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The bad news, and the good ones
CBC profiles Bob Ezrin with a lengthy interview, published on the occasion of him receiving a Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award today, June 14, 2025. Music-wise, the interview focuses on just the two “genre-defining” albums from his vast portfolio — Pink Floyd The Wall and Kiss Destroyer. He also mentions that he just got back home after spending a month in Nashville working with Deep Purple on a new album under the heading of Some guys never learn, which may or may not be the working title.
Thanks to CBC for the info, and to Nigel Young for the YouTube link.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
No matter what we all think of him, the likes or dis-likes, it seems that the Purplepeople are really happy with him 😊
June 14th, 2025 at 20:41I have to shout this out loud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euODi5aH9hY
though I know no one takes KISS here seriously, but Destroyer is fucking great. Ci-ne-mas-co-pic!
Uwe
– Resident KISS ARMY Attaché & Flaming Youth (turning 65!) –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeEZjj72MyA
June 14th, 2025 at 20:59Putting music and politics to one side, please listen to his messages regarding how people’s differences should be respected and celebrated in one pot and that’s the nation of Canada.
June 14th, 2025 at 21:48Also I had shivers down my spine to learn about the loss of his son 16 years ago and the story behind it and how he used that powerful energy of pain and sorrow to turn it into an amazing charity that has raised 300 million dollars and help young adults with mental issues.
Amazing person and an amazing producer.
Total respect to you Mr Ezrin 👏👏👏👏
Peace ✌️
Bob Ezrin is a lovely person, I could listen to him all day. Very perceptive, quoting his dad, a scientist: “The strongest system is a heterogeneous one; inherent in a homogeneous system is a weakness.”
I didn’t know about the suicide of his schizophrenic son, what can be more crippling as a parent?
Re The Wall (never my favorite Pink Floyd album, to me it is more of a first Roger Waters solo album/vanity project with the other guys from Floyd guesting), I know that Roger Waters is difficult, can paint himself into corners and also act like a self-righteous & unpleasant prick at times (plus a cruel humor streak), but there is not a (neo-)fascist bone in him. Of course The Wall taps on fascist imagery – the 1984/George Orwell inspiration is plain to see, but that was never more than role playing/artistic license to me and a warning against regimes like that. It’s similar with the antisemitism he’s been accused of. There is no doubt that Waters takes a totally one-sided anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian stance, I don’t agree with that, but antisemitism – an obscene, indefensible sentiment – is something different still.
“Some Guys Never Learn” – yes, make this the title for the new DP album please! 🙏
June 14th, 2025 at 22:35Thanks for the link to Bob’s interview. A bit of a hit and miss interview, not Ezrin’s fault, the interviewer looking for the dumb down ‘saucy’ bits or political rubbish, didn’t listen to that. Otherwise a typical Ezrin outlook on his life as a successful music producer and human being, a proud Canadian and so he should be. As he said, he was there at that time when Canada was a ‘unknown’, so to speak. Cheers.
June 14th, 2025 at 23:08Who do they think they are! Don’t they ever learn?
June 15th, 2025 at 09:29Also on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6-VOTg7Jzg
June 15th, 2025 at 11:24the bad news is that Ezrin will still produce the next album…
June 15th, 2025 at 12:02I myself would have put Ezrins work with Alice Cooper and especially on Billion dollar babys before Kiss and even before
June 15th, 2025 at 13:09Floyds “the wall”.. but hey thats just me.
Cheers!!
All the Ezrin-produced albums have sold better than the Glover- and Bradford-produced ones of the last 30 years – duh!
It ‘s like with Elvis, you can’t argue with success; well, only Karin can.
https://1265745076.rsc.cdn77.org/1024/jpg/238948-elvis-presley-50-000-000-elvis-fans-cant-be-wrong-elvis-gold-records-volume-2-LP-678e4459245dc.jpg
June 15th, 2025 at 13:33@10
Ahem!
I’m not arguing against the success of Elvis!
NOT AT ALL!
the only, strongly subjective, notion I have is this Uwe:
I can’t stand the guy!
I don’t like his voice, his singing, the way he was dramatically exposed!
I am sure Elvis was a really nice guy and made yummy food to his loved ones etc, but even if I am the only one in the world where the ears feel like they’re bleeding whenever I hear just a glimpse of his singing, isn’t that ok, Uwe????
I have in my great naivety always thought that there does exist free speech, and free thinking!
But maybe, Uwe, the free speech and free thinking is only allowed if I agree with you!? 😅😅
On the other hand I have, thanks to you guys in here, learned to appreciate a lot of other singers!
