The 36th Grammy Awards, held 30 years ago, is a perfect capsule of its time.
Whitney Houston swept, of course, with
The Bodyguard
and performed three songs in a row perfectly, establishing a dangerous precedent for the future: every time she didn't do it that perfect, they said she did it wrong.
Gloria Estefan became the first Latina woman to sing in Spanish at the gala (Linda Rondstant had done it before, but she was not Latina).
U2 won the award for best alternative album because the term alternative still existed then and they could give it to an album that had sold seven million copies.
But the gala is remembered among audiences around the world who were watching it live (24 million people in the United States alone) for being the night they silenced Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra was the great honoree of the night.
At 79 years old, the singer was moving away from the stage, but paradoxically he had just published two of his best-selling albums,
Duets
and
Duets II
, with which he paved the way for dozens of artists to subsequently sweep sales in their professional autumn with a trick as vague as it is effective: reviewing his catalog with younger singers.
One of them, Bono from U2 (with whom he sang a version of
Under My Skin
), was in charge of presenting the Grammy Legend Awards, which had been given since 1990 and had previously received Liza Minnelli, Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin. .
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Bono offered, cigar in hand, a speech that was well received and began by talking about himself (“Frank Sinatra has never liked rock nor has he been a big fan of the guys we're interested in”) and then described the honoree as “ the boss of all bosses”, “a man stronger than the Empire State, better connected than the Twin Towers, as recognizable as the Statue of Liberty and living proof that God is Catholic.”
Sinatra comes out on stage in a tuxedo, with a red handkerchief in his jacket pocket, visibly excited.
Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennet, Aretha Franklin and Sting applaud in the audience.
With a broken voice, he explains that this applause is “the best welcome I have ever been given” and that the award will help him “to hold on to it when the wind blows and that way it won't drag me away.”
When the audience applauds again, he jokes: “This is more applause than Dean [Martin] got in his entire career.”
Then he continued making jokes worthy of his legend: “A lot of drought in there!
[referring to the back of the stage].
Not a single person came up to offer me a drink.”
He asked his wife, Barbara, to stand up and told her: “I love you.
You love Me?
I love you for two.”
Afterwards he regrets that they didn't give him an orchestra to sing in, he is happy to be in New York, “the best city in the entire world.”
And then, a shot of the audience, the 1994 Grammy billboard, and we move on to advertising.
When the gala returned to televisions, Frank Sinatra was no longer there.
There were no social networks so that people could go en masse to ask what had happened and complain, labeling the network, but the cut was so abrupt, the ugly towards a legend so obvious, that the gala itself responded, becoming at the same time in generator of conversation and conversation in itself.
The presenter of the gala, the now deceased Garry Shandling, said: “Before I continue, I think you will agree with me that Frank Sinatra should have been able to finish his speech.
It has been a sad mistake.
This is live television and I'm sure Mr. Sinatra will get back at us by cutting this show another time.
So let's give Mr. Sinatra another round of applause and move on."
But it didn't happen.
Shandling introduced, after this hasty apology from the organization, Billy Joel, who was going to perform
River of Dreams
.
In the original song, after a bridge after the second chorus, the music stops for about two seconds before returning to the chorus and reaching its end.
The pause was repeated in the live performance at the Grammys, in which Joel was accompanied on stage by a gospel choir and live musicians.
But it didn't last two seconds, but 23, an eternity for a millimeter-long awards gala.
During those 23 seconds, Billy Joel looks at his watch and exclaims into the microphone: “Valuable advertising time is slipping away!
Valuable advertising time slipping away!
“Dollars, dollars, dollars!”
The applause of the entire auditorium and the musicians who share the stage with him is unanimous.
They get the joke.
The Grammy diss to Sinatra was the
trending topic
of the night inside and outside Radio City Music Hall in New York before the
trending topic
was invented.
Bono receives Frank Sinatra on stage at Radio City Music Hall at the 36th Grammy Awards, in 1994, when Sinatra received a tribute for his career. Ron FREHM (AFP via Getty Images)
The idea of Joel talking to his musicians backstage to change that part of the song in a matter of minutes (the insult to Sinatra and his performance were very close at the gala) and redo a performance to include a protest is too good to be true , so good that it is not.
In an interview with journalist Marc Allan that same year, the singer acknowledged that “the idea was there before the Frank Sinatra thing happened.
In rehearsals the day before the Grammys we had been asked to reduce the length of the song for television.
They said, 'We'd like you to shorten it by 30 seconds.'
I replied: 'You nominate me for best song of the year and now you tell me it's too long?'
I agreed, this is television!
“You have to think with their mentality.”
In the interview, Joel (who in February will publish his first rock song, precisely since
River of Dreams
in 1994) laments the way the Grammys work: “Why don't they give Grammys to interesting and lesser-known artists?
Because advertisers don't know their names.
“They want to reward famous artists so they can sell very expensive advertising.”
Regarding his live protest, when he stopped the song for 23 seconds, Joel explains that “they were already nervous about that pause during rehearsals.
We had removed parts of the beginning and the end, but it seemed important to hold on to that little silence in the middle of the song.”
But after the ugly to Sinatra, he not only kept it, but added 20 eternal seconds to it.
“It was kind of a challenge.
Dare to interrupt me too in the middle of my song that you have nominated for song of the year, album of the year and best male pop vocal performance of the year!
I think if they had cut me too they would have shot themselves in the foot.”
Billy Joel's boycott worked, somehow: he ended up having 4:14 minutes to sing his song, an eternity in current times.
Just that, 4:14 minutes, was the average length of a hit pop song in the nineties.
In the current decade it has dropped to 3:15.
Joel had more time to sing
River of Dreams
than Sinatra did to thank him for that award for his entire career (just four minutes, just 20 seconds more than Bono was given to present it!).
The Grammys the next day gave something more like an excuse than an apology.
Mike Greene, then president of the organization, clarified to the Associated Press that the cut was not the decision of the producers, but rather that of an assistant to Mr. Sinatra, who asked the producers to cut the artist.
“They noticed that he was having a great time and were afraid that he would spend an hour talking.”
The scales are millimeters, but the artists (and their teams) are unpredictable.
The lessons that televised awards galas usually teach is that after 70 years of broadcasting them (the 1953 Oscars were the first broadcast on television) no one still knows very well how to make a perfect one.
Whether it's the Grammys, the Oscars or the Goya, those responsible know that a shower of criticism will fall the next day.
The good and bad news is that it probably doesn't matter much: according to audience data, awards shows are becoming less and less interesting.
This year, for the first time, the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards) can be seen on Netflix.
Perhaps, without advertisers, the honorees will be able to say everything they want.
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