Katy Perry Unpeeled — and Other Signs of Life in the Dead of the Grammys PressRoom

Paul McCartney comes out supercool and chatty. I ask him about his plans for Coachella — how the gig came about, and what kind of set he may do. He says he agreed to play Coachella after he was asked because he heard it was a cool thing to do. As to his set, Sir Paul says that he usually decides that stuff a few days before the gig.

John Linnell of They Might Be Giants talks about the rationale behind the band’s move to the children’s market: “It’s crazy money!” he exclaims. “Those kids are loaded.”

Peter Bogdanovich discusses winning the Grammy for Best Long-form Music Video, his four-hour documentary of Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down a Dream. Says the director of The Last Picture Show of his rock project: “It’s longer than Gone With the Wind, but it plays.”

We learn from a dashing, best-dressed award–winning will.i.am that the new Black-Eyed Peas album will be called The End, and will feature a song unimaginatively titled “Boom Boom Boom” (and apparently not a John Lee Hooker cover).

Natalie Cole sits down and talks about heroin addiction, her search for a kidney after contracting hepatitis C, and the offers she’s had from fans volunteering to actually donate an organ to her. That’s the power of music: to be so moved and connected to a performer that you’d actually give a piece of your body to them. Would anyone in this room do that?

I’d donate a kidney to Katy Perry after her little performance in the pressroom. Say what you will about her music and what she represents; anyone with the nerve, confidence and ambition to plant her body inside a giant banana and descend onto the national stage to sing a semiprurient song about hot lesbian action is inherently more interesting than the grunts who write about her. After the show, Perry is incredibly charming, forthright and thoughtful. That huge smile on her face and that insanely bodacious body, combined with wit and natural grace, make the room a million times brighter than it had been moments before.

She ends her conversation with thoughts on traveling with the Warped Tour this summer, and how people had dismissed her as being underprepared to rock on that particular stage. She brushes them aside with a clean little exclamation point: “I’m at the Grammys, so fuck them!”