Toby Keith photo courtesy of Show Dog Nashville.

Sunday night’s CBS telecast of the “44th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards” was an ratings winner for the network as an average of 14 million fans hung in throughout the broadcast for the final Entertainer of the Year showdown, in which Carrie Underwood was a surprise victor.

But the biggest drama took place behind the scenes. Toby Keith lambasted a reporter, Tim McGraw walked out during rehearsals, and the folks in the business continue to debate the Academy’s increasing use of fan votes to determine the winners.

One place where there’s no controversy comes in re-broadcast of the show. GAC will re-air the Reba McEntire-hosted event — complete with performances from Sugarland, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert and Heidi Newfield — on Sunday, May 31.

When the show airs, you can watch it with the knowledge of all the following controversy that was erupting away from the cameras:

• Toby hauled into a reporter for The Tennessean who ran a piece that called attention to the new issue of Rolling Stone, in which actor Ethan Hawke wrote a Kris Kristofferson profile that takes up a whopping 14 pages in the magazine. The opening section details an incident from 2003, now in dispute, in which Kris has a verbal spat with an unnamed hit-making star. The Tennessean pointed out that the description pretty much had to be Toby. None too happy, Toby whipped out a string of four-letter words in verbally dressing down the journalist in front of his fellow reporters. Accounts can be found in The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and HitFix.com, among others.

As it was happening, at least one of the journalists in the room was typing out an “Oh, my God!” message to a press member back in Nashville. Toby, perhaps inadvertently, all but guaranteed the Rolling Stone piece would get even more coverage. In the end, Toby insisted the original confrontation with Kris never happened, Kris said he doesn’t recall it, Rolling Stone stood by the story, and Ethan has remained quiet.

Peter Cooper, The Tennessean reporter who took all the abuse, has a rather ironic connection to all of this; he provided backing vocals for a Todd Snider cut on the 2006 tribute album The Pilgrim: A Celebration Of Kris Kristofferson.

• Toby’s faceoff was not impromptu. He told HitFix.com at a party the previous night at his I Love This Bar & Grille that he hoped to see Cooper the next day at the ACMs. Toby performed a half-hour set at the party with a bottle of bourbon in his hand, though he was preceded by an NFL player. The Las Vegas Sun indicated the New England Patriots’ Matt Light “proceeded to stagger onstage” and forget the words to a song he delivered through “drunken antics.” Toby, the paper said, “appeared to be just as far gone,” describing his appearance as “bleary and bloodshot-eyed.” Toby’s show, which ended at 2:15 a.m., included a cover of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.”

• Tim had been billed as a performer on the ACMs, so his fans were likely surprised to sit through the entire broadcast and not see him. Tim left his Saturday rehearsal before it was over, according to Entertainment Weekly. It was, ACM chief Bob Romeo told The Tennessean, Tim’s choice, attributing his absence to “creative differences.” Tim was still slated to perform during Monday’s taping of an ACM-related George Strait special for CBS. Blake Shelton, who did a stripped-down version of “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” Sunday, was announced as an ACM performer about four-and-a-half hours before the show started.

• A year ago, Kenny Chesney questioned the validity of turning the ACM into a public vote, saying that makes it “a sweepstakes to see who can push people’s buttons the hardest on the Internet.” Indeed, at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville last month, a panelist spoke about using text-message marketing to influence fan voting at awards shows. It remains a controversial subject within the business, and the Associated Press indicated artists are torn on the subject. “There’s not as much control over that,” John Michael Montgomery said. “I know that a lot of times they feel the fan base is manipulated a lot more.” Taylor Swift, who won Album of the Year and hopes she’ll get an Entertainer nomination in 2010, took the opposite position. “I just hope they keep it fan-voted,” she said. “The fans are the reason the album was so big. I’ll spend my life trying to thank them.”

ShareThis