Canadian producer Bob Ezrin on elevating Pink Floyd, taming KISS and leaving the U.S. behind

Bob Ezrin's resumé is as impressive as it is diverse. Over his five-decade career, the legendary Canadian music producer has worked with dozens of artists, from Alice Cooper and Jane's Addiction to Taylor Swift and Andrea Bocelli.

"Most people don't understand what I do for a living," he told CBC's Ian Hanomansing in a wide-ranging interview. 

"You're dealing with extremely talented, often very high-strung people or complicated people, and you're trying to get the best performance out of them you possibly can on every level." 

For Ezrin, that work has included concept development, co-writing, arranging and sound design. But it has also required getting more intimate with a band, with Ezrin often playing the role of psychologist, confessor or protector — sometimes all in one day.

That work often came at a personal cost — from being individually called out in reviews to a falling-out with an "apoplectic" Roger Waters — but his collaborations have helped create genre-defining releases, like KISS's slick Destroyer from 1976 and Pink Floyd's transcendental 1979 concept album The Wall.

Now, as he celebrates receiving a Governor General's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 76-year-old musical icon reflected on everything from recording with Pink Floyd to reworking KISS's sound — and why he decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

One of Ezrin's career highlights came while recording The Wall. He fondly remembers working with guitarist David Gilmour when he played the iconic first solo on Comfortably Numb, one of the band's most iconic songs. 

Gilmour's two solos on the track are consistently regarded as some of the best of all time. Ezrin says he recognized the power of that first solo as soon as Gilmour started playing along with the track.

"I did get tears in my eyes. It just blew me away," he said. "Like, it's so majestic and so melodically perfect and so serves the story, you know, in a way that just regular orchestration or other things like that could never have done."

That moment of perfection came during a famously acrimonious period for Pink Floyd. 

Main lyricist Waters had started to assert his primacy within the band, Ezrin said. The project was based on Waters's life, so he had a deep, proprietary feeling about it, and was at first resistant to input from the others.  

Even with the tension, Ezrin says there were some good times — "laughter, kibitzing, messing around" — as well as some schoolyard bullying.

"There was a lot of picking on me," said Ezrin. "One day I showed up after we had taken a break and everybody had 'NOPE' buttons, N-O-P-E. And what it stood for was 'No Points for Ezrin.'" (Points meaning royalties for the album sales.)

"I didn't think it was that serious, and later on I found out that they were more serious than I thought," said Ezrin, who noted that in the end he did get paid for the project.