“Death, be not prolific” might have been the collective wish of music fans beset by the recent losses of David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Maurice White, among others — but especially of Grammy Awards brass, who had to rip up much of their playbook for the 58th edition to squeeze in more tributes than ever before.
Says longtime producer Ken Ehrlich: “We had a good deal of the show laid out around the end of 2015. Of 20 slots, 11 or 12 acts were booked, and we were filling the others. With the exception of B.B. King, all of these passings happened since then. It became a challenge to do the proper thing and, at the same time, not let the show turn into a series of tributes.”
Beyond the performance homages, Grammys co-writer David Wild points out that Ehrlich “allowed the ‘In Memoriam’ package to go over the assigned time. It was maybe 55 people. That doesn’t mean there aren’t 150 you want to put in.” He adds that inclusions and exclusions “become a bit political. You don’t want to disrespect anyone.”
Those politics of posthumousness made news when three members of Natalie Cole’s family publicly aired grievances over the nine-time Grammy winner receiving a vintage video clip rather than an all-star performance. Natalie’s sisters, Timolin and Casey Cole, noted their “outrage and utter disappointment at the disrespectful tribute, or lack thereof.” To them, however long the video, it was an indistinct tag to the “In Memoriam” montage.
Counters Ehrlich, “For the record, there was an email exchange. I told Timolin what we were doing, and she seemed very happy with it.” Rumors circulated that the production team tried and failed to get a female superstar to salute Cole before landing on the video. Covering Cole’s Grammy smash “Unforgettable” would have been weirdly meta, as a salute to her salute to her late father, Nat “King” Cole. When Ehrlich looked at the clip of Natalie blowing a kiss to a screen image of her dad and then one to the audience, he decided that the video would beat any artist the producers could get to re-create it. “It’s not like we were trying to get in there and be done with it,” says Wild. “Ken often had Natalie back on the show, went to her service and always spoke lovingly of her. When he showed that clip to me, he was in tears because it meant so much to him.”
Other tributes were smoother. “We already had booked Lady Gaga, then when David Bowie passed, we were calling each other almost at the same time,” says Ehrlich. “A no-brainer.” And while he admits Motörhead isn’t exactly his bag, Ehrlich added a Lemmy Kilmister tribute to the show’s rock-light lineup at the behest of Dave Grohl.
As for the Eagles with Jackson Browne, “I’m amazed it happened,” says Ehrlich, who first got a “highly unlikely” response from the band’s manager, Irving Azoff, “and then things just changed over the course of a week.”
Wild points out that, unlike the Oscars and Emmys, the Grammys didn’t have an “In Memoriam” segment until the early 2000s, so wary was Ehrlich of letting melancholy take over. But, adds Ehrlich, “when you’re paying tribute to music people with music, it’s by definition celebratory.”