OK, so you already know Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are making their world debut tonight as a performing couple at the Grammys.

But can you name the Issaquah-bred rock band that's up for two awards?

Or how about this year's new ethnic-music category, which owes its existence to efforts by the Northwest music industry? (Hint: The category is named after a state.)

Those questions may sound like trivia, but the answers (read on) are