GRAMMY’S GONNA GRAMMY: THE FIRST “GRAMMY MOMENT”

The way Ken Ehrlich remembers it, his phone rang at 2:00 in the morning, on the eve of the very first Grammy Awards he ever produced. “It wasn’t two or three nights before; it was definitely the night before,” Ehrlich says from his home office.

Barbra Streisand had asked him for his phone number during rehearsals for the 1980 Grammys, where she and Neil Diamond were set to perform, unbilled and unannounced, their dying-love ballad, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

“She calls and says, ‘I have an idea,’” recalls Ehrlich. “During the number, I want to brush my hand up against his cheek. Do you think I should brush my left hand against his right cheek, or my right hand against his left cheek?’ And I said, ‘I think left hand, right cheek.’ She said, ‘That’s what I was thinkin' too.’ And I went back to sleep for three hours.”

The way Streisand remembers it, she came up with the idea on the spot. “When Neil and I finally met in the center of the stage,” she wrote in her best-selling memoir My Name Is Barbra, “I impulsively reached up and caressed his face. The audience went wild. Neil held on to my hand, and at the end of the song, he brought it to his lips and kissed it... The song stopped the show.”

Everyone agrees that Streisand and Diamond had never performed the #1 hit onstage together before that February evening. The duet was kept a secret from both the viewing audience and the bizzers and nominees at the Shrine Auditorium. The two superstars weren’t even introduced. “I didn’t want to have anybody say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond,’” says Ehrlich. “I just wanted the two of them to magically appear, one at a time, from each side of the stage. The audience couldn’t even see them. Barbra and Neil were basically in the dark.” When the two singers were finally visible, they just stood there—“It was at least 20 seconds,” says Ehrlich—as the audience gasped, then cheered wildly, before the pair launched into their sad, florid (and floral) tale.

Ladies and gentlemen, the first “Grammy moment.”

“I’m probably overstating the importance of them, but people began to tune in to the show because of those unexpected combinations and moments,” says Ehrlich of what became his and the show’s signature flourish: rarified musical couplings (Eminem and Elton, Prince and Beyoncé) and cross-genre experiments (most famously, Aretha Franklin performing “Nessun Dorma”).

Streisand and Diamond were aesthetically in keeping with the Grammys’ MOR heart, but Ehrlich had made his bones producing the rock-centered performance shows Soundstage and Midnight Special and that year, he'd booked Bob Dylan (tuxedoed, singing “Gotta Serve Somebody”) and Song and Record of the Year winner The Doobie Brothers (“What a Fool Believes”). In ’79 Billy Joel hadn't even bothered to show up, and producer Phil Ramone accepted the Song and Record trophies for “Just the Way You Are.” “The Academy wanted the show to be more contemporary, but it didn’t have a lot of credibility with those kinds of artists,” says Ehrlich. “U2 laughed at me for a few years. Bruce Springsteen said no. But I got them both.”

Ehrlich produced or executive-produced the Grammys until 2020. “I loved the show,” he says today. Ben Winston, Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins are now co-executive producers, curators of their own Grammy moments. But on 2/4, when Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars doubtless perform their own florid power ballad, “Die With a Smile,” perhaps for the first time on television, some of those around in 1980 will remember who did it first.