I mention in passing: David Coverdale, (which was pretty hard for me, because he really sounds alarmingly ill regarding his breathing in his later years 😢) Bob Dylan (yeah I know he was a great 1/5th of theTraveling Wilburys) among others!
But no one, of professional singers that is, comes anywhere close to Ian!
And that’s my right to think so!
To quote another great singer (ohhh yes he certainly does sing, this one by many: ‘Always look on the bright side of life’😍) Eric Idle: ‘Call me Loretta, don’t suppress me!
And to end this tirade: What have the Romans ever done for us!
(Wait wrong crowd…)
Thank you and goodnight 😴
June 15th, 2025 at 16:28The guys may be happy with him, but for me he turned DP in a 3-4 minutes song band, with a few exceptions. And those exceptions were often the better songs.
June 15th, 2025 at 19:26Where is the adventure, the unexpecte??
You sure go to bed early, Karin, but then true night life has always been hard to come by in East Jylland. 😂
As for Elvis, you‘re of course free to dislike him, one woman‘s Elvis is another man‘s Led Zeppelin!
It would be terrible if everyone agreed with me, how could I ever then be contrarian?
June 15th, 2025 at 19:29Theo (#12) He put it in the best possible way. In just a few lines and a few words… I quote: ‘He turned DP into a 3-4 minute song band, with a few exceptions. And those exceptions were often the better songs.’
A sad reality that has curtailed the creativity of one of the most innovative bands in the history of their genre.
I don’t like his mixes either. The sound of any old Deep Purple album, even without remastering or remixing, sounds better than the compression and absurd ‘brick walling’ to which recent albums have been subjected.
I hope that Roger Glover will at some point have the time, health and patience to correct all these disasters, as he has done, or is doing, with ‘Rapture of the Deep’, which, although not a bad album, was greatly affected by the poor quality of the production and that horrible sound.
And to conclude, I would like to clarify something: it’s not that the recent albums have been bad, on the contrary, ‘=1’ is a good album, but they could be better with fewer compact tracks and more freedom than those absurd 3 or 4-minute tracks that often seem more like filler.
June 15th, 2025 at 20:48@ 10- “All the Ezrin-produced albums have sold better than the Glover- and Bradford-produced ones of the last 30 years – duh!” Uwe is having trouble placing the songwriting seperate to the production. This can happen at times and the saying with certain folk, ‘mother please forgive them, for they know not what they do’, springs to mind. Uwe throws it all into the mix (sorry, bad pun) and then runs with it. It all fits in with the fawning, yes I just said that because that is what it is. Thankfully, (repeating again) Ezrin does have a certain nous with co songwriting aspects, that is where the albums he is involved with improve greatly. The production, well we all know the jury is still out on that one. Keep them seperate Uwe, you know there is a difference. I don’t recall Ezrin being involved with Purpendicular and Abandon which of course had the bigger impact with Deep Purple aficionados, well most of them, especially Purpendicular. Oh wait, now we will get the ’embellishments and orchestral arrangements and all the fairy floss’ comments, have to remember all that. Fire away old son. And please, some people still think that Ezrin ‘solely’ produced Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” album. This is a classic case of ‘don’t let the headline get in the way of the facts’. I like Bob Ezrin’s 70’s production and even into the 80 and early 90’s, but since then he has become a ‘victim’ of technology, by the sound of it. Not to worry as he is a nice chap with a very good reputation for the occasional musical outing. Good luck to him. Cheers. Oh hang on, I forgot to add the insulting, ‘duh’.
June 15th, 2025 at 22:17@13
“It would be terrible if everyone agreed with me, how could I ever then be contrarian?”
Uwe, you are right!
June 15th, 2025 at 22:52I agree completely with you ☺️😉
Bob didn’t dwell at all on Purple. Sounded a bit self conscious about saying he is in the middle of “another DP album” Wonder how it went .. said he couldn’t wait to get back home. Will be interesting .. like everything Purple. He’s so efficient I doubt if they could make so many albums without him.
June 16th, 2025 at 06:57@9
I’m with you Wiktor; Ezrin’s work with Alice Cooper (especially in the ’70’s) eclipses everything else he’s done.
The Wall is my least favorite Waters-era Pink Floyd album. On the other hand, Destroyer is my favorite Kiss album although that’s not saying much as it is the only Kiss record that I own.
