped the Needle
Speaker 1: and first heard of My Wheels, the sound and the
Speaker 1: humor involved, and then it went into Be My Lover
Speaker 1: and ultimately Halo of Flies. It was like, unbelievable. So
Speaker 1: it tell us about the creation of that record. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that what what that record really did was
Speaker 1: it it um uh. It incorporated their actual true personalities.
Speaker 1: Like the first one, we were trying to be something,
Speaker 1: we were trying to have a hit record, and we
Speaker 1: were trying to play by the rules, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Although there were certain things that we did where, you know,
Speaker 1: we just weren't going to We just weren't, you know,
Speaker 1: no matter. You know, people said, black Juju, you can't
Speaker 1: put that on a record, and we were just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are because it's great and we love it, so
Speaker 1: it's going. But um, when it came time to kill Her,
Speaker 1: it was more to do killer. It was more about, um,
Speaker 1: the stuff that we hadn't been able to do that
Speaker 1: if we could figure out a way to do it
Speaker 1: so that it made a good record. But it's still
Speaker 1: had the sense of humor, it's still had the theatricality,
Speaker 1: it's still had these different characters that Alice would play
Speaker 1: on stage that we're frowned upon by normal record makers. Right,
Speaker 1: So so this gave it, you know, we had a
Speaker 1: broader palette and and and we had leeway, we had
Speaker 1: license because we had a successful album just behind us.
Speaker 1: This was only nine months later that we that this
Speaker 1: thing came out, So so we were already we were
Speaker 1: riding a wave and people were listening, and that allowed
Speaker 1: us to do some things that we had never done before,
Speaker 1: allowed me to start using orchestral instruments that I actually
Speaker 1: wrote the parts for. And honest to god, I didn't
Speaker 1: even know the range of the cello before. I had
Speaker 1: to call Alan McMillan at the office and go, Alan, like,
Speaker 1: what's the low note of a cello? So that so
Speaker 1: I can figure out what to write, you know, and
Speaker 1: and and and I wrote this, you know, the French
Speaker 1: horn part uh for um Halo of Flies. I think
Speaker 1: it was, but I may be wrong which song it is.
Speaker 1: And but there were two great French horn players, one
Speaker 1: of which was Dale Clevinger, who was the principal horn
Speaker 1: for the Chicago Sympathy. And here he is in the
Speaker 1: studio with Alice Cooper, and this kid, this hippie from
Speaker 1: Canada who doesn't know his asked from his elbow, and
Speaker 1: he looked at the chart, and he looked at me
Speaker 1: and he said, I don't think that's what you really
Speaker 1: want me to play. And I said, well, uh, what
Speaker 1: do you think I wanted to play? And he did
Speaker 1: some corrections of accidentals and things that you know that
Speaker 1: I got wrong, and and and then he played it
Speaker 1: and I learned right that moment you know what, you know,
Speaker 1: the power notes for the French horn and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: all of which goes into the memory bank, all of
Speaker 1: which at some point in your life becomes useful. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's go back to the Lou Reed story. So
Speaker 1: Lou here's the trans version of rock and roll. It's
Speaker 1: the favorite cover he has of his material. So he
Speaker 1: tracks you, Yeah, he tracks me. They tracked me down
Speaker 1: um uh Dennis Katz, who was his manager at the time,
Speaker 1: found me in Toronto and they invited me to come
Speaker 1: to uh Massey Hall to see who played live the
Speaker 1: opening act that night. It was a band called Genesis.
Speaker 1: And I had become friends with the number of the
Speaker 1: DJs at CHUM FM, which was like our this was
Speaker 1: our FM er in Toronto, you know, in those days
Speaker 1: it was experimental radio. They played, the DJs played what
Speaker 1: they wanted to play, and they found things. They went
Speaker 1: to record stores and bought something at four o'clock in
Speaker 1: the afternoon and it was on the air by ten
Speaker 1: o'clock at night. So they've been playing Genesis and and
Speaker 1: I was very impressed with just the complexity of it,
Speaker 1: the musicianship, everything about it, the the sound of and
Speaker 1: the sound of of the lead vocal So I wanted
Speaker 1: to go see this band. So I said to Dennis,
Speaker 1: look at you know, if you mind, I'd like to
Speaker 1: get there in time for the opening act. He said, no,
Speaker 1: no problem. So we went and we saw a Genesis
Speaker 1: and by the time Peter Gabriel rose up on an
Speaker 1: elevator from beneath the stage with a flower on his head,
Speaker 1: and he'd already sung um Watcher and a couple of
Speaker 1: other things like by that. By that time, I was
Speaker 1: just like beyond mesmerized. My jaw was in my lap
Speaker 1: and it was everything I could do to not just
Speaker 1: rhapsodized to the to the manager of the guy I'm
Speaker 1: really supposed to be seeing about this other band. So
Speaker 1: I was just trying to be careful and you know,
Speaker 1: to keep it under control. And then Louis came out
Speaker 1: and that was another animal altogether. The he would animal
Speaker 1: is a good term. He was like a feral creature.
