CLEVELAND, Ohio — My sweet spot in last week’s wack-a-doodle Grammy Awards was when Tyler Joseph, lead singer of Twenty One Pilots, and drummer Josh Dun took off their tuxedo pantaloons before receiving their little golden Victrolas. The band won best pop duo/group performance for the song “Stressed Out.”
Joseph told a story of being musician nobodies from Columbus, Ohio, and watching the Grammy Awards from his rented house. It was a bunch of guys in their underwear watching TV. Joseph and Dun vowed if they ever won a Grammy, they’d accept it in their U-trousers.
And so they did. I was thinking, “Uh-oh. Don’t do this.”
But after he told that silly, tender, youthful story, it all seemed supremely sweet and heartfelt. Especially winning was the motto with which Joseph left the audience. The moral of the story, he said, was: “Because anyone from anywhere can do anything.”
Nothing else that happened at that crazy awards show — and a whole heck of a lot of jaw-dropping, nutty stuff took place — moved my heart as much as the story of those two guys standing there in their gutchies.
“Because anyone from anywhere can do anything.”
That phrase kept echoing in my head the next couple of days. Where in my career had that really been true? Then I remembered.
It was maybe 20 years ago. I was on the pop music team back then. There were two or three of us.
The word came down from on high. One of our big bosses at The Plain Dealer had recently made the acquaintance of the district attorney of New Orleans. His son, a piano player, was going to be appearing at a Holiday Inn in Cleveland the next weekend. Somebody was to be assigned to review that performance.
None of us were thrilled at the prospect of reviewing a lounge-bar piano player. If the guy was any good, why wasn’t he at least playing at Nighttown on Cedar Hill in Cleveland Heights?
It sounded like nothing more than a cheesy, quid pro quo favor from one of our bosses to an influential politician. Why did we have to get involved? Not one of us had ever heard of him. And we knew our stuff.
If our boss wanted to do his new friend’s son a favor, why not simply give him a free ad in Friday magazine? It didn’t just sound like a mere review was requested. Reading between the lines, it was pretty clear a positive review was required. What if he was terrible? We had our standards, if little else.
The pop music team gathered with our editor to decide how this would be handled. Nobody wanted to get in dutch with Mr. Upstairs. So the late Eddie Hill, the junior member of the team, and a very talented writer/critic, was given the dangerous assignment.
I saw Eddie in the office the day after the Holiday Inn show. I asked how the guy was. Eddie said that he was great, a super talent.
“No kidding,” I said in a mild sort of shock. “What was his name again?”
“Harry Connick Jr.,” said Eddie.
“Because anyone from anywhere can do anything.”
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