Bob Ezrin

There's no doubt that through the early 1980s, Vincent Fournier, the artist known as Alice Cooper, suffered through a bit of a rough patch.

From being a part of the band called Alice Cooper, whose reputation and popularity grew through their final five albums together, that were helmed at the production level by Bob Ezrin, and then into his immediate blazing glory of his solo career under the same name that began with his debut solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice had created a career through the 1970s that saw fame and fortune, and all of the pitfalls that tend to come with such a thing.

Along the way, he had committed himself to a sanatorium to deal with his alcoholism, recovered, and then come out the other side to discover that drugs tended to work even better.

From 1980 to 1983, Alice recorded and released four albums, Flush the Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catcher's Skin, and Da Da, that he dubbed his blackout albums, as he now has no memory of actually creating those albums.

All of this affected his gaunt body change, a look he would eventually dub his apocalyptic Alice stage.

He was incapable of touring on either Zipper Catcher's skin or Dada.

In fact, Dada was the final album of his Warner Brothers contract, and privately, if not publicly, believing it would be his last, he brought back Bob Ezrin to produce and Dick Wagner to play and write the album.

Following the recording of the album, and under the threat of divorce by his wife Cheryl, Alice returned to hospital for his alcoholism and for cirrhosis of the liver.

So once we got signed, you know, you start to shop producers because you're going to make a record.

So we had Bob Ezrin, which was really cool.

And we had dinner with him.

We had dinner with all those guys.

Bob Ezrin, though, wanted to.

completely rewrite your songs.

And we didn't want that.

Did he actually listen to the tracks and tell you what he wanted to turn them into?

It feels a little like, okay, we've reached this point of the album, we need a ballad, let's find a way to squeeze one in.

You can almost see Alice, along with his production team of Bob Marlett and Bob Ezrin, discussing just this scenario.

On the other hand, I Just Want To Be God has a fabulously brawly opening riff, the protagonist telling us exactly how things are going to be and that they are going to be doing it their way, that they will be the omnipresent ruler of the human race.

And if this song is not Alice Cooper looking 20 odd years into the future and talking about a very specific person in our current timeline, then I am a very bad judge.

Thanks, guys, for listening.

It's Anthony J. Resta signing off Studio Secrets A to Z. I've booked Bob Ezrin on the show, and I'm going to be tracking that next week.

And that's going to be a real highlight for the whole series.

I mean, he's just a legend, and I think it takes us to a whole new place.