Speaker 1: He owned that stage. He was he was dangerous, he
Speaker 1: was he was scary, you know, and and uh and
Speaker 1: and and at the same time, he seemed to be
Speaker 1: completely unconcerned with the audience in front of him. He
Speaker 1: didn't give a ship whether people were clapping not clapping.
Speaker 1: He was just in his show. So when it was over,
Speaker 1: I filed it away and I said, I am honored
Speaker 1: to work with lou Reid. Thank you, Dennis. And to myself,
Speaker 1: I said, but get me that kid with the flower
Speaker 1: on his head. Okay. Did you meet Peter Gabriel that evening? No? Okay,
Speaker 1: so now you make a deal to work with lou Reid.
Speaker 1: Tell us the next steps. The next step, Well, the
Speaker 1: next step was, you know, he came to my house
Speaker 1: and we met after the show. We went to my
Speaker 1: house and we sat on the floor of of the
Speaker 1: living room. Uh. He played guitar and he played me
Speaker 1: some songs. And I have been doing my research, so
Speaker 1: before I went to see him, I I by that
Speaker 1: time then I did know the velvets, and I knew
Speaker 1: everything he'd written in every album he've done. So he
Speaker 1: sat down on the floor and he started to play
Speaker 1: what he was thinking of for this new project. He
Speaker 1: wanted an anti transformer. He you know, in a way,
Speaker 1: the commercial success of Walk on the wild Side really
Speaker 1: bothered him because it's not who we saw himself as,
Speaker 1: and people then try to make him a rock star
Speaker 1: or a pop star, and he did not want that
Speaker 1: on any level. So he wanted to make an anti
Speaker 1: Transformer record. And and he started playing me these songs.
Speaker 1: They were good, they were lou reed songs, of course
Speaker 1: they were good, but they didn't seem to have any
Speaker 1: real point of view and and and I just didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, for me, they were missing some of the
Speaker 1: drama and the uh, the evocative qualities of some of
Speaker 1: the other things that he had written before. And and
Speaker 1: so I said to him, you know, look, listen, these
Speaker 1: are good, but every once in a while, more often
Speaker 1: than most to anybody else that I've listened to, you
Speaker 1: tell a whole life in two minutes and forty seconds.
Speaker 1: And that, to me, that's magic, Like why can't we
Speaker 1: do something like that but expand it? Because I always
Speaker 1: find myself saying, what happened to that guy? Or what
Speaker 1: happened to those two people? And I said to him,
Speaker 1: like that song you wrote called Berlin, I've often thought
Speaker 1: whatever happened to those two people? I said, we should
Speaker 1: think about doing something like Berlin and make a story
Speaker 1: out of it. And then I said, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't think about doing something like Berlin. It's your
Speaker 1: fucking song. Let's do Berlin. Why don't we do that?
Speaker 1: Why don't we take Berlin, Why don't we take the
Speaker 1: beginning of the story, and why don't we take it
Speaker 1: to where those two people would have ended up? And
Speaker 1: he loved that. He was like he just stared at
Speaker 1: me for a minute, and he just said, give me
Speaker 1: a few weeks. And I was it and he left.
Speaker 1: And about four weeks later he came back and played
Speaker 1: me Caroline says on my on the on the living
Speaker 1: room floor in that same position, and I got goose flesh.
Speaker 1: I was like, Wow, this is this is heavy stuff.
