Bob Ezrin’s loose lips led to some big consequences. Speaking to Canada’s CBC, the famed producer revealed how an interview led to his falling out with Pink Floyd’s frontman, Roger Waters.
Ezrin admitted that the end of his relationship with Waters “was entirely my fault,” but noted that it had nothing to do with the making of Pink Floyd’s famed 1979 album, The Wall.
Instead, the relationship-ending incident happened later, amid preparations for The Wall Tour. At the time, Ezrin was being shadowed by a journalist, one that he considered a friend, who was writing a profile on him.
How an Interview Ended Bob Ezrin and Roger Waters’ Relationship
The journalist initially wanted to come to a Pink Floyd concert, but those plans fell apart.
“He called me in my rent-a-house on Kings Road in Los Angeles, and said, ‘They’re not letting me go. The magazine won’t send me, and I’m dying. It’s killing me. What am I missing?’” Ezrin recalled. “I had signed an NDA, and I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ And he said, ‘Come on, it’s me. It’s just between us. I’m dying. What am I missing?’”
As he made dinner, Ezrin decided to tell the journalist “a little bit about” the band’s plans for the tour.
“Next issue of Billboard came out, and it said, ‘Over dinner with Bob Ezrin, we learned…’ and [it] said some things about the show,” Ezrin said.
When Waters learned about the interview, Ezrin claimed he “went absolutely nuclear, apoplectic.”
“He had every right to. I was naïve at that time,” he said. “I didn’t realize people would go to those lengths to get a scoop on a Pink Floyd record. To me, it was just us guys working. It taught me an incredible lesson.”
Bob Ezrin Remembers Working With Pink Floyd
Despite the falling out, Ezrin said he’s able to look back fondly on the making of The Wall. In fact, he said that some times in the studio included “laughter, kibitzing, messing around.”
One memory he pointed to was watching David Gilmour play his guitar solo on “Comfortably Numb.”
“I did get tears in my eyes. It just blew me away,” he said. “It’s so majestic and so melodically perfect and so serves the story in a way that just regular orchestration or other things like that could never have done.”
Photo by Jim Dyson/Getty Images
