“Everything leaks, always,” says Ben Winston, executive producer of the Grammy Awards. So he was surprised and pleased when the Weeknd‘s dramatic return to the Grammy stage Sunday night — after a years-long boycott and months of planning — somehow managed to stay secret until the moment he appeared. The show milked maximum drama from the reconciliation, beginning with a montage of headlines criticizing the Grammys that left even the stars in the audience confused. “No one, even in the room, for a second thought, ‘Oh, he’s behind that wall,’” Winston adds. The performance required complex backstage coordination, with stagehands and 107 dancers preparing backstage while Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sang “California Dreamin’.”
The road to the performance began when Winston and his team simply reached out to the Weeknd’s camp, and discovered his feelings about the Academy had softened. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason, Jr. “ has done amazing work with this Academy, and I think the Weeknd saw that,” Winston says.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Winston goes deep on the making of the show. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Some highlights follow:
Postponing the show due to the wildfires in Los Angeles was never a realistic option. “When people go, ‘We’ll just delay it,’ it’s like, well, you just don’t understand how the world works,” Winston says. “If you delay it, that budget’s already been spent. No company’s going, ‘No, no, you don’t need to pay that invoice because you’re not using it now.’” The result would be devastating for workers, he argues. “The show comes back four months later, but you’re not going to have the same budget because no one’s going to spend all of those fixed costs again. All that happens is you have to employ less staff.”
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The New York Times suggested that producers might have had advance knowledge of the winners, wondering if Taylor Swift was chosen to present the country album award because of Beyoncé‘s victory in that category — but Winston says that’s nonsense. “Why wouldn’t I want Taylor Swift to present the country award regardless of who wins?” he says. “She’s Taylor Swift! I’d be lucky to have her on the show… I never know who’s won, and it’s better that I don’t, in a way, because then you can make the show with real purity.”
Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga abandoned their hit for Los Angeles. The duo had originally planned to perform “Die With a Smile,” but that changed after the wildfires. “I had a really early call with Bruno, and we chatted for a while, and we were just thinking about what’s right,” Winston recalls. “He said, ‘Is anybody on the show doing, like, ‘California Dreamin”?… I loved what they did. They were like, ‘No, you know what? We’re not going to do our massive single that would make us money and help our albums. Actually, we’re going to do something for the city. That was the biggest spike in donations of the night because it came off the back of that fire appeal film.”
Stevie Wonder gets as much time as he wants. The show had to build in significant extra time for Stevie Wonder’s tribute performance for Quincy Jones, knowing from experience that he plays by his own rules. “When you ask Stevie Wonder to do the show, you have to accept two things,” Winston explains. “You’re getting one of the biggest icons alive — he’s my favorite artist of all time, I am starstruck by him, and I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world I am starstruck by. But you have to accept he’s going to do what he wants, and he’s going to take as long as he wants. We put him in the Motown tribute three years ago. He had a three-minute slot with Chris Stapleton, and it was an act three, and he did nine minutes. And it was the best nine minutes.” This year, when Wonder agreed to perform, Winston immediately called the president of CBS Entertainment, Amy Reisenbach, who told him “You’ve got 30 minutes leeway. If you need to go all the way to four hours, you can.”
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Will Smith made his first big awards show appearance since he was banned from the Oscars for slapping Chris Rock — but that choice, for the Quincy Jones tribute, sparked no internal debate. “Everyone wanted him to do it. I really wanted him, the Academy wanted him, he was close to Quincy,” says Winston. “We called Will Smith and he went, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ And that was it.” He adds, “We’re a different show. You know, it’s not for me to comment on other shows. I’m so proud to produce this show… We can do what we want.”
Chappell Roan wasn’t sure about choosing “Pink Pony Club” as her performance — but then came the fires. “I advocated very loudly and for a long time for ‘Pink Pony Club,’” Winston recalls. “When the fires happened, I went to them again and said, ‘There is a love letter to Los Angeles. You have a song that is not only beautiful and powerful, but it is literally about the freedom that you found in Los Angeles.’”
The Best New Artist medley required military precision.The show’s most ambitious sequence, a seamless, non-stop musical performance featuring several of the Best New Artist nominees, moving from stage to stage within the arena, was a technical feat. The only slight cheat was having Khruangbin pre-record their performance for sheer logistical reasons — there wasn’t enough space in the arena for all of the performances otherwise. When the sequence concluded with Raye’s performance, the production truck erupted in celebration. “We were literally punching the air, we’re hitting the walls,” Winston says. “It was without question the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do on the show.”
