Grammy-tastic.

Enjoy the clip of Bob and the Soy Bomb from the 1998 Grammy Awards.

So far, my favorite Six Degrees radio show is the Grammy Show that I did yesterday. Didn't include a six-degree challenge, but probably worked on the show as much as I've worked on any show that did include a challenge. I did a sort of very subjective survey of Grammy Winners Past. To keep it manageable I just went backwards in ten-year jumps, back to 1958.

1958 gave us Henry Mancini's "Theme from Peter Gunn" (Album of the Year) and Ella Fitzgerald doing "I Got it Bad (and that ain't good)" from "The Duke Ellington Songbook" which won the Best Jazz Performance-Individual award.

1968 yielded Jimmy Webb's "Up, Up and Away" by the Fifth Dimension and "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", the Joe Zawinul tune by Cannonball Adderly.

1978 - getting into the era of my young adulthood. Songs by Fleetwood Mac bookended a live-in-Europe Al Jarreau recording.
I conciously avoided using anything from "Hotel California" which won Record of the Year. Enough said?
Here is my first rant: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year? Someone on NPR on Friday had a funny commentary on the Grammys. He likened the Awards Show to a summer camp where everybody gets a prize for something.

1988 was a very fat year for the Grammy Awards. Or maybe I mean it was a fat year for music fans. Record(!?) of the Year was Paul Simon's "Graceland", and Album of the Year was U2's "The Joshua Tree". I'm certainly nailing myself into a particular demographic group now. I was 35 in the summer of 1987 and these two albums are landmarks in my musical world. Very different records, both high points for the artists that made them.

1998's Best New Artist was Paula Cole. Haven't heard a lot from her in the past few years, but recently she did appear - in her role as a songwriter - on a television segment about last year's Herbie Hancock project called "Possibilities".
Album of the Year was Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind", produced by Daniel Lanois. Record of the Year and Song of the Year honors went to "Sunny Came Home" from Shawn Colvin.

I played a few pieces by some of this year's nominees - a few from Herbie Hancock's "River: The Joni Letters", a couple of selections from the Robert Plant - Alison Krauss record "Raising Sand", and of course one each from Feist and Amy Winehouse and one each from Raheem De Vaughn and Bruce Springsteen.

I'm sitting in front of the tube now - counting down the next 21 minutes 'till the Grammys starts. You can follow that story here.