How I got booted as a Grammy voter

A long and complicated relationship continues

I used to vote for the Grammys. Now I don’t, and it wasn’t my choice. I’m not mad about it, because I understand the reasons that current management wanted to purge the voter rolls.

But I think they made a mistake when they kicked me out. I have a long and complicated history with the Grammys, going back to childhood when I started watching every awards show that I could find on the television schedule.

How addicted was I to trophy presentations? I actually watched the 1978 Science Fiction Movie Awards, the show where William Shatner gave his legendary performance of “Rocket Man.”

Awards shows didn’t get reruns back in the ’70s and there was no way to record a TV show (at least in my house). I told people about Shatner and “Rocket Man” for years, no one really believed me, and I’d finally decided that I’d just made up the story. That was before Tony Berg circulated a bootleg VHS tape of Shatner’s performance to everyone in the Geffen A&R department in the ’90s. “Rocket Man” was even weirder than I remembered. Beck also got a copy of that tape and used it as the inspiration for the last verse in his “Where It’s At” video.

As we get into this difficult topic, let’s not forget that the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles has an excellent 8-track player on display in its museum.

Art is not a competition

Trophies are nice, but it’s impossible to determine the best of anything in the arts. With sports, you have a set of rules for contests that yield an outcome on a particular day. The results could have been different if the game was played a week earlier or if it had started one hour earlier or later.

For me, the greatest record is usually the one I’m listening to right now. Anyone who’s been subject to one of my enthusiastic tirades during a 2-minute punk single knows that I can say that five different 45s are “the best record ever made” without the course of one listening session.

I watch the Grammys every year even though I don’t believe that the awards mean anything. That doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t cherish the recognition, but long-term support from an engaged fan base is the most important reward any performer can receive. Grammys don’t buy groceries.

If awards don’t really mean anything, why should we care?

The Oscars and Grammys are both awards shows put on by trade associations with a mission that should be to promote their product to a mainstream audience that doesn’t pay close attention to the details of movies and music. Those once-a-year network awards broadcasts are an opportunity for the industries to remind casual viewers and listeners why the arts should be an important part of their lives.

Both have been doing a terrible job on that front, but I’m going to concentrate on the music here.

History Lesson

Back when I was first trying to get into the business, most people from my generation considered the Grammys to be irrelevant. The music that was changing the culture was not on the organization’s radar.

What am I talking about? Here’s a list of artists who have never been nominated for Album of the Year, Record of the Year or Song of the Year:

• The B-52’s

• Bon Jovi

• Kate Bush

• The Cars

• Cheap Trick*

• Chic*

• The Clash

• The Cure

• Def Leppard*

• Depeche Mode

• Duran Duran

• Elvis Costello

• Echo & the Bunnymen*

• The Go-Go’s

• Journey

• KISS

• Kraftwerk

• Notorious B.I.G.

• Nirvana

• N.W.A.*

• Psychedelic Furs*

• Public Enemy

• Roxy Music*

• Todd Rundgren

• Queen

• Ramones*

• Tupac Shakur

*never nominated for any Grammys

For the artists on that list who have been nominated, it’s often for late-career music that you don’t remember they made or for music videos and not the records themselves. A couple were nominated for Best New Artist but later ignored even though they continued to make great music.

“California Love” was not nominated for Record of the Year. I can’t comprehend.

The organization found a few pet “underground” artists that it liked, so at least Radiohead, R.E.M., and U2 have a slew of major nominations and a few wins, but all the artists on my list show why people who came up when I did had a bad attitude. And, aside from a few that I thought to look up on my own, most of the artists on that list are recent inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I heard a rumour

In my early days, the general consensus in the music business was that artists signed to labels that chose to play the game (spent a lot of money, forced their artists to appear at events that no one except an elite group of Grammy insiders were allowed to attend) were far more likely to get nominations than artists on labels who didn’t give NARAS (a/k/a the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, now rebranded as The Recording Academy) their “full support.”

There was a longstanding rumor about one particular LA-based label executive who oversaw the nominating committees. Allegedly, this executive would freely adjust the nomination lists to better reflect which people were in his favor each year. I don’t know if this story is true, but people in the business certainly believed it was true and therefore treated the whole enterprise as sort of a joke.

This conspiracy theory could just be some standard issue industry smack talk, but there was a belief in the building at Geffen Records that the label’s artists weren’t ever going to win anything, at least they felt that way before Beck’s shock Album of the Year nomination for Odelay in 1997.

You can’t search by record label on the Grammy website, and no one has compiled a “nominations by label” statistic anywhere that I can find, but there was a real sense that if you were signed to the record company that employed the previously mentioned label executive during the ’80s and ’90s, you had a much better shot at getting Grammy recognition, especially early in your career and in the lower-profile categories.

Perry Mason fans will recognize this telegram from S06 E08, “The Case of the Stand-In Sister.” It’s also the address of the studio where Raymond Burr’s show was filmed, a location that later housed a record company that employed a certain LA-based industry executive.

If anyone reading this has more insight into this rumor or has new ones to add, I’d love to hear your take on this one. It’s a story that feels true to me, but I’m always open to hearing why it isn’t. I have no direct knowledge, not only because this executive also refused to return my phone calls during a miserable six-week attempt to manage an artist on that label.

Stories like that one help explain why a substantial chunk of younger folks in the industry saw the Grammys as hopelessly corrupt and out of touch at the end of the 20th century.

I did make the effort to improve my attitude about the whole enterprise once Lisa Loeb got nominated for a Grammy (Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal 1995) and won a Brit Award (Best International Female 1995). Neither she nor her producer Juan Patiño shared my convictions about Grammy lameness. They both understood that awards were good for your career and excellent leverage with parents who thought you should have gone to grad school instead of fooling around with show business. Me, I could’ve come home with a dozen Grammys and my parents wouldn’t have softened their doubts about my career choice.

“Stay (I Missed You)” was a cultural phenomenon in 1994, and I can’t understand why the Grammys didn’t nominate Lisa for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. Instead, she was up for an award given out at the pre-show cattle call. Once the broadcast began, we were banished to nosebleed balcony seats at the Shrine Auditorium.

“Stay” came out on an RCA Records soundtrack, but she signed her record deal with Geffen in the summer of 1994 at the moment when the single was at #1. Lisa wasn’t nominated again until she finally won a Grammy in 2018, and I was surprised at just how happy I was for her when she finally got that recognition.

In the meantime, the Grammys ignored Tails and Firecracker, the two hit albums Lisa Loeb released on Geffen in the ’90s. Would it be churlish to note that RCA Records parent BMG Music was the longtime distributor of the record company that employed the label executive so carefully not mentioned above? No, it would not.

My Grammy years

By the time I moved back to Atlanta from Los Angeles, I had the kind of producer credits that qualified me as a voting member of the Recording Academy. The people in charge of the Atlanta branch were aware of the longstanding issues with representation in the organization and the narrow musical tastes of the voting base. They wanted to bring in new blood and fix the system from within. I signed up.

You can’t vote for any music that’s not nominated, nor can you select any performance that hasn’t been submitted for nomination in the first round of voting. I put a lot of effort into that first round, listening to music I might not have heard during the year and trying to vote for underrepresented records that had a legitimate chance at nomination.

For most of their history, Grammy voting was not open to A&R executives unless they were also actively getting producer or musician credits. Back in the ’90s when I did that job, I found it both frustrating and ridiculous, because no one knew more about the records that came out each year than talented A&Rs at the big labels.

That knowledge was just as much about survival as anything else. A&R execs needed to have an answer when a new act on another label was bubbling up with a hit single and their boss asked why our label didn’t sign them. Not only did you have to keep up with all the artists being shopped to labels at any given time and the records you were currently in charge of making, you needed to have a grasp of what was happening with the competition for that inevitable moment when you were called out for “missing out” on someone else’s hit.

Did the Grammys improve during this decade? I think there were a better group of nominees, but I’m not sure the end results were any better when they handed out the awards. At some point, the Grammy executives decided their recruitment campaign hadn’t fixed the problems.

Their solution was to purge the voter rolls. As a guy born before 1980, I’m sure that I looked like a lot of the other people they wanted to remove from the organization, at least on paper.

So I was told I was no longer eligible to vote but welcome to stick around as a non-voting member. I appealed, but the deciders decided that my recent credits didn’t hit meet their minimum number. That’s mostly because I had gone back to artist development projects and was actively looking to slot young producers into records where I was essentially the A&R person. That was the right decision, but one that put me out of whack with my Grammy eligibility.

So I’ve been out of the Grammy game for a few years. I understand the motivation behind what happened and maybe it is better that I’m out if getting rid of me also allowed them to whack a dozen or so old white guys who think all the new music sounds like garbage.

It wasn’t personal. And, on the off chance it actually was, I’m sure someone will figure out a way to make sure I know now that I’m publishing this.

We don’t want records with good taste, we want records that taste good

The Grammys can’t quit their habit of nominating and giving awards to records that have no impact on the culture. Sometimes those ignored records are by enormously successful artists (Beyoncé) and other times they’re culturally important albums overlooked for late-period, minor works by Grammy favorites. Grammy voters have a habit of choosing what they think is classy instead of what’s good.

I’ll go back to 2008 for an example in a probably vain attempt to avoid pissing anyone off. The Album of the Year winner was Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, the pianist’s 45th album. The album’s a tribute to Joni Mitchell, and both got awards for the win.

What didn’t win that year? Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and Kanye West’s Graduation. Things didn’t work out for either of those artists over the next few years, and this was the moment when they were at the height of their creative powers. In 2024, I can’t imagine that anyone’s pulling out River when they want to hear Herbie or Joni. Those other LPs are rightfully identified as classics, full of songs that people who weren’t born in 2008 know today.

Oh, you want to argue that I’m making this claim with the benefit of hindsight? I think you could’ve survey a thousand people working in music in 2008 and asked them to rank the long-term cultural impact of the five albums nominated that year (add in Vince Gill’s These Days and Foo Fighters’ Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace), and River: The Joni Letters would have come in last with both Amy Winehouse and Kanye West finishing in the top two.

It was obvious, and it’s been obvious over and over again for decades. Each Grammy generation has its own pet artists, performers who get bundles of awards and don’t matter in the broader cultural conversation.

The most egregious error of recent times, and maybe ever, was the 2021 Grammy snub of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” and the accompanying LP After Hours. “Blinding Lights” was one of those omnipresent songs that almost everyone who heard music in 2020 could identify. It was huge then, and I’ve heard it in the wild at least five times already in 2024.

This was the most obvious Record of the Year I can remember, and it wasn’t even nominated. The Weeknd got zero nominations that year, and has since declined to submit his music for the award.

In response, the organization changed some rules to eliminate the committees that had previously screened nominations, but the problem wasn’t the screening committees themselves. It was that the screening committees didn’t have the best interests of the industry at heart. If you want people to watch, how to you skip a record that might be both the best and most popular in a given year?

I was a Grammy voter who wanted what was best for the people who plied my trade, and that meant we needed winners who would resonate with the casual fans who check in once a year to see what’s up. I cannot believe that Beyoncé didn’t win last year for Renaissance, even though Bad Bunny would have been an excellent backup choice.

For the curious, here’s how I voted up in the years running up to the time when I was purged:

• 2018: Kenrick Lamar Damn.

• 2017: Beyoncé Lemonade

• 2016: Taylor Swift 1989

• 2015: Beyoncé Beyoncé

• 2014: Kendrick Lamar Good Kid, M.A.A.D City

• 2013: Frank Ocean: Channel Orange

The only time I voted for the winning album was 1989.

I think the Oscars have the same problem. My best film of 2024 wasn’t nominated (John Wick: Chapter 4), so I certainly hope those folks have the good sense to recognize either Barbie or Oppenheimer, two outstanding examples of commercial filmmaking that audiences loved. Of course, that probably means that The Holdovers is a lock.

I’ll be tuned in to the Grammys as usual this year. My vote for album of the year would have been an easy one, because SZA’s SOS is the kind of commercial breakthrough record we’ll still be playing in 50 years. I would have voted SZA’s “Kill Bill” as Record of the Year, but I’m expecting Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” to win this award and pick up an Oscar for Best Song next month.

I realize that we live in an era when people who can hold contradictory ideas in their heads are seen as either spineless fools or traitors with a hidden agenda. And yet, I believe I can have spent most of my life having issues with the Grammys and still want the organization behind them to do better and succeed. I respect people I know who are active in the organization, and I’m pulling for them to succeed as they work to improve the awards product and undo the damage done by the sleazy behavior of men who used to run the show.

It’s important work. During my lifetime, the arts have been devalued in education and society at large because no one can produce quantitative proof of their success or failure. If the engineers can’t measure performance and monetize the data, then they don’t have much use for what the artists do. They’ve built up a powerful contingent that wants artists to be seen as either trivial, unimportant people or evil forces looking to corrupt youth with anti-social ideas.

I still believe that exposure to art, music, and drama will make our future politicians, engineers and business leaders better at their jobs and more open to the ideas of others.

The Grammys are one of the few platforms we have to introduce music to the culture at large. Those of us who make music need to remember that and do better with the image we present to the majority of people who don’t live and breathe music and only check in once a year to see if they should be paying attention. Award shoes may be an imperfect way to make our point, but we can do better at convincing our audience that we share their taste.

Wayne Kramer

I met Wayne Kramer one time, after I hired him to overdub some guitar tracks on a record that desperately needed some glue that might hold together some chaotic tracks. The artist had left me to finish however I saw fit, and I knew I wanted someone who could give the tracks some teeth and match that fierce Wayne Kramer guitar tone.

After running through a list of possible session players, I had the obvious idea: Why not ask Wayne Kramer? I dealt with his manager (and wife) Margaret Saadi, and she made the entire thing casual and very easy.

Rather than swagger in like the monster guitarist from the MC5 whose influence towered over almost every band I cared about growing up, Wayne was gentle, cooperative and happy to be in a studio.

He was very eager to please and more than willing to play whatever I told him to play. After we listened to the track and I explained what I thought was wrong, I told him I was looking for attitude and feel more than a specific part. If this was his band, what would he want it to sound like? I was not going to tell Wayne Kramer what to play, I wanted him to tell me what he wanted to do.

The end results were far better than I had a right to hope for at that point in the project, I turned in the tracks, and walked away. I hope he got paid the outrageous fee that I quoted to the label.

I’ve often thought about that session, because that day I encountered a musician who’d gone through some incredibly difficult times after the MC5 broke up and managed to get himself back on track. He wasn’t taking anything for granted and was fully engaged in the moment, no matter how weird the circumstances of the project we were trying to repair. He was deeply present, a trait that you may be surprised to learn isn’t always what you’ll get when you recruit a big-name gunslinger to play on your record.

All of us who make music go through ups and downs, but Wayne’s a person who reinforced the idea that every day you have a chance to be creative is a good one. Thanks to Wayne for taking the time to work with me, and for helping to create a sense memory that I’ve used a thousand times to get back on track when things aren’t going well.

Chuck Phillips

Now that he’s left us, I guess I can reveal that I was one of those unnamed music industry sources who gave background intel to Chuck Phillips when he was a badass investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. If you don’t know his work, Chris Willman wrote an excellent obituary in Variety.

Chuck saw through all the spin and bullshit that the music industry was so good at generating. Labels were used to Billboard, Variety, and even the LA Times blithely transcribing whatever nonsense they were floating to explain away their latest scandal, but Chuck was determined to figure out what was really going on.

He had that Midwestern guy distrust of authority, sometimes to the point where he couldn’t believe that someone could possibly tell the truth after they’d lied to him so many times before. Chuck often pushed back when I agreed with a story that one of his usual villains had told him, but I could usually convince him to at least consider that things might be exactly as what someone had described.

I’m on the side of the people who believed the LA Times threw him over the cliff when there were issues with one of the Biggie/Tupac murder stories they published. The music industry was still populated with execs who wanted Chuck silenced, and the newspaper decided to blame the reported instead of taking responsibility for its own vetting process and editorial influence. I hadn’t been in touch with Chuck since he left the Times. I hope he found good times away from the music beat.

8-track of the day

This pirated truck-stop version of Joni Mitchell’s Blue is here to remind you that the album that many consider the greatest ever made received zero Grammy nominations.