Carrie Underwood was scared. Jennifer Hudson was riveting. Chris Brown and Rihanna were MIA and almost as loud in their joint absence as Coldplay was on percussion.
The night's backstage doings—and sayings—at an emotional and powerful 51st Annual Grammy Awards:
5:20 p.m PT.: On stage, the Coldplay boys are banging their drums so loud that even though I'm not listening to the show telecast, my backstage self can hear them banging their drums so loud.
• "I can't believe I'm holding this priceless artifact with $30 eBay dress," the Grammy-toting, Hawaiian-music-singing Tia Carrere jokes.
• Uh, actually, Carrere isn't really joking. Her floor-length, sleeveless black gown and accessories ran her less than 100 bucks, she says: "It was my statement for our economic times."
• President Obama probably would prefer Carrere engage in a little economic stimulus, but Tia would prefer to playfully tweak her fellow native Hawaiian. "He went to the most expensive school in town," she says. "I went to the rather inexpensive Catholic school."
• Granted, the press that does the Grammys is a lot more fannish than it is pit bull, but I'd challenge a pit bull not to give it up even a little for Jennifer Hudson. Her breakdown at the end of "You Pulled Me Through" on the TV telecast draws applause back here. And, I'm guessing, plenty more elsewhere.
• The unspoken story of the night is the still-evolving Chris Brown-Rihanna situation. The upfront theme of the night is tears. They have been flowing for hours. From George Carlin's daughter to Frank Zappa's son Dweezil. And now to Hudson.
• There is simply no talk back here among the Grammy folk of Brown and Rihanna. It's unclear if they just don't want to broach the subject with us, or if they just don't know Brown was surrending to police for questioning even as the prime-time show got underway.
• Carrie Underwood, a winner on the preshow for Female Country Vocal, is just like you, assuming you, too, still feel kinda dorky no matter how successful you are. As Underwood confesses of her Grammy weekend party encounters—or almost-encounters, as it were: "I wanted to meet Prince, but I was just scared."
• Underwood tells me she watched the performance of Hudson, a fellow American Idol alum, on a TV monitor. The impact of the moment, however, was not lost. "I think it was healing," she says. "I hope she can find peace."
• 7 p.m.: Estelle may have just nailed Kanye West, with whom she shared a Grammy win for Rap/Sung Collaboration: "Genius, crazy—it's the same thing."
• Estelle may have just nailed Jennifer Hudson, too: "I was hoping she won, the chick is brave…If that had happened to be, I would've gone and hid for two years."
• Anthony Hamilton won a Traditional R&B Vocal Grammy with Al Green, a last-minute performer tonight subbing for Rihanna. I ask Hamilton if he knows just how quickly the Green-Justin Timberlake opening number came together. "I think it was about an hour and a half before the preshow," he says. After a "Really?" slips out of my mouth, Hamilton backtracks a little, and seems to suggest Green was practicing last night. "He knew something could happen," he says.
• If Green were practicing last night, he or Grammy producers are psychic. The incident in which police say Brown is being investigated, and which E! News sources say Rihanna was the victim, occurred around 12:30 a.m. this morning.
• On the telecast, Duke Fakir tore it up with Jamie Fox, Ne-Yo and Smokey Robinson. But the last surviving original member of the Four Tops is true to the memory of his late friends. "It was fun with those guys," Fakir says, "but there's nothing like the real deal."
8:30 p.m.: Ne-Yo is spotted by some front-row reporters walking by the room. "Ne-Yo! Ne-Yo!" No dice.
• Attendance in the big press-conference room is usually spotty. Attendance tonight has been unusually light, as the case of the fleeing Ne-Yo attests.
• Is the Chris Brown-Rihanna storyline scaring away the stars from the microphones? It's still hard to tell. I'm told that Ne-Yo wasn't even aware of Brown's arrest on suspicion of making criminal threats until informed of it in a post-how, one-on-one interview with Extra.
• Has Jennifer Hudson gone through enough without putting herself through one more press conference? Apparently, and understandably so. She's also a no-show.
• Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, the night's big winners, though far from its main storyline, are the first Grammy winners in our midst in more than an hour. Neither are known to be intimates of Brown or Rihanna, so they get to field softballs and drop witty lines, à la Plant's explanation of how a Led Zeppelin rock god ended up dueting with a bluegrass queen: "I got lost in Nashville on my way to London."
• Neil Portnow, not Ne-Yo, runs the Recording Academy, so it's his job to face the music—and walk into the room. And he does. I ask him when he was informed that neither Brown nor Riahanna, both scheduled performers, were out. "It was pretty late in the afternoon—2ish," he says. The prime-time show started only about three hours later, at 5 p.m. Los Angeles time.
• Portnow repeats an earlier statement that Rihanna told the Academy she was "unable" to attend. He doesn't say what Brown said, veering off into a Luciano Pavarotti story before he's hijacked by another reporter.
• Back to Rihanna and Brown: "Musicians are no different than anybody else. I'm not judging," says Portnow. "I'm sorriest that they weren't there for their moments on stage."
• Portnow initially tried to pass off tonight's show reshuffling as the stuff of live TV. But the Brown-Rihanna situation created two holes in the show's lineup, and I ask him if he'd ever faced so many late-breaking crises. "During my tenure," he concedes, "I've not had a situation quite as significant as two [compromised segments]." Ultimately, Portnow was only able to fill Rihanna's opening-show slot; Brown's was simply cut.
• At the end of a long night, Portnow is cool, calm and spinning. He tells us, in so many words, that tonight was about what happened onstage, not offstage. "I'm hoping that is [the] story, and should not be eclipsed by this part of business," he says. Well, a man can hope.