Going Through Hoops for Tickets

Where have all the tickets gone?

That’s what a lot of people in the music business are asking about the Grammy Awards as the show prepares to take over Staples Center on Wednesday.

Publicists for several major record companies, charged with coordinating ticket requests, report that their allocations not only didn’t increase over last year’s show at the much smaller Shrine Auditorium, but actually decreased.

Do the math: Staples has about 14,000 seats available on Grammy night. The Shrine had fewer than 6,000. But the sponsoring National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences had no trouble filling the arena, President C. Michael Greene says--and there are enough people on the waiting list to almost fill the Shrine as well.

“The fact is that we’re over 15,000 people in academy membership now,” Greene says. “And we have some major new sponsorships, such as Ford doing Grammy in the Schools, and we make some tickets available to them so their people can come and enjoy the event as well.”

One major point of moving the Grammys to an arena, which was also done in 1997 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, was to accommodate more academy members. In the smaller Shrine or Radio City Music Hall in New York, there has been little seating left for the academy rank and file after nonmember record company executives, nominees, managers, agents and so on are taken care of.

Apparently, Greene says, members who knew there was no chance of getting a seat at a smaller location didn’t even try. Now they figured they had a shot in the arena, so requests increased in numbers much greater than the boost in seating.

MORE GRAMMY MATH: Tickets for the academy members range up to $950 for the so-called platinum seats, with an average price about $600 for the 11,000 that were sold. (The rest went to nominees and their guests, with about 600 going to the public via radio station contests.)

Add to that the roughly 120 luxury suites being used for the event, which cost a cool $40,000 each for the night--with the academy splitting their revenue with Staples.

The total ticket take for NARAS on Wednesday will come to about $9 million, about three times as much as at the Shrine or Radio City.

And yet, says Greene, “we really don’t make any more money in this.”

That’s a statement sure to raise eyebrows among those in the business who have been critical of the high-salaried Greene and have questioned the spending of funds raised for various academy charities.

But Staples Center’s higher rent and the greater production costs of staging a show in such a building make the finances “about a wash,” Greene says.

Some of the costly features resulted from lessons learned during the Madison Square Garden experience. Audio design and equipment have been tailored to maximize the sound quality for those in attendance.

And such touches as carpeting on the floor and stairways are being done to add elegance and diminish the cavern-like ambience of the huge arena.

SPEAKING OF CAVERNS: Veteran artist manager Ron Stone remembers the Grammys’ one previous arena visit with some amusement. He was at Madison Square Garden with his client Tracy Chapman, who was scheduled to perform on the telecast and was also nominated in the contemporary folk category--which was to be given out in the afternoon “pre-telecast” segment. She and Stone were in her dressing room when she was announced as a winner.

“We headed in the general direction of the stage,” Stone recalls. “And we never made it. The place was just so big and the dressing rooms so far away that we couldn’t find the way to the stage. It was like ‘Spinal Tap.’ We didn’t even get to the floor to yell, ‘We’re here!’ That’s a big drawback of an arena setting.”

Greene makes assurances that such things won’t happen at Staples. In fact, with NARAS’ involvement, several elements of the arena were configured to make the show a smooth experience for the nominees and performers, including an elevator’s being relocated to provide a more direct route between the stage and the media tent in the parking lot.

They’re also using the space outside to try to create more of the surrounding excitement New York boosters say is lacking in Los Angeles.

The arrivals area is being expanded to give it more of an Academy Awards feeling.

There was also some grumbling that the crowd at Madison Square Garden seemed somewhat removed from the performers and presenters onstage.

“We’re pulling the seats up closer to the stage here,” Greene says. “And through lights and set design and anything we can do, we’re trying to shrink down the emotional size of the hall.”

THE STAGE’S A WORLD: Production designer Bob Keene tested the arena waters at the Madison Square Garden show, taking advantage of the freedoms afforded by not being confined to a conventional stage and proscenium.

This time he’s taken it even further.

Noting that Staples Center is actually much larger than the Garden, he was afraid of having the stage get swallowed up by the wide-open spaces. So he thought big.

“A normal touring show like Bette Midler or the Eagles or Ricky Martin is a third of the size of our stage,” he says, showing artist renderings of the massive structure of trapezoids and circles at his Burbank office. “Instead of 80 feet wide, like at the Shrine, this is 200 feet.”

At the Garden, though, the stage was essentially an adaptation of the conventional standard, with two staging areas that could be used alternately for performances and presentations.

At Staples, the stage will have three areas, and action in individual performances will often move through all three, allowing more elaborate stage sets and effects to be used than ever before.

Look for such spectacles as Kid Rock flying across the stage and his piano exploding, while Britney Spears is apparently planning a “Wizard of Oz” theme for her showcase.

And all this must be changed quickly and quietly.

“One minute it will be the Backstreet Boys performing, and five minutes later it has to be ready for Kid Rock,” says Keene, who’s working on his 13th Grammy show and has also done Academy Awards, Emmy and Tony shows. “They have to unplug everything, roll it offstage, roll new stuff in, plug it all in, test every microphone and every connection in about five minutes, without anyone noticing.”