What You Don’t Know About The GRAMMYs

From Paul Bachmann, Senior Program Director of Classical and World Music – on the air on XM Classics, XM Pops, Fred on 44, and more…

So…

This will be my second year of broadcasting the Grammy Awards from Los Angeles here on XM. For the purposes of the nascent XM blogoverse, I thought maybe instead of talking about my disparate musical interests and how they relate to the Nominees - which could take days to read, much less to write! - that I could throw out some “here’s what you might not know” about the Grammy Awards that I learned last year on the ground, and what’s new for this year (and it’s a biggie)… Cool? Cool.

Part of my gig at XM is to be the on-the-fly sort of anchor at a variety of events/situations. Which I really like. Some radio people like to focus on the one type of music or talk style they’ve always been associated with…that’s totally cool – maybe I’m schizophrenic, I just like a ton of different things. So in a 3-week span last January and February, I had this weird travel swing where I was in Austria, broadcasting for Mozart’s 250th Birthday featuring some of the world’s best classical musicians and the President of Austria on our airwaves…and then I dropped off my luggage in DC…and a couple of days later I was in Los Angeles, at one point walking for awhile within a couple of feet of Beyonce and Jay-Z (who were being golf carted around behind the Staples Center, I should have asked for a ride).

When I think back to last year’s Grammys, I think of a lot of mental snapshots I took – you can’t be the media anchor asking for photos, that’s SO not cool. But the memories are good.

I remember Chris Brown and his crew at the Beverly Hilton – they had all their room doors open like it was one of those out-of-state trips we all took back in high school… I thought at the time that Chris is insanely talented, and looked like he was surrounded by the right people. That’s an equation for mega-stardom.
I remember riding up an elevator with NFL Wide Receiver Keyshawn Johnson… at the time he was still with the Cowboys (he’s with the Panthers now), and I’m a lifetime Redskins fan. So it took self-control to not be a fan-idiot and talk about the famed rivalry…instead I did what people try to do in L.A. and New York. Small talk. “Are you in town for the Grammys?,” I said. “No, I’m trying to get out of town, man,” Keyshawn claimed. He looked all of a sudden like he was late for a plane… but then again, I broke the elevator oath of silence, so what did I expect? Key said, “When is that thing? Wednesday?” “Yeah.” “Ok, I’ll be long gone by then, whew.” And we said goodbye.
On the red carpet, I got to tell the guys in Keane that I thought they did the best music performance on Saturday Night Live in years…and I told Chris Cornell and Tom Morello of Audioslave that I really appreciated their documentary/concert of the band’s groundbreaking trip to Cuba. From their reaction, it seemed that it might have been the first time that day that anyone had mentioned one of their musical achievements.
And I recall running into Grammy President Neil Portnow and Grammy VP (and music icon in his own right) Jimmy Jam at virtually every event. We were pretty sure that Neil and Jimmy and the other top brass of NARAS would start ducking us at some point, but it was quite the contrary – as the Awards day approached, they were even more gracious on the air. I thought about that when I was there…maybe it’s the realization as the Grammy week wears on that the Grammys isn’t just an award ceremony where some people WIN and most people LOSE, and those assembled really feel like they’re part of a greater community… ok, maybe that’s a little too much like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas plot…

Or maybe not, actually. Or if it is, it’s a coincidence. Grammy week really is an assemblage of a remarkable community of artists from all walks of musical life. Since most people only cover the Awards aspect of the Grammys - so most people around the world only see the 9 or 10 awards they give out on TV as more of an entertainment show - that sense of community might go unnoticed. But not by me. I saw it up close, and I was impressed.

When XM decided last year to create Grammy Radio for 3 days, it was a grand experiment. How could we capture the events of Grammy week in such a way that it both told the NARAS/Grammy story and at the same time, conveyed XM’s similar passion for music? In the end, I think we did that really well. We were present with XM microphones at every major event for Grammy week – I was personally there for the following: we got to see legends like Oscar Peterson unexpectedly play a piano duel with a 17 year-old kid at the Salute to Jazz; we interviewed legends at the salutes to Classical and Gospel music; we covered the very interesting dialogues about the future of music and its distribution in the What’s the Download sessions at USC, which featured guest panelists like Kanye West, John Legend, and American Idol’s Randy Jackson; XM was on hand when Bono unexpectedly walked onstage during the Merit Awards to honor his longtime friend Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records… by the by, who else was in that room that night? The son and grandson of blues legend Robert Johnson, honoring his memory…and members of the folk group The Weavers receiving a Lifetime Achievement award, as the musical world still remembered that they were one of the best-selling folk groups in history, only to be caught in the gory reach of McCarthyism because of their protest songs. A night to remember, for sure!

Any of the above on TV? Nope. But XM was there. If you missed it in 2006, trust me – you’ll want to try Grammy Radio in 2007!

So this year, we want to be at all of those events. And if last year is any indication, it’s going to be just as cool this year. But now, lookout. We’re going to try something nobody has attempted before. In the biz, they call it “Pre-Tel”. That means what you think it means… the awards that go out before the TV broadcast.

!!!

Do you know how many awards that is? It’s like a hundred, maybe more! Put simply, it’s every award that they don’t have time to give out on TV for the big CBS broadcast. And that is going to be the perfect combo between the Grammy and XM’s passion for music. Because XM has everything musical, and the Grammys honor everything musical. You’re going to hear coverage of the winners of every musical genre that means something to you… you’ll hear the winners in the Reggae, Blues, World Music, Jazz, Classical, and Gospel categories…along with the other categories in “mainstream” popular music – for example, there are TONS of Rock categories, far more than they can talk about in the TV broadcast…so if you’re an alternative rock or a metal fan – XM will have the live coverage. Same goes for Pop and Country too.

And it speeds by, too – it should be really interesting to listen to… I think that it’ll be me and Scott Walterman moderating the XM side of the proceedings, so I hope that you can listen, and write to me and tell me what you think. I have a bunch of different e-mail addresses; you can always go through one of the channels – like xmpops@xmradio.com, that’s a good one. Say hello.

So another year, another grand experiment – Pre-Tel (insert cliché synthesized `wow’ effect), building on what XM did last year. Hope you like it!

-paul