Speaker 1: This is really powerful, and and I said to him,
Speaker 1: give me a few weeks. So he gave me the
Speaker 1: songs and then I went into the studio and for
Speaker 1: the first time ever in my career, I didn't have
Speaker 1: a band to work with. I couldn't say try this,
Speaker 1: play that, do this, do that. I had nothing. I
Speaker 1: just had me. So I went into the studio we
Speaker 1: were building. It wasn't even done yet. It just had
Speaker 1: a piano in the middle of the room. And I
Speaker 1: sat there at the piano and I just imagined what
Speaker 1: the songs ought to be like. And then I started
Speaker 1: playing them for myself, like like this is how I
Speaker 1: hear it. I'll say that again, like this is how
Speaker 1: I hear it, this is this is this is where
Speaker 1: the base would go, and these are the big shots.
Speaker 1: Here's the riff, that sort of stuff. And then I
Speaker 1: got Alan McMillan to come in and I said, Alan,
Speaker 1: I can't write this down. I'm way too slow and
Speaker 1: it will disappear before I before I ever get it written,
Speaker 1: I'll forget. So would you mind please help me with this?
Speaker 1: And so he he started writing it down, and then
Speaker 1: we fleshed it out, and I said, you know what,
Speaker 1: what if we had an orchestra, Like what if we
Speaker 1: really had an orchestra and they played you know, Dad
Speaker 1: at it and and and he started writing that down.
Speaker 1: It was not like the scene from Amadeus. Alan and
Speaker 1: I were collaborating. He wasn't stealing, and we were collaborating.
Speaker 1: He came up with great ideas. He helped me so
Speaker 1: much in that moment, so that by the time lou
Speaker 1: and I got back together, I could sit at the
Speaker 1: piano and play him the record and he could hear it.
Speaker 1: He heard it, and he loved it. So we took
Speaker 1: that the combination of these a couple of weeks for
Speaker 1: each of us, and we went to London to cut
Speaker 1: the record, all with studio, well actually all with guest performers,
Speaker 1: some of them had never done studio work before. It
Speaker 1: included Steve Hunter, who I loved and could count on
Speaker 1: in just about any circle stands. It also concluded the
Speaker 1: late grade Jack Bruce, who I've I learned to love.
Speaker 1: He was difficult, but he was amazing. Um. And and
Speaker 1: I had b. J. Wilson from Procol harm Barry Wilson
Speaker 1: played his last session on that before he died, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, an untimely death. And and I had uh
Speaker 1: Stevie Winwood on on the on the song called the Kids,
Speaker 1: Stevie Winwood and I played harmoniums facing each other. We
Speaker 1: were playing pedal harmoniums and playing with each other's part.
Speaker 1: And and uh, I know I'm forgetting out the people.
Speaker 1: And Jean Martinek, who was an amazing musician from Toronto
Speaker 1: who was also a student of Leghetti. And he's the
Speaker 1: guy who came up with that atonal choir thing that
Speaker 1: to sound like the moment of death. Anyway, as you
Speaker 1: could tell, it was an exciting experience sounds expensive. Was
Speaker 1: it expensive? It wasn't. No, no, no, no. We worked fast.
Speaker 1: We were really fast. We did not spend a lot
Speaker 1: of money. Nobody would give you a lot of money
Speaker 1: in those days. Not like Okay, the record comes out
Speaker 1: into my memory, especially coming after a hit. Reviews were
Speaker 1: not charitable, they were well, they went both ways. There
Speaker 1: was one review that said Sergeant Pepper of the seventies,
Speaker 1: which was completely untrue and and inappropriate. But but the
Speaker 1: but the reviewer just loved the record to pieces. And
Speaker 1: then there were others who said that I had destroyed
Speaker 1: Lou's career and he would never recover. And yeah, so it,
Speaker 1: you know, definitely got a reaction that one. Like there
Speaker 1: was nobody who was on the fence about Berlin. They
Speaker 1: either loved it or they hated it. But it was
Speaker 1: also it was also an extremely difficult process for both
Speaker 1: of us. He was going through a really rough period
Speaker 1: of time. I I was, you know, I was too
Speaker 1: young to be able to resist tempta during the making
Speaker 1: and things. So I started, I started, you know, doing
Speaker 1: drugs along with some of the other people, and and uh,
Speaker 1: and then I suffered when we stopped because I didn't
Speaker 1: know that you would feel bad afterwards, you know. And
Speaker 1: I felt horrible and and and also just the emotion,
Speaker 1: the emotion tied up in it, like every song is
Speaker 1: a you know, melodrama. And I had to listen to
Speaker 1: those sounds like it's okay, any listener that wants to
Speaker 1: complain about listening to Berlin you only had to hear
Speaker 1: it once. I had to hear it thousands of times.
Speaker 1: And those you know, getting the kids, getting the screaming kids,
Speaker 1: you know, and then making it sound like that. That
Speaker 1: was you know, it was intense. My I did not
Speaker 1: torture my children. My son David was uh five and
Speaker 1: a half I think at the time, and Joshua was
Speaker 1: like too. And I told David the story. I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want you to go outside and once your pound
Speaker 1: on the door. I need to record this because I'm
Speaker 1: doing a story about a kid and his mom is
Speaker 1: in the kitchen and she can't hear him. So what
Speaker 1: I want you to do is is not as hard
Speaker 1: as you can and you know, mommy, mommy, mommy, until
Speaker 1: she comes out. He said, okay. So I had a Nagra,
Speaker 1: a little portable tape machine on the other side of
Speaker 1: the door, and David starts pounding, yelling mommy. I have
Speaker 1: a microphone on his side and a microphone on my side,
Speaker 1: so I got the the real sound of the door pounding,
Speaker 1: and Joshua had followed him outside. Joshua was like too,
Speaker 1: he didn't know what was going on. But and you
Speaker 1: can even hear him if you ever solo that track
Speaker 1: where he goes like, but it's after that the mummy like,
Speaker 1: why are we calling mommy? She's right there, you know.
Speaker 1: But then he starts yelling and and so then I
Speaker 1: got the two of them yelling mommy, mommy, pounding, and
Speaker 1: I took that to the studio and put it through,
Speaker 1: you know, basically like a cheese grater, to just make
Speaker 1: it sound horrible. It's just I just compressed it and
Speaker 1: distorted it and compressed it more and distorted it more
Speaker 1: until it was so in your face and so uhverwhelming
Speaker 1: emotionally that it would bring normal people to tears. And
Speaker 1: it did, like they were uh one one of one
Speaker 1: of Loo's assistants went running crying out of the control
Speaker 1: room when we first played the album. Was Lou happy,
Speaker 1: and was Lou happy after the record came out. I
Speaker 1: think that I think that Lou was um relieved. He
Speaker 1: was always proud of it, and he didn't like It's
Speaker 1: Lou he didn't give a ship what the critics said.
Speaker 1: He didn't care. But it was such a gut wrenching
Speaker 1: experience for him, one that he never forgot and valued
Speaker 1: for his entire life, and one that knit us together
Speaker 1: as as really deep, dear, true friends, like real friends
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life for you know that.
Speaker 1: So he was proud of it, he admired it, but
Speaker 1: he never wanted to hear it again, he said, he said,
Speaker 1: he said, let's just walk it away in the closet
Speaker 1: and uh, and we won't have to do that again now.
Speaker 1: He ultimately after that goes on the road, probably the
Speaker 1: stage and a very rock version of all that came
Speaker 1: before with Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. Did you have
Speaker 1: anything to do with that? That was my house band.
Speaker 1: So that included Penty Gland or Whitey we called him
Speaker 1: Whitey Gland and per Cash John who had played in
Speaker 1: The Mandela, and Joey Charowski, who was the keyboard player
Speaker 1: of The Mandela and was one of the greatest keyboard
Speaker 1: players I ever worked with until he lost his mind,
Speaker 1: got married to a woman and ran into the woods
Speaker 1: and never came back. He actually became a very he
Speaker 1: actually became a very successful uh lumberman, like seriously anyway,
Speaker 1: So a forester, that's the word I was looking for.
Speaker 1: So yes, So that was kind of my house band.
Speaker 1: Those guys plus Wagner and Hunter and all of them
Speaker 1: played on so many different things. I mean Joey and
Speaker 1: Um and Steve and and Dick as well also played
Speaker 1: on Peter gabriel solo album and anyway, So yeah, so
Speaker 1: Lou got lu He liked the sound of those people.
Speaker 1: He certainly knew what Steve was doing because he had
Speaker 1: been a fan of Steve since Rock and Roll and
Speaker 1: U and it may have been Steve that said, hey,
Speaker 1: look I I'm playing a lot with this group of guys,
Speaker 1: you know, like we should get together. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know who the original idea was, but these
Speaker 1: were all people that were linked, um basically through Nimbus. Now,
Speaker 1: ultimately decades later, you did a performance of Berlin. How
Speaker 1: did that come together? Because Lou, my friend and I
Speaker 1: were um across the street from his house having a dinner,
Speaker 1: and and Julian Schnabel, the the artist and film director,
Speaker 1: walked in and a friend of Luz, but he had
Speaker 1: never met me before. And when lu said, you know,
Speaker 1: this is bob Ezn, he got on his knees in
Speaker 1: front of the two of us and he held our
Speaker 1: hands and he just said, now you listen to me.
Speaker 1: He said, Berlin is why I'm an artist. He said,
Speaker 1: Berlin is what I played when I started for work,
Speaker 1: and I still play it and YouTube. You have to
Speaker 1: promise me that you will do it live. We'd had
Speaker 1: that conversation many times in the past, lou and I
Speaker 1: and we well, we we always came away and saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: we gotta do it, we gotta do it, and then
Speaker 1: he would get busy, I'd get busy, and we wouldn't
Speaker 1: do it. So we said we'll do it, and then
Speaker 1: we got busy and didn't do it. But but uh,
Speaker 1: Susan Feldman, who was the artistic director of St. Anne's
Speaker 1: Warehouse in Brooklyn, which is a really great alternative art stage,
Speaker 1: a place where a lot of stuff percolates, she called
Speaker 1: and maybe it was Schnabel who gave her the idea,
Speaker 1: but she wanted us to do Berlin live at St.
Speaker 1: Anne's Lou called me. We conference Schnabel in Schnabel agreed
Speaker 1: to be uh the show artistic director or designer whatever
Speaker 1: it wasn't And then it became actually a film that
Speaker 1: produced by another great friend of mine, Stanley buck fall Um,
Speaker 1: who I almost got involved with when he was doing
Speaker 1: the Biosphere and Stanley has UH He's got that film
Speaker 1: called Spaceship Earth about the biosphair. He was, he was
Speaker 1: the UH. He owned the marketing rights to all that stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's a very small world. It's all the all
Speaker 1: these roads lead to the same place. So we all
Speaker 1: decided to do it, and I brought the first first call, Steve,
Speaker 1: you got to do the show, and then Um. And
Speaker 1: then we put together a band made up of some
Speaker 1: of Lou's touring band, his existing touring ban. We had
Speaker 1: Steve and then some of my people, and and UH
Speaker 1: and Anthony who is now now unknown, Anthony and Uh
Speaker 1: and Sharon Jones from Sharon Jones and the dap Kings.
Speaker 1: They were the backing vocals. We had a children's choir
Speaker 1: to do the whole leaghetti segment, and we had a
Speaker 1: small orchestra on stage, all dressed. We we wanted all
Speaker 1: the orchestra to be dressed like a like a cocktail band,
Speaker 1: like a bar mits for a wedding band. They were
Speaker 1: all in light blue jackets, dinner jackets, and they had
Speaker 1: little music stands that were the same color. And during
Speaker 1: rehearsals I had to conduct because lou was just he
Speaker 1: hadn't played this stuff in like decades and decades. He
Speaker 1: kind of knew it, but he was nervous about it,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't quite sure about entrances and exits and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And the band also needed coaching. So
Speaker 1: I was I was conducting the rehearsals, but as we
Speaker 1: were getting closer to the you know, opening night, Lue
Speaker 1: just looked at me. He just goes, You're on stage.
Speaker 1: And I was saying, you know, that's not really supposed
Speaker 1: to be my job, and he goes, no, you're on stage.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, I'll be on stage. There was
Speaker 1: one jacket left. It was an extra large, and I
Speaker 1: put it on. It looked like I was wearing my
Speaker 1: dad's dinner jacket, like my dad's powder blue tuxino. And
Speaker 1: of course now I'm gonna be having my back to
Speaker 1: the audience. So I said to schnovel. You got to
Speaker 1: do something on the back of this thing, Like, I
Speaker 1: can't just be this this sea of bouncing blue on stage.
