"If you want to know me, it's not about the music," says Bob Ezrin.
Insiders can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow. It is hard to think of a bigger musical mainstay than Ezrin; during his 30 years in the business, he has produced albums like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and KISS' "Destroyer" and has helped to define the sound for scores of others, including Alice Cooper and Nine Inch Nails.
Now the 51-year-old chairman of Enigma Digital is producing Internet radio, a phenomenon that is about the music but also goes beyond it. Ezrin believes radio on the Web will take the form of communities - people will cluster around particular genres, listen to music and talk to each other about it.
Inside his Santa Monica office, on a concrete floor etched with cracks, Ezrin discusses the five distinct communities his firm is launching: heavy metal KNAC.com, dance-music site Grooveradio.com, LuxuriaMusic for the lounge set, hip-hop at CurbServer.com and Acaza.com for Christian contemporary.
Ezrin recalls how he came up with the community idea long before the Web as we know it was invented. "The first day I got cable installed in my apartment in New York City in 1976, and I saw that wire come in and saw things pushed at me I thought, 'Why couldn't I push at them?'" he remembers. "When you can connect people to each other and fans to stars, you have an incredibly powerful loop."
In the past year, the online music space has gone through an upheaval as some fans and artists are finding themselves on opposite sides of the debate on whether music should be free on the Net. "People are suddenly afraid of music on the Internet," says Ezrin. "Just as hysterically overinflated it was a year ago, that's how hysterically undervalued it is now. The truth is people will be connected."
This isn't the first time Ezrin has roamed beyond the recording studio. There was his stint at 7th Level, an educational CD-ROM company Ezrin cofounded, the several boards he sits on including Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, and the six months he spent in South Central distributing food and producing a youth summit for local teens after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. "I'm a producer with a capital 'P,'" he says. "It's what I've done my whole life, producing music, live events, companies and helping move people and their ideas toward creation."
Some musicians who revere Ezrin lament the consequences of his ambition. "Bob is always interested in being a trailblazer," says KISS' Paul Stanley, 48, who met Ezrin 25 years ago in a stairwell and hired him a short time later as the band's producer. "But sadly, sometimes he and the general public is done a disservice when he chooses not to spend more of his time in music."
Ezrin remains undeterred. "I have a dream that has to be realized before I can move on to my next calling," he says. "To create the last mile to the fan. That completely connected relationship to the fan and the stuff they love."
You can almost hear the flicking sound of virtual lighters igniting all over the world.
