Bob Ezrin celebrates his 2016 Juno Award for Producer of the Year. Last month, Ezrin moved to renounce his U.S. citizenship because of the rancorous political divide south of the 49th parallel.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
Growing up in Toronto, veteran music producer Bob Ezrin sat in a basement listening to his uncle’s extensive collection of jazz records, trying to wrap his mind around the “myth and magic” of New Orleans and the city’s sublime musicians.
His first visit to the United States was a family jaunt to New York, where he was entranced with Broadway’s bright lights and musical theatre after seeing Judy Holliday in Bells are Ringing.
“I became a student of United States history,” Ezrin says. “I was in love with the country from a young age.”
The romance is officially over. Last month, the 75-year-old dual citizen moved to renounce his U.S. citizenship because of the rancorous political divide south of the 49th parallel. The process is lengthy, but he has already returned home to Toronto from Nashville.
“In the last few years, it seems as if America is split in half,” says the producer of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Lou Reed’s Berlin. “The voices of a radical right have become so much louder. Conspiracy theories abound, people are armed to the teeth, and it’s just a different place than the place I went to.”
Ezrin and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1985. In addition to producing such albums as Kansas’s In the Spirit of Things and Rod Stewart’s Every Beat of My Heart, he became involved in the community, serving as chair of the California Mentoring Partnership and Los Angeles Communities in Schools. He helped distribute food from the basement of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles.
With U2 guitarist the Edge, he co-founded Music Rising, an initiative to replace musical instruments lost in natural disasters. A year after the calamitous flooding in New Orleans caused by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Ezrin produced a concert for the re-opening of the city’s SuperDome.
“I was very engaged, very involved, very committed,” says Ezrin, who became a U.S. citizen in the 1990s in order to vote. “I believed in the country and I believed in the American people, in spite of things like the Iraq War and the income inequality I saw growing, and in spite of the racism that was knitted into the fabric of American life. I still believed the goodness of the majority of Americans would prevail.”
Earlier this month, Ezrin was among those named a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award laureate, Canada’s highest honour of its kind. A two-time Juno winner and an Officer of the Order of Canada, Ezrin is also a member of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame and Canada’s Walk of Fame.
He believes that with the awards come an obligation: “Those of us who are lucky enough and privileged enough to be recognized by our country, we have a responsibility to earn it. It’s not about the work we’ve done in the past. It’s about the fight we’re going to fight now. We need to speak up and stand up, all of us, and be thankful for our country.”
Ezrin’s ideas on patriotism would seem to be at odds with the actions of Canadian hockey icon Wayne Gretzky, who in 2009 was named a Companion of the Order of Canada but has been criticized for not travelling to Ottawa to pick it up.
Named as honorary captain of the Canadian squad for the recent U.S.-Canada 4 Nations tournament final in Boston, the Great One faced backlash for giving multiple American players a thumbs up on the ice before the game. Gretzky, a longtime U.S. resident, attended the inauguration of President Donald Trump and is no stranger to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Ezrin had already made his decision to return to Toronto when Trump declared a trade war on Canada and floated his proposal to make Canada the 51st state, insultingly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor” in the process.
“All that underscored the rightness of what I’d decided to do,” he says. “If I’m going to spend time fighting the good fight anywhere, I should do it here.”
Tensions between Canada and the U.S. are now sky high, and the arts sector has not escaped the political drama. The Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) recently cancelled Canada House (a networking opportunity for Canadian musicians and filmmakers) scheduled for next month’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin.
CIMA president and chief executive officer Andrew Cash cited “the growing instability of everything in the United States right now” as one of the reasons for the cancellation.
Ezrin believes the move is a mistake: “We should show up loud and proud. Austin is a liberal, arts-orientated, humanistic city, and it’s a great place to fly our flag, right in the middle of Texas.”