June 16th, 2025 at 07:26Bob Ezrins work with Alice Cooper in the 70s is fantastico to me and the production of the latest AC-albums (except perhaps Road) is alright too (you can’t make the producer responsible for a lack of good songs). I’m looking very forward to the Alice Cooper band reunion record which is coming out next month, hoping that Bruce, Dunaway and Smith helped Mr. Furnier to retrieve some of his dark humor. Destroyer is indeed a highlight of early Kiss, both songwriting- and production-wise and The Wall just is kind of boring album with a few exceptions. The sound of the Ezrin-Purple albums is fine for me, and I like the vibe of recording most things live in the studio, but I have to agree with @14 Errol Arias: Many songs are too short, which is a pity especially on those where you can hear that the actual jam went longer and he just cut it down with a fadeout (which in general is an indecent way to end a song). Most upsetting example is On Top of the World, where one feels the song gets going again after the talkin-part and then just gets shut down after a few bars out of the blue.
June 16th, 2025 at 09:18Some people here seem to have general issues with Ezrin‘s sound recipes (he has more than one). I just don‘t share that view, I think those Alice Cooper Group albums (he was pivotal in creating that sound, before him Alice Cooper were a largely directionless artsy freak band), Kiss’ Destroyer (essentially, he refined Kiss‘ rough & ready garage sound to a second coming of the Alice Cooper Band), Peter Gabriel’s first few albums (which really put him on the map as a solo star after Genesis), Floyd‘s/Waters‘ The Wall (not my favorite Floyd album either, but it is by no means a sound issue) and the Hanoi Rocks’ Two Steps From The Move all sounded great. But Ezrin‘‘s style has always been contentious, I give you that. Yet long before there was a connection to DP (which first surprised and then elated me), he was my favorite rock producer.
As regards the shortness of the songs nowadays, I‘m happy those guys still make new music at all! I don‘t need DP to take them to the masturbatory lengths of Mandrake Root, Wring That Neck/Choke That Chicken and Space Truckin‘. 20 to 30 minute songs would put the bladder of the average-age DP fan under duress, you could never listen to it in one go anyway without hitting pause at least once. Now let that sink in/drip through. 🤣
June 16th, 2025 at 12:46That orchestral and full of grandeur, Phil Spector‘esque CinemaScope sound of the Alice Cooper Group albums under Bob’s wing was not only transferred to KISS for Destroyer (who never sounded quite like this again), but also to Finnish export Hanoi Rocks for their 1984 Two Steps From The Move which should have broken them in the US had not fate and a drunken Vince Neil intervened via the death of their beloved Brit drummer Razzle in a car accident:
https://youtu.be/adVdgcG4b7w
However, that Alice Cooper/KISS/Hanoi Rocks recipe was never applied by Bob to DP – for his generally very encompassing style, all five DP albums with him are in actual fact relatively underproduced and only moderately fairy-dust-sprinkled which goes to show that he listens and retains the character of a band like DP, eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach. Never forget that he only agreed to producing them after having first witnessed Mk VIII live (and coming away impressed, however in full realization that there are limits to how much you can commercialize DP).
Although with a different producer, the closest Kiss came to reproducing the Destroyer sound was with their „slap-the-makeup-back-on“-comeback album Psycho Circus:
https://youtu.be/BWIW6Ti0PbE
There are two other Ezrin-produced KISS albums, namely The Elder
https://youtu.be/niEHsY3EiFw
and Revenge,
https://youtu.be/SUi_Dtcg0C4
both of them underrated in the canon of the New Yorkers, but neither managed to recreate the Destroyer sonics.
June 16th, 2025 at 17:29Bob Ezrint kritizálni… Nézzük meg 20 év múlva..
June 16th, 2025 at 18:23I was just about to say, Attila!
June 16th, 2025 at 20:16I think Bob Ezrin is a great and wise producer. The one to blame for the last supperb four albums plus Turning to crime. I don’t think there would have been anything else since Rapture if not for his guideness, his habilities to deal with such talents within the band and his vision as to where the band should go. After eight long years of zero new material, he catalized one of the best DP albums, and at the time everyone were positive it was the best production they had ever had. The songs are shorter, he gets what he wants and that’s it, and that’s not much ok at times, I think it’s a crime how Steve’s solo is rawly cut at the end of On Top Of the World, for instance. But he’s able to take the best of them, of what DP is today, as no one else would do.
June 16th, 2025 at 23:41I think it was great he was there to give Purple a new chance, a new flight, a new purpose. He really helped turning the band into something else, something that seems InFinite.
What Attila says:
When Destroyer came out, Kiss fans were aghast, “not how Kiss sounds”, “ballads”, “piano”, “strings” etc.
When Peter Gabriel’s first solo album was released, the Genesis crowd grumbled “not like Genesis at all”, “Alice Cooper teenybopper producer has turned Gabriel into pop star”.
When The Wall hit the racks, Floydians were shaking their (then mostly long-haired) heads, “this isn’t Floyd at all, he’s made them sound like disco music”.
All those albums – like them or not – have written rock history by defying fan expectations.
He turned this here (Detroit Rock City demo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYtakRS4m0&t=54s
into this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM8ESd6AF_w,
this here (God of Thunder demo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qac4retZMPk
into this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOr1mVpmxBU
and this here (Beth demo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMgf487ZHtM&t=48s
into this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2g6al_-w0c
And you tell me the guy isn’t something special and doesn’t have vision.
Meanwhile, the battle rages on elsewhere too:
https://www.kissfaq.com/forum24/viewtopic.php?t=65521&sid=c2558807279ceb315846f978e631fca9
June 16th, 2025 at 23:45Amen 🙏 to Apostle John’s Epistle at #24. Let the faithful congregate!
https://youtu.be/pB7v35-pWyU
June 17th, 2025 at 09:24Max, your absolutely adorable Sprößling @19, such a perceptive young man who even knows what the Alice Cooper Group is and how Destroyer was a pivotal feat! A rock’n’roll Bildungsbürger, you raised him well!
I think that Purple after nearly 60 years at the front line have lost some of their improvisational zest that once made them famous. That is however only natural, Miles Davis as a senior citizen wasn’t the improvisational firebrand he was as a young man either. And it is also fair to say, the general audience doesn’t have the patience for that kind of improvisational frenzy anymore – most lamentably so.
But I guess it is also fair to say that while Bob Ezrin might appreciate DP’s jam fests live because they hearken back to a time when rock’n’roll was wild and dangerous, his production ethos is not so much about capturing gifted call & response soloing as creating an atmosphere of almost surreal grandeur.
June 17th, 2025 at 16:43@20
BPH aside… I agree with you that 25-30+ minutes of Wring That Neck is too much and the same goes for my beloved Mandrake Root. You can say all there is to say musically with Wring That Neck in 8-10 minutes max. Stretching Mandrake Root or Space Truckin’ past 20 minutes is\was pointless and amounts to self indulgence or as you put it a wank-fest. I recall Jon Lord saying pretty much the same thing in an interview when talking about the “old days”.
June 20th, 2025 at 07:40But everything isn’t black or white. I agree that most people probably don’t want to hear a 30 minute WtN but how about just some extended jamming in some songs? My favourite example of post Blackmore jamming was Cascades in the 90’s. The form was basically the same but still it was different every night, and I saw a lot of shows back then. 🙂 There were still moments where some nights, JL looked at SM, or the other way around, and you could see in their faces that they went “WTF did you get that from!?”. Followed by big smiles, of course.
But I tell myself, as I tell all the people who miss Blackmore or want the new albums to sound like Fireball, that was then, this is now, the recordings and memories are still there and one is free to choose if you want to accept DP of today as they are or just give them a pass and listen to the old material instead. 🙂
June 20th, 2025 at 08:14All I think of is what would Frank Zappa and Jerry Garcia think of today’s live music scene, to name but two musicians long gone from the era of extended music composition. Not to mention the progressive and jazz music too. Sure improvisation can be boring, just like guitar solos and drum solos. I listened to Space Truckin’ yesterday, the MIJ version after listening to Lazy. It doesn’t get any better than that in many ways. Those guys at that time were painting a picture or at least attempting to. A much more appreciative audience back then who were there for a sense of escapism, to go somewhere different. Not the same old same old each night. It is a fine line indeed, to improvise or to not improvise. Most music fans these days don’t have the patience, do they? That is the way the world has gone unfortunately. There are other reasons as we know, the difference that 50 years does make and what is perceived today as ‘art’. The energy has shifted and of course waned, as age takes over for the players and certain audience members. Were the people a lot more forgiving back in the glory days, it seems so. There are still music fans who attend today’s concerts of the progressive rock variety and they do enjoy the 20 minute epics being performed. I have always preferred a bit of both, the long form of music and the short form. Mix it up little. Cheers.
June 20th, 2025 at 10:15I’m personally all for more improvisation, really, and I don’t mind extended jams at all. But it has gone out of fashion with the public for a long time now, its heyday was likely between 1968 and 1974. And don’t forget that part of it was actually filling time – all those improvisational/jammy bands didn’t have a huge back catalog then (and not all songs adapted well to live playing) so they padded their sets with long free-form improvisations – early Purple were masters at this.
But these days, the majority of concert goers prefers a lot of songs (Judas Priest – never a jammy band, everything is very structured right down to the details with them – played a whopping 20 tracks when I saw them two days ago!) to drawn out improvisations. Yet hard and heavy live music is still a refuge for that more than other types of music – go to two consecutive Taylor Swift gigs and you’ll know what the absence of improvisation really means. Even with Mk IX we still get relatively spoiled, let’s not forget that.
June 20th, 2025 at 13:34