The human factor

The Grammys and R&B awards give the industry soul

by Jon Garelick

NEW YORK CITY -- Critics aren't supposed to like the Grammys. That gramophone icon is the very emblem of the corporate music world. But last week, there I was, backstage at Madison Square Garden, at the 39th Annual Grammy Awards -- and I was loving it.

Grammy week brought in not only the NARAS glamor show on Wednesday night but the eighth annual edition of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards on Thursday night at the New York Hilton. The R&B Foundation gig was timed, said foundation trustee Bonnie Raitt, so that the bigwigs of the music biz (artists and industry honchos alike) couldn't make the lame excuse that they weren't going to be in town. And it worked -- the Boss, Aretha, Smokey Robinson, even a controversial captain of the industry like Ahmet Ertegun himself made the R&B gig. But the synchronicity of both events produced an unlikely result: they gave the music business a surprisingly human face. Going into the week, the R&B gig had the edge on that score. Gathering generational peers for a raucous, down-home family gathering, the R&B folks seemed sure to trump the glitzy, network-televised, Garden event downtown. But -- surprise of surprises -- both events ending up being about the artists. Despite the institutional settings, the artists came through not as industry product but as people.

For the working journalist especially, the Grammys are the less promising event. Forget the TV show. At the event itself (the first held at Madison Square Garden) the cavernous backstage is divvied up into curtained rooms, a carnival midway of headquarters for VH-1, MTV, CNN, photographers, print journalists, Apple computers. The print folks (between 75 and 100) work at long tables, yakking on the phone, tapping at their laptops, watching the event on closed-circuit monitors, listening on headphones -- meanwhile asking questions and taking notes as a steady stream of Grammy winners is ushered into the room and up to a small stage. That's pretty much the routine, from 5 p.m., when the "pre-telecast" awards presentation begins (during which 74 of the 89 Grammys are doled out), to midnight, when the last winner trundles off the press-room stage.

The effect of the broadcast itself here is minor. Springsteen (Best Contemporary Folk album, The Ghost of Tom Joad) confronting the audience of 10,000 with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Celine Dion's phalanx of producers accepting their awards for her Falling into You (Album of the Year, Best Pop Album), Billy Corgan's bleating vocal performance on "1979" (Smashing Pumpkins won Best Hard Rock Performance for "Bullet with Butterfly Wings") -- all of this was secondary to the cumulative power of seeing one artist after another come backstage and engage in give-and-take with the press. Some artists appeared not only humbled but downright flabbergasted. Beck in particular, looked stunned. He won not only Best Alternative Rock Album but Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, where he was up against such blue-chip mainstream Grammy types as Eric Clapton, Bryan Adams, and Bruce Springsteen, plus another left-field contender, John Hiatt.

It's one thing for Toni Braxton (Best Female Pop Vocal Performance) to say she expected Celine Dion to win, or LeeAnn Rimes (Best New Artist) to say she expected No Doubt to win. But Dallas-Fort Worth DJ and sometime songwriter Bill Mack (Best Country Song, for Rimes's "Blue") said he felt his chances of winning a Grammy were about as good as winning the Texas state lottery. Dion, arguably the most powerful woman in pop music right now, on being asked whether she had expected to win, said, "I never expect anything from the things I do," and added, "When I sing, I still see myself as a little girl -- as the baby of the family -- standing on the kitchen table singing for my 13 brothers and sisters."

Other winners, arguably less rehearsed than the megawatt types, came across with plain-spoken matter-of-factness. When someone asked Pete Seeger (born 1919) where he felt the Grammy (Best Traditional Folk Album, Pete) fit in his career, he answered without self-pity or irony, "I don't have a career. I've just made music all my life for fun." And he was also pretty straight about his future. Saying that it took producer Paul Winter 10 years to get new performances suitable for Pete, he noted, "My voice is really gone."

In their separate visits backstage, jazz guys Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter were asked about Tony Williams, the influential drummer they worked with in the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid '60s, who died a week and a half ago at 51. Hancock was effusive in his description of Williams's influence not only on jazz drumming but on the individual members of the Davis quintet, and on jazz-rock fusion. Shorter, after dedicating the award on the broadcast to the memory of his wife, Maria, who died on TWA 800, said of Williams backstage that he "was a friend and fine human being, and that's the only place I can be with him now. I put the music aside."

The only off-key notes at the Grammys came, no surprise, from Smashing Pumpkins' Corgan, who when asked about the place of alternative music at the awards compared his band's own "organic" musicmaking process with Dion's supposedly less credible methods. Heck, even loser Tracy Bonham, heavily handicapped against favorite Tracy Chapman, said she was glad Beck got a couple. It's one thing to get shut out of the Grammys, but to go to the Grammys and win and still be churlish about it -- all I can think of is a paraphrase of celebrity advice from the much-maligned Sharon Stone: don't say fuck you; say thank you.

The R&B event, on the other hand, was a "homecoming," as Curtis Mayfield called it, from start to finish. The Rhythm & Blues Foundation was established to seek reparations for unpaid or underscale royalties, as well as to help early R&B artists in need with everything from medical expenses to funeral costs. By now it's given away $1.7 million. The winners of their "Pioneer Awards" last Thursday night got $15,000 for individuals, or $20,000 for groups.

They included the famous and the not-so. Recipient William Bell wrote "Born Under a Bad Sign" for Albert King with Booker T. Jones. Guitarist Phil Upchurch played bass on innumerable Chicago blues records and wrote "6 to 4" for George Benson's Breezin' album. Van "Piano Man" Walls was an early Atlantic session player; he cut "Shake, Rattle and Roll" with Big Joe Turner. Other recipients included Gary U.S. Bonds, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Gene Chandler, Little Milton, Gloria Lynne, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Ruby and the Romantics, the Spinners, and Lifetime Achievement Award winners the Four Tops.

With co-hostess Aretha Franklin setting the earthy-royal tone (despite the ditzy commentary of co-host T-Boz of TLC), and an all-star band led by Maceo Parker, it was an emotional evening. Bonnie Raitt, a foundation trustee, harped on her Jerry Maguire-inspired motto, "Show the money." In particular, she called out Saul Zaentz, whose Fantasy Records owns the Stax/Volt catalogue, to bring reissue royalty rates up to standard. Zaentz is scheduled to receive an Irving Thalberg production award at the Oscars in a few weeks.

The recipients were by turns affecting, joking, and bawdy. Upchurch, jovial and sweet-tempered at an afternoon press conference, broke into tears as he accepted his award, then broke into a guitar instrumental with the band where his light, jazz-funk picking made its influence on Benson obvious. Ruby Nash, who for years has worked for AT&T in Ruby and the Romantics' hometown of Akron, looked that afternoon like an ordinary middle-aged woman in a pants suit. At the awards, in a silver and blue gown, she delivered her early hit "Our Day Will Come" in a light, supple soprano. Little Milton's guitar playing on his standard "The Blues Is Alright" had biting authority, similar to B.B. King, with its own down-bent note phrasing. Gary U.S. Bonds asked, after a comical introduction by Little Steven Van Zandt (who produced Bonds's 1981 comeback album, Dedication, with Springsteen), "Is this a roast? This will be the last time I teach you white boys how to play music!" And then he ripped into his number one hit from 1961, "Quarter to Three."

But the highlight of the evening for me was Gene Chandler's performance of his number one 1962 hit, "Duke of Earl," probably because I didn't expect much from what I'd always thought of as a novelty tune. Chandler had a couple of other hits in the '60s, wrote songs, produced, and started his own record label, Bamboo, where he produced the hit "Backfield in Motion." But after the '70s, he pretty much disappeared from the business.

Now he accepted his award, saying, "I stand here with mixed emotions of pride, humility, and gratitude." He disappeared from the stage and the band kicked into a bluesy vamp and you could hear the call of the staccato bass note -- "Duke, Duke, Duke" -- and Chandler re-emerged, with top hat, walking stick, and red-trimmed black cape, taking slow, high steps, his head bowed, shrouded behind cape and hat, singing in a deep voice, "As I walk through this world, nothing can stop . . . the Duke of Earl." He fell to his knees and testified in a powerful falsetto. If anything his voice, now darkened with years, has more heft than on his 1962 recording. From center stage he tossed his cane, then his hat, to the wings, fell to his knees again, and swore that his girl would always be safe with the Duke. It was in the greatest rock-and-roll tradition of theatrical self-invention. And it gave us everything -- the man and the star.