I


F IT WASN’T FOR BOB EZRIN, TOILING IN OBSCURITY MAY HAVE BEEN THE EXTENT OF ALICE COOPER’S NIGHTMARES.


It was September 8, 1970, when the rookie producer – then only 22 and living


in Toronto – was sent to New York by famed Canadian producer Jack Richardson to see the Alice Cooper Group play at a popular glam and punk club called Max’s Kansas City. The band had been hoping the rock vet would helm its next record but the group was ultimately too edgy and androgynous for Richardson, who had but one charge for his young understudy: get rid of ’em. Fortunately, things didn’t go exactly as planned. “What I saw was the most incredible rock show I’d ever seen,” Ezrin enthuses.


“It was the theatre of the absurd, it was cock-and-balls rock, it was high art, it was countercultural, it was sexually confusing, it was so many things wrapped into one show, and at the core of it were these songs that everybody in the place knew the words to. ... Everybody in the joint had spider eyes and spandex on, and black fingernail polish and jet black hair. You didn’t see that in the streets of New York or anywhere at that time. There was no goth movement. There was no per- formance art rock happening on that level like there was in England. I thought this could change the approach to rock music altogether and I wanted to be a part of it.”


Ezrin immediately signed on to produce the band’s next album and returned to


Toronto to fight for his job. His instincts were correct. The chemistry between pro- ducer and band proved to be palpable. Ezrin, pictured above in the studio, refined the quintet’s psychedelic tendencies into the hard, garage rock sound that char- acterized some of Cooper’s most pivotal and best-selling albums: Love it to Death and Killer, both released in 1971, School’s Out (1972) and Billion Dollar Babies (1973). Though he would bow out of working on the group’s next record, Muscle of Love, once Cooper decided to forge a solo career, the rocker wisely brought him back on board for the 1975 breakout album Welcome to My Nightmare. “As he was growing as an artist, I was growing as a producer,” says Ezrin. “I


learned on the job making Alice Cooper records and developed who I am while he and I together developed who Alice was.” Welcome to My Nightmare became a massive hit but it would also serve, in


hindsight, as the high watermark of Cooper’s lengthy solo career. When Ezrin was- n’t producing other hit records, including KISS’ Destroyer and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the pair would team up for three more studio albums, none of which ever matched Nightmare’s combination of critical acclaim and commercial success. Fast-forward to early 2010, when Ezrin received an unexpected call from


Cooper’s management informing him of plans to re-record some of the shock rocker’s greatest hits with another producer for Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Grateful for the gesture, Ezrin was also insistent that he be the one to oversee the sessions, telling management, “Nobody’s going into the studio to record ‘I’m Eight- een’ but me.” Of the ensuing production, he notes: “It was kind of like no time had passed since the last time we were in the studio together. It was so natural and automatic


RM 26


and at the same time really effective. I had such a great time doing it that I wanted to keep going and so did [Cooper]. That’s when we started talking about what to do next.” The team eventually agreed that the best idea


was to bring back the character of Steven from the original Nightmare and do it “2011 style.” So Ezrin and Cooper began writing and recording a new chapter to the spooky story they started telling some 36 years ago. Hesitant to reveal the new album’s narrative, the producer cautiously allows


that Welcome 2 My Nightmare picks up right from the opening track, “Caffeine,” with an older Steven trying desperately not to slip off into dreamland, for fear of what awaits him there. “Of course, the nightmare returns and he finds himself in a scary world that


looks very much like hell,” explains Ezrin, who also co-writes, arranges and plays various instruments on many of the songs. “He has these crazy encounters, sort of Technicolor experiences that mirror some of the things that he was most fright- ened of on Earth. For example, he finds himself at a disco, which is a place Alice would never go. [Laughs] A disco from hell where it’s on a loop. It’s a bloodbath. People come, they dance, they get butchered, they fall in bloody heaps on the floor, then they rise up again and it starts all over.” Another track, “Ghouls Gone Wild,” is described as “Beach Blanket Bingo with


dead bodies.” Steven then has an encounter with a devilish vixen called The Lady in Red (played by dance-pop singer Ke$ha), who threatens to take his heart and soul. Standing up to her, he’s forced to relive a particularly painful childhood ex- perience on “When Hell Comes Home,” in which his father comes back to terrorize him and his mother. While the sonic mandate for the original album was to capture the most natural


sounds possible on analog tape, the sequel was recorded in the digital realm, al- lowing for the manipulation and creation of sounds and effects that simply weren’t possible with ’70s technology. Ezrin downplays the shift in approach, crediting the lyrics and Cooper’s performance, not studio trickery, for the material’s truly scary moments. “Getting [Alice] into a character, for me, is not that hard because I know them


all very well. I know them personally,” he explains. “I can call them up and appeal to them. He can slip in and out of those characters at will. ... Unlike people who may not have had that much experience with him, I know when he’s really nailing it and when he needs to try it again. He trusts me so he lets himself go a lot when I’m there. He’s not guarded in any way, shape or form. He’s not self-conscious. He’s the most natural performer I think I’ve ever worked with.” Clearly, more than just a legacy of successful rock records was in the air that


fateful night in New York. The manner in which Cooper and Ezrin collaborate and the important role each has played in the other’s career make it evident they share a special bond. “I feel like Siamese twins in a certain way,” confides Ezrin. “We were really


joined at the hip at one point and we came up together at the same time. … I really love that man. I feel very connected to him and very much in sync with him and have since the very first day that we met.”


Photo courtesy of Lee Davey at www.alicecooperechive.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72