Bob Ezrin remembers Alice Cooper and the 70s
Keith Elshaw who was the evening DJ on CKFH in Toronto (an AM station with an FM format) played me Brontosaurus in 1970 and it literally changed my life. Until that moment I was really a long-haired hippy folkie dabbling in rock music that all sounded like sons of The Band.
I had just met the Alice Cooper group in NY a few days before and was pitching Jack Richardson to consider producing them when I went to the radio station to visit with Keith, a slight man with a booming, melifluous voice, trippy patter and amazing taste in music. Back then, the DJ’s programmed their own shows.
Keith was my friend outside of work. At the time, he was renting Scott Young’s coach house on Lyndhurst Ave, the street I grew up on (that’s Neil’s dad in case you’re wondering). We would hang out there, listen to records and smoke dope and I would hide there from my responsibilities as a premature husband and father at 20 years of age. But that’s another story.
That evening in the studio, Keith said “I’ve got something you HAVE to hear. I’m going to put it on the air now” and he did. Because he wanted to, and he was in charge of his own show. What a concept! Anyway, he dropped the needle, turned it up and this lumbering beast of a song charged through the mono Altec 604 studio monitor and took my face off. I had never heard anything like it…though the Beatles and Jimi and a few others had come close to true heaviosity a few times. And maybe there were other antecedents to the heavy metal sound of the 70s that I was unaware of the, but I’d never heard anything THAT massive and sludge-laden before. The minute I heard it, I was cellularly converted and nothing but Truly Big and Heavy would ever really satisfy me again (I’m talking about music here…so get your mind out of your pants). Remember Shana Boom Boom? Heavy makes you happy! So right.
The next thing I knew Jack had cleared the way for me to go to work with Alice Cooper in Pontiac Michigan. And when I got there, the first song I worked on with them was I’m 18 which I needed to sound as massive and bigfooted as Brontosaurus, so I started to experiment with guitars and bass doubling riffs and things like tuning down and all the stuff that became SOP in heavy rock. I didn’t know anything about heavy rock then except that I had been infected by it and I wanted THAT sound! And that desire informed my early career – and might be the reason I had some success. Heavy made me happy. And the Brontosaurus was my indoctrination into true heaviosity.
Source: Bob Lefsetz Newsletter
