Inside the Grammy Awards’ response to the L.A. wildfires

As soon as Harvey Mason Jr. was convinced that firefighters had gotten a handle on this month’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires, the head of the Recording Academy turned his mind to a somewhat less dramatic matter.

Hotel rooms.

“I know that sounds weird,” said Mason, whose organization’s biggest event — the annual Grammy Awards ceremony recognizing the best in pop music — was just weeks away when local officials assured him that moving forward would be safe. “But if we’re having people fly into the city for our show, are we gonna be displacing people who need rooms because they lost their homes?”

To find out, Mason began working the phones, soliciting input from L.A.’s tourism department and from hotels including the JW Marriott next door to downtown’s Crypto.com Arena, where the 67th Grammys will be held Sunday night with nominees, presenters and performers including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Herbie Hancock, Shakira, Charli XCX, Doechii, John Legend, Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar.

“I also called the guy who manages the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I thought was probably a place where a lot of people from our industry go,” Mason recalled. “He said, ‘We’re at below 30% occupancy. Everyone on the outside feels like the city’s shut down and everything’s burning and we’re out of business. We need people to come.’ ”

For the Recording Academy, Sunday’s show — set to be broadcast live on CBS and streamed on Paramount+ — isn’t just an opportunity to reveal who won record of the year and who was named best new artist. It’s also a crucial gig for the 6,500 people the academy says the Grammys employ in Los Angeles: dancers and drivers and caterers and stagehands, many of whom have yet to recover from the economic stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hollywood strikes.

Just as important, in Mason’s view, is the chance to use the telecast and its associated events to aid in fire relief. Already, the academy says it’s distributed north of $4 million to more than 2,000 music professionals affected by the wildfires; the TV show itself will feature appeals to donate to MusiCares, the academy’s philanthropic arm, as well as to groups providing relief throughout Southern California.

Mason said those considerations outweighed his concerns about “the optics” of essentially throwing a party at a moment when thousands of Angelenos have seen their homes or business destroyed.

“People in the business were concerned about: If we do this, are we gonna look bad?” he said. (Indeed, music companies like Spotify and Universal Music Group called off their annual Grammy-week parties.) “But to me, canceling does the opposite of what needs to happen,” Mason added. “We need to raise money, we need to raise awareness and we need to show a unity around our community and around the city of L.A. — that we’re going through a hardship but we’ll bounce back.”

Striking the right tone for the show “is a high-wire act, there’s no question,” says Ben Winston, one of the Grammys’ executive producers along with Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins. Winston has experience in that effort: In 2021 he and his team designed the telecast around COVID-19 restrictions that had pop stars in masks; in 2022 they mounted the show just a week after Will Smith shocked the world by slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Until 2023, Winston ran James Corden’s CBS late-night show, which he called “an hour of fun and silliness” that frequently ran up against the real world. “A natural disaster or a school shooting happens right before you go on, and you’ve got this superstar dancing in the street. We got very used to saying: ‘Is that appropriate? How do we get there?’ ”

Sunday’s show will honor firefighters and other first responders and showcase impacted small-business owners; it will also “celebrate the spirit of the city of Los Angeles,” according to Winston, including several performances “that didn’t exist before the fires,” he said. “There’s a couple of artists who called afterwards and said, ‘I was gonna sing this, but how would you guys feel if I now sang that?’ ”

There’s also a tribute planned to Quincy Jones, the hugely influential music figure who died at 91 in November. Said Kapoor of the segment: “It’s maybe a little bigger than what we would normally do. The entire Grammy show could actually be Quincy because of how many genres he touched and how much work he accomplished and the love of the industry for him.”

One element the show won’t include, Winston said, is a performance by Kendrick Lamar of “Not Like Us,” the Grammy-nominated diss track that capped Lamar’s epic feud last year with Drake. Lamar is scheduled to headline the Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 9, “and the NFL always make their Super Bowl halftime performers sign a deal that says they’re not allowed to perform anywhere for a matter of weeks,” Winston said. “We’ve never had a Super Bowl performer on the Grammys. That’s the NFL’s call, it’s not the artist’s.” (Winston did promise that the show would contain “a couple of surprises.”)

Ratings of the previous two telecasts were both up significantly, but Winston expects numbers to be down this year, in part because the show’s marketing campaign was narrowed to just over a week in length, compared to the usual month.

“I was very passionate about the show happening,” Winston said, “but what we weren’t comfortable with while people were evacuating was: ‘Hey, watch the Grammys!’ ”

Mason didn’t seem worried by the prospect of a ratings dip, though he also knows that viewership matters — particularly this year.

“The reason we give these awards is so that we can have a broadcast, and the reason we have a broadcast is so we can have a licensing fee come in the door that goes back out to serve music people,” he said. “There’s no greater example of that than this fire and this show.

“Whoever wins a Grammy on this telecast is gonna be directly tied to the people who get help from the money that comes in from the show.”