Selasa, 04 Desember 2007

Backstage at Grammys with a man in the know


Grammy producer tells all.

By Geoff Boucher
December 5, 2007

"Excuse me, could you turn down the music? I mean, I like Sinatra, but. . . ." The waiter at the Italian restaurant gave the customer, Ken Ehrlich, a puzzled look before shrugging and walking off in search of a volume knob. Even when he's sitting beneath dangling Chianti bottles and eating antipasto in Hollywood, the executive producer of the Grammy Awards still has strong opinions about the way music should reach the public.

Ehrlich is one of the most powerful gatekeepers in the music industry and, with nominations for the 50th Annual Grammy Awards due Thursday, his cellphone will soon be burning up with calls from label executives, managers and sometimes artists themselves, all lobbying, demanding or begging to get a moment in one of the brightest spotlights in the music industry. A sparkling performance on the Grammys not only can yield a commercial windfall, it can shape careers.

The 63-year-old Ehrlich knows the pressure of all that (he is only two years removed from a quadruple heart bypass that he partly assigns to the stress of 27 years of the the Grammy show), and he also feels the weight of the history. That's clear on every page of his just-published backstage memoir, "At the Grammys!: Behind the Scenes at Music's Biggest Night" (Hal Leonard, $29.95), which, despite the breathless title, is like Ehrlich himself -- understated, candid and impatient with those celebrities he deems arrogant or, worse, possessing only flimsy talent.

Take for example his reprinting of a handwritten note from Britney Spears that arrived on the eve of the 2006 show requesting a spot for her as a presenter ("I wanted to write you personally in hopes that you might find a place for me on the show . . ."). Ehrlich was unmoved; a few years earlier, he had been advised that he shouldn't speak directly to the star, only to her manager, and he was still seething. In his book, he reports his response to Spears' overture: "I think we ought to keep the relationship the way it was then."

All of the expected Grammy moments are accounted for in the memoir, among them the bizarre "soy bomb" incident, when a loopy fan with body paint jumped on stage with Bob Dylan at the 1998 show, and the sublime, last-minute performance of "Nessun Dorma" by Aretha Franklin, filling in for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti that same year.

The more interesting stories, though, are the smaller ones that never made it on camera but reveal just as much about the strange physics of the celebrity universe.

For a lesson in jockeying, there's the 1991 Grammys, when Ehrlich dearly wanted to book his old friend and idol Tony Bennett, but the Recording Academy leadership balked until Ehrlich had the idea of pairing Bennett with Harry Connick Jr., who was not far removed from his "When Harry Met Sally . . ." success.

Connick was thrilled with the idea that would have him sing and then introduce Bennett, but then, after everything was set, his manager said Connick would drop out of the show unless the performance order was switched -- the younger singer wanted Bennett to "open for him" and introduce him. Ehrlich fumed, but Bennett agreed.

The story doesn't end there -- Bennett was so sensational in rehearsals that he got a standing ovation from the crew at Radio City Music Hall. Five minutes after that, Connick's people had a change of heart: They didn't want to follow Bennett after all. Ehrlich, with some glee, announced that it was too late. "I had no great desire to please the manager," he writes.

These are not stories Ehrlich expected to be telling the world.

Tidak ada komentar: