Grammys Producer Ken Ehrlich on Tributes, Tough Decisions in a Death-Heavy Year
Last year’s Grammys ceremony was an extremely memorial-heavy affair, with all-star homages to the late David Bowie, Eagles’ Glenn Frey, Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, and B.B. King, plus a special appearance by the surviving members of Earth, Wind & Fire. Considering all the shocking deaths that have hit the music industry since then, one might expect the 59th Annual Grammy Awards to feature even more tributes to deceased legends. But surprisingly, the show’s producer, Ken Ehrlich, tells Yahoo Music that this Sunday’s ceremony will focus on just two major memorial performances: for Prince, led by Bruno Mars, and for 1989 Album of the Year winner George Michael, with participants yet to be announced.
Photos: Music Stars We Lost in 2016
“Last year, definitely, we were responsive to the deaths that had taken place. We had about six really significant deaths between December and the show. I don’t want to say we overdid it, because I don’t think we did, but because of the timeliness of it, we really geared a great deal of our show to that — Bowie, and Natalie Cole, and [Earth, Wind & Fire’s] Maurice White, and Glenn Frey,” Ehrlich explains. “Would there have been that much coverage [of deaths] had there not been in that short timespan that many people? I don’t think so. But it happened. So we were kind of committed to covering it.”
Ehrlich, who has produced the Grammys for the past 37 years and has signed on to stay with the show through 2020, admits that there was a time when he wanted to avoid featuring any tribute performances on the telecast. “I’ll tell you a little story,” he begins. “I didn’t really want to do these kinds of segments on the Grammys, because my feeling was the other shows — the Emmys, the Oscars — they don’t have as much inherent entertainment, you know? Or music, for that matter. And with everything we always try to put in this show, it seemed to me that I was taking away time from other things by doing [tributes].
“So it took me a while, and it wasn’t until 2003, I think, that we did the first one — because I got pressured into doing it by the Academy, saying, ‘You must do it. Everybody else does it. We have to do it.’ And I didn’t want to, but ultimately we did it. I said, ‘I’ll do it as long as I can tie it into some music.’ And that was the year that we did [the tribute to] Joe Strummer from the Clash with Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and Elvis Costello. It really turned out to be a pretty amazing segment. And from then on, I was like, ‘We can do this, but we need to do this so that musically, it isn’t a dirge.’”
It seems that Ehrlich’s desire to keep the Grammys from being too depressing or “dirge”-like has influenced his decision to scale back on the memorials this year. “I will be very honest with you: I thought when Kate McKinnon did ‘Hallelujah’ on SNL, it was really beautiful and well-done,” he says, referring to the classic ballad by Leonard Cohen, one of the major musical deaths of 2016 (and one of the many recently departed artists who will not be honored with standalone Grammy tributes). “But you know, I had a bunch of people come to me and say, ‘Look, you’re going to do “Hallelujah,” right?’ And I said no. I think that just because we’re going to address the subject, of course it needs to be evocative and emotional, but it doesn’t have to be really sad.”
Bruno Mars’s Prince tribute, which will likely be a centerpiece of the 2017 Grammys, certainly doesn’t seem like it will be depressing in any way. Mars has a lot to live up to after the BET Awards’ fantastic, multi-part Prince tribute last year (and, to a lesser degree, Madonna’s heartfelt but shaky “Nothing Compares 2 U” performance at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards). But he’s a tribute veteran, having honored Amy Winehouse at the 2011 VMAs and Bob Marley at the 2013 Grammys. And Ehrlich insists that there’s no better current pop star for the job.
“I can tell you this: Having worked with Bruno, and having talked to him several times in the past couple of weeks since he’s been working on this, he’s passionate about it, and what he’s going to do is going to be pretty amazing,” Ehrlich asserts. “Bruno Mars morphed from a really interesting young performer, who was kind of derivative, into this showman. ‘Uptown Funk,’ in the dance steps, in the rhythm, the tempo, the formation of the band, was basically James Brown crossed with Prince… I don’t mean to slam anyone else, but I think Bruno is as close as it gets to a Prince-like live stage persona.” As for any doubters who would prefer that the Prince tribute be led by one of the Purple One’s peers, Ehrlich says one “special guest” (rumored to be the Time, whose classic Minneapolis sound, no doubt, at least subconsciously influenced “Uptown Funk”) will “definitely speak to Prince fans.”
Related: Ken Ehrlich’s Most Memorable Grammy Moments
Ehrlich will face a unique and serious challenge speaking to all type of music fans when it comes time for the Grammys’ In Memoriam segment, which he says is “one of the most popular segments on the show.” With all the deaths of the past year, it will be impossible to fit everyone in — so he will be forced to make some tough decisions.
“The segment is usually around three minutes. I try not to reduce this to mathematics, but the reality is, in three minutes we’re usually able to do about 50 people,” Ehrlich reveals. “And honestly, we started this year [2017] with a list of over 400 people in the music industry who’d passed away. And the list is still being added to today; five more people just died in the last few days.
“We tend to gravitate toward artists that had impact, but that doesn’t mean we ignore the bassist from blah blah blah who was an extremely popular player over a number of years. We do the best that we can. The show is a box. It can only hold so much. And when the box is full, there ain’t nothing more that can go in the box. So we’re not going to make everyone happy, and we’re going to disappoint people… But hey, not everybody’s happy with who just became the president of the United States, either.”
Still, Ehrlich stresses, “I take everything to heart. I was worried [with last year’s Grammys] that it was going to be too much, and we were going to get criticized. In reality, I don’t think we got any more criticized than the usual, and the criticism that we did get was who we didn’t do [tributes] for.” For instance, he recalls catching flak from the fans and family of Natalie Cole for not giving Cole her own special tribute at the 2016 Grammys. “I thought — maybe wrongly so, and ultimately the family did not agree with me — that that little piece that I put at the end of the In Memoriam segment [with Cole blowing a virtual kiss to her father, Nat “King” Cole], ended it perfectly. It was so lovely. She was saying goodbye.”
With many friends in the business, like Cole (“I worked with Natalie from her first television show; that’s an example of someone I really loved”), Ehrlich struggles every year to make these cuts. “It bothers me,” he says. “I take my personal feelings sometimes out of it. I suspect there’s not a year that goes by where there’s someone who maybe didn’t have the highest profile in the music business, but was a personal friend, that I felt belonged in there — but we don’t do it.”
Unofficial tributes of sorts at this year’s Grammys will include a performance by A Tribe Called Quest, whose Phife Dawg died last year, and a Saturday Night Fever 40th anniversary medley led by lone Bee Gees survivor Barry Gibb. An all-star, two-hour Bee Gees tribute special will also tape on Feb. 14 in Los Angeles and will air in April. The 59th Annual Grammy Awards will air this Sunday, Feb. 12, on CBS.
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