You probably know Brett Netson from his work with Built To Spill and Caustic Resin. Now he’s back with the excellent Scavenger Cult EP, credited to Brett Netson & Snakes. Netson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Netson: I have no idea what this guy was trying to do and have watched several videos and read interviews. Bob doesn’t seem to be an altogether interesting or intense person, but those records he produced are bizarre and heavy. They continue to blow my mind. The first one I heard was Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper when I was eight. The low-budget, hi-fi craze of the late ’70s and all the DIY speaker kits from Radio Shack enabled almost everyone the chance at a pretty decent stereo system. My sister moved out of the house at an early age, so I would spend the summer there, blasting all manner of heavy ’70s rock records amongst the macramé and VW parts in her funky trailer. This record played like a wartime vaudeville show on mescaline. Weird and huge!!
The next Bob-produced record to blow my mind was The Wall. It came out when I was 12 or so. Same thing, bizarre and heavy, but this one had a real message. A real personal one of aloneness and authority nightmares. And killer jams! It’s like, “gather round and watch our show of paranoia, sadness and perseverance in the face of a nightmarish life.” Like wartime entertainment. Since then, over the years, I’ve gotten ahold of more records produced by Bob. Lou Reed (Berlin), Peter Gabriel, Kiss (Destroyer) and (so bad it’s good) The Elder, Heavy Metal (soundtrack) and, get this, Flo And Eddie! Great record. In looking up the Bob Ezrin discography, it seems like he’s done some real stinkers, too. Of course, I had to give the recent Deep Purple record a chance and, uh … well, there being no Ritchie Blackmoor must make a good Deep Purple record impossible. Yikes, 30 Seconds To Mars, too. Ick. There’s a Dr. John record in there, I’m gonna check that out next.
What you have got to know about this production method is that he had a bunch of his own guys that played on a lot of these records. Most notably, Wagner and Hunter. Two shit-hot guitarists from Detroit. In the ’70s, with all the big money behind the big-selling records, the producer was the guy who was expected to deliver a sure thing to the label. And Bob had Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter for a right hand. Rumor has it that they played most of the guitar on the ’70s records and wrote parts of and entire songs as well. The producers of the time would regularly psychologically fuck with the bands they recorded. It was probably Wagner and Hunter that got otherwise mediocre bands like Alice Cooper Group and Kiss’ asses in gear to deliver some shit!
“Only Women Bleed” was a song from Dick Wagner’s early Detroit band Frost, with new lyrics by Vince (Alice Cooper). Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings has Wagner and Hunter on it, most notably “Train Kept A Rollin.” Killer solos!
Lou Reed’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal, the solo on Peter Gabriel’s “Slowburn” and acoustic guitar of “Solsbury Hill” (Steve Hunter) and even Air Supply had a few things courtesy of these guys. I guess it’s just an example of a situation where all the money and resources in the world were in the hands of a group of people who had some special skills. Turns out, Bob Ezrin is a Canadian. Ha … It’s been my experience that you should never under estimate or predict the abilities of a Canadian. And Michigan in the late ‘60s/’70s had some super human rock ‘n’ roll dust in all that polluted air they were breathing.
Video after the jump.
