'Book of Mormon''s Trey Parker Promises Special Grammy Party If They Win

Robert Lopez, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker pose with the award for Best Musical in the press room of the 65th Annual Tony Awards.

Mike Coppola/WireImage for Tony Awards Productions

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, along with Robert Lopez, the composer and lyricist known for the hit show Avenue Q, received a Grammy nomination last night for their work on the smash Broadway show The Book of Mormon. The three are up for Best Musical Show Album, and Parker – who is still bitter about losing an Oscar to Phil Collins in 2000, when Collins won for "You'll Be in My Heart" and the South Park duo were up for "Blame Canada" – doesn't plan on leaving the Grammys empty-handed.

"We have to win. I’m not losing to Phil Collins again," Parker told Rolling Stone. He's even willing to bribe voters with the promise of a Grammy party with a unique hook – Parker and Lopez playing the songs of Elton John and Billy Joel on dueling pianos.

"Bobby is the Billy Joel guy, and I’m such an Elton John guy," Parker said. "If you sit either one of us down at a piano, he’s gonna bust out Billy Joel, and I’m gonna bust out Elton John."

Inviting voters to the proposed party is a change of tune for Parker. Initially, when he thought the nominees would not be allowed to attend the awards show since their category isn't among those televised, he joked that the piano tribute would be a pre-Grammy party at P.F. Chang's: "I actually made a good amount of money from Book Of Mormon, and I’m going to use all that money to have the biggest Grammy party. It’s going to be a huge party, and it’s only going to be me, Bobby and Matt. We’re gonna be at P.F. Chang’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, and no one else can come."

To Parker, his past experiences with the Emmys are no joke. "South Park, Family Guy and The Simpsons, three pretty big shows – they won’t even let us go to the real Emmys," he said. "Fuck the Emmys super-hard. That’s the one that really pisses me off, because those are big shows... To say that you’re gonna have this thing about the best of something on television, but The Simpsons doesn’t count because it’s animated, that’s bullshit."

Lopez attended the Grammys when Avenue Q was nominated. "Even though we lost to Wicked and it was kind of a bummer night for us, it was the best awards show I’ve ever seen in person," he said. "It was so cool. It was like a great rock show."

Hearing that, Parker said he'd welcome a Grammy invite. "I’ll bring my P.F. Chang’s and I’ll go," he said.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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