Dave Goes To The Grammies

“The Grammies” is actually a week-long marathon of hoopla, culminating in “Music’s Greatest Night,” a.k.a. “The Telecast.” We (that is: Carol and I, Curt Wittig and Jody Dalton, Executive Director of CRI) skipped the “Classical Luncheon,” the “Elton John: Person of the Year” luncheon and the Grammies in the Schools Day. These are serious fund-raisers, with seats costing $500 a plate and up (S10,000 a table, if I recall correctly, for the Elton John bash). We couldn’t afford it, being ordinary mortals. However, nominees DO each get one free ticket to The Telecast and can buy one more as well (my wife Carol’s seat cost $400 – our seats were view-obstructed at the back of the main floor – cheesy to say the least!). We also got to go to the Nominees Reception and to the post-Grammy party at the Regal Biltmore (more about that later). The Grammies are an expensive business!

So what was it REALLY like? REALLY, REALLY like? Well, the Telecast is the least of it, that’s for sure. The night before, there was a Nominees Reception held at the California Science Center, at which Lifetime Achievement awards were given out. This was quite a moving ceremony, and the four of us felt honored to be there. As we settled in for the ceremony, we managed to say hi to Lesley Ann Jones, President of NARAS, who’s a friend of Carol’s, beginning when she participated in one of Carol’s AES Women in Audio Events. Bill Putnam (one of the first great Studio Owners, also founder of UREI) got a Technical Grammy, as did AMS Neve Consoles. Phil Spector and Clive Davis got Trustees Awards. Spector’s sardonic one-liners set a nice tone for the following acceptance speeches. His best Don Rickles zinger: “I’ve got lots of new projects in mind. One of the most exciting is, well, I’ve been listening to the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber and I’ve been thinking how great it would be to set them to music!” Ka-tiddely-ching, boom! You get the idea. Nobody was spared. A Grammy Roast!

Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Woody Guthrie, John Lee Hooker, Willie Nelson, Mitch Miller, and Harry Belafonte, certainly a stellar and deserving lot. I found myself particularly moved by Arlo and Nora Guthrie’s acceptance speeches on behalf of their late father, speaking about his identification with the poor, the oppressed and the displaced legions of the American Depression, Willie Nelson’s wry discussion about how “staying out of jail, a day at a time” was probably his most significant lifetime achievement, and finally Harry Belafonte’s speech, which transcended NARAS and the Grammies altogether, as he described his experiences working in the civil rights movement. “After my substantial early success, I was angered to discover that I was not welcome at the table of plenty that was America in the 1950s, due to the color of my skin. I decided to resist that,” he began, and went on to describe his work with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and others. It was quite inspirational, and he got a richly deserved standing ovation. Dayo, indeed!

After the awards, we all got to pick up neat little Tiffany medallions to hang on our chests. You have to sign for them, and when they opened the book to the M’s for me, there, listed at the top of my page, was Alanis Morisette and at the bottom, Anne-Sophie Mutter, with a lot of household names in between! A helluva list to be on, I’ll tell you. I asked them if I could get a photocopy, once everybody’d signed for their medallions. They smiled, politely. Right.

Armed with the medallions, we did all our photo ops and then went around snarfing food, guzzling hooch and saying to people, “What were you nominated for?” The preferred response was, “No, I asked you first! What were YOU nominated for?” It was a lot of fun. A really nice bit was the GRAMMY High School Jazz Ensemble, a pick-up big band and swing choir that had been rehearsing for this event for about four days. Under quite difficult playing conditions, they were really knockin’ out the charts. I particularly enjoyed the last couple of tunes, with extended solos and the director (whose name I never got, but who deserves some serious credit) teaching riffs to the horns while the soloists were playing, and the kids were really picking it up, ripping off crescendo choruses using the riffs and neatly setting up the next soloist. Great playing! NARAS at its best?

Grammy Day it rained, hard. Rain, in LA, is like 11 inches of snow in Boston – a big deal! No problem. Carol, who’s really good at this, was the perfect Grammy person, rain or shine. She dressed to the nines, complete with strapless gown with train, long black gloves and a beautiful beaded Guatemalan necklace that we figured Cher was sure to try to grab. So attired, and with her typical boisterous enthusiasm, she cut a royal swath through the hotel lobby, onto the bus, to the Staples Center through the pouring rain and onto the sheltered and famous Red Carpet, getting high-fives from everyone from the concierge to the Nashville Nominee Contingent to the video guys set up on the Red Carpet, looking for stars. She really made the whole thing into magic! I trailed along in my tux, yet another penguin, happy to just be there!

All this at two in the afternoon, for the so-called Pre-Telecast Ceremony, where the bulk of the awards were given out. This is the real Grammies, of course. No production numbers, no songs, dances or FX, just serious if immensely fun business. We all sat down front. Carlos Santana was about six rows in front of us, B. B. King was about six rows back and on the other side. Wayne Shorter was around, as was Tony Bennett, bless his heart! Turns out that Tom Scott and his wife were sitting next to us! A quality group of people, I’d say. Whew!

David Foster did the honors and was both gracious and funny. A bunch of other music celebs did the actual awards, including LeVar Burton, Emmylou Harris, Lalo Schifrin, and Stevie Vai. I tell you, it was fun being there! Our category came up fifth, which was merciful, because I was getting really cranked with the tension. I had handicapped us at 3:1, based on listening to all the nominees’ recordings. Carol was convinced we’d win, just because of the surround sound and the “degree of difficulty” of the recording (I like to think we were at least an 11!). Not our day. Markus Heiland won for a three CD release on RCA of Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony playing Stravinsky’s Firebird, Rites of Spring, and Persephone. Definitely their day, as they won in three categories. Nice going!

It was a relief to get it over. Curt and I shook hands, and we all sat back to enjoy the rest of the show. Too many categories to remember, much less comment on. It was nice to see Wayne Shorter honored, also Gary Burton. He was my boss’s boss at Berklee, and I knew him a little. I’ve always thought he is one of the great jazz players, and I was really pleased to see him cop a Grammy.

Carlos, meanwhile, was raking ‘em in. Nobody begrudged him, either. A very popular winner, he was gracious, eloquent and funny. It was a very pleasurable ceremony.

They then shooed us out to re-set for The Telecast. The Staples Center, being a sports arena, had beer and pretzels available, plus some really cheap, if expensive, wine. They cut off all of this about half way through The Telecast, which was definitely less than classy. The Telecast itself seemed more like a circus than a concert or awards ceremony. The broadcast aspect made it more than a little surreal, with all the sturm und drang drying up for three minutes out of every nine. There’d be a blackout, we’d all sit around chatting in the semi-dark, pointing out the stray celebrity on his/her way to/from the bar/john, and then the stage director would yell over the PA, “Rosie, 60 seconds to air,” and Rosie O’Donnell would start telling raunchy jokes, smoothly cutting to the Teleprompter script just as we rolled back into America’s Living Rooms. Being there wasn’t very enriching, culturally. The sound was not very good and was also way too loud, I said, I SAID, IT WAS WAY TOO LOUD! I estimate it was running at about a sustained 100-105 dB SPL where we were sitting, with peaks to 115. We all put in our ear-plugs in self defense. And keep in mind we were probably more than 200 feet from the stage, back in row ZZG. It musta been brutal up around Row L-for-Loud, right under the primary cluster! The House Ear Research Institute is a supporter of the Grammies, or is it the other way around? – whatever, they should say something serious to NARAS about it. From my standpoint, their mission is incompatible with the gratuitously gross sound levels we endured. Without ear-plugs, it was physically painful. NARAS at its worst?

The Telecast was what it was. Better watched on TV than live. Even then, long on FX, short on substance, quite limited in musical range and performance quality. High points for me were Sting’s performance, Elton John with the Backstreet Boys, Joshua Bell and the string band, plus the kids’ fifteen seconds of fame. All in all, a media event. Not really Music’s Greatest Night, but, hey, that’s Network TeeVee!!

One musical bonus that wasn’t at all apparent on TV was the incredible musicianship of the sidemen playing on stage. This is not a comfortable venue at best, with a reverb time of a bunch of seconds and a wicked low-mid frequency slap coming back at the stage about a second and a half late. Yet the time-keeping and ensemble focus of the players was phenomenal! Fabulous playing! These guys are good, I SAID, GOOD!

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