Speaker 1: It'll be a terrible distraction. So he wrote the word
Speaker 1: Berlin down my back on the back of this thing
Speaker 1: in paint, and I still have that jacket. It's probably
Speaker 1: worth like, who knows, half million dollars. He's a very
Speaker 1: he's a very famous guy. There's in no way I'm
Speaker 1: selling that you right, Okay, let's go back. Meanwhile, you
Speaker 1: have what I believe to be your first hit with
Speaker 1: Schools Out. So tell us how that comes together. Well,
Speaker 1: eight Team was a hit, and under my wheels, they
Speaker 1: were just they just weren't number one, but they were
Speaker 1: all they were fam hits. No, they were am they
Speaker 1: were am hits. I don't want to I don't want
Speaker 1: to argue about their success. Well I can tell you
Speaker 1: with schools success. Okay, Schools I was a bigger success.
Speaker 1: I'll give you that. It was, and it was it
Speaker 1: was eighter really it was. You know, the album Billion
Speaker 1: Dollar Babies was really what it blew out worldwide. But yeah,
Speaker 1: Schools Out was amazing. Chef called me up and he said, um,
Speaker 1: the guys just they're they're working on this idea and
Speaker 1: it's called schools Out, and we gotta we gotta record this.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be a hit. I can tell you
Speaker 1: this is gonna be hit. We gotta get it done
Speaker 1: before school ends. And I said, I'm like okay. So
Speaker 1: I came out to l A and we had that riff,
Speaker 1: which was Glenn Buxton's riff. And schools out was what
Speaker 1: Leo Gorsey used to say to Satch and the and
Speaker 1: the on the Bowery Boys when he would say something stupid,
Speaker 1: Leo course, slap his hat off his head and go
Speaker 1: schools out, Satch, schools out, wake up, you know. So
Speaker 1: that's where the term schools out came from because Glenn Buxton,
Speaker 1: the lead guitar player, if anything, he was a Bowery
Speaker 1: boy in life, in his real life, and sadly he
Speaker 1: was a tragic Bowery boy who you know, drank himself
Speaker 1: to death. But at that time he was he was
Speaker 1: hot and he was doing you know, he came up
Speaker 1: with a great riff, like one of the all time
Speaker 1: most notable guitar riffs and um, and then we started
Speaker 1: working on you know, what can we do we want
Speaker 1: to make at school egg and we came up with
Speaker 1: a no more pencils, no more books, and that that
Speaker 1: was a really good section to sort of knit helped
Speaker 1: to knit the song together. And we worked on the lyrics.
Speaker 1: You know, we we got no class, we got no innocence.
Speaker 1: Uh no, but we got no class, we got no principles.
Speaker 1: I love that, and that's kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: that's an example of the kind of ironic um double
Speaker 1: on time that that is in almost all of Alice
Speaker 1: Cooper's lyric writing. Like I have to say, Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: said this, and I agree that Alice Cooper is is
Speaker 1: maybe the most underrated great lyricists in rock. The people
Speaker 1: don't realize how brilliant his lyrics are. But anyway, so
Speaker 1: the song came together. It came very quickly and um
Speaker 1: and then we had to to then we had to
Speaker 1: scramble and put together the whole album, which we did
Speaker 1: again very quickly in New York. Okay, Bob, uh, this
Speaker 1: is what I think we should do. Why don't we
Speaker 1: close it for now as the first part and then
Speaker 1: get back to kiss in Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd,
Speaker 1: the Wall and Fish and so many of your more
Speaker 1: recent adventures sound good to you. Oh my god, Bob,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, is this talk about slave labor? None
Speaker 1: of these victims of Bob Left. It's I want all
Speaker 1: the listeners to know get paid. To do any of
Speaker 1: this stuff. We have to give up like hours, sometimes
Speaker 1: days of our schedule. Some people come by mule train,
Speaker 1: they have to get all the way out to l A.
Speaker 1: They're not allowed to record unless they go into this
Speaker 1: one particular room at a particular time, and they have
Speaker 1: to give Bob two hours. And so when we add
Speaker 1: in travel time and all that stuff, it could have
Speaker 1: taken me a week to do this. Thankfully, we're actually
Speaker 1: confined to our quarters, so I was able to do
Speaker 1: this by remote technology. That's good. I'll do it okay,
Speaker 1: until next time when we do more with Bob ezritten.
Speaker 1: It's a Bob Left sense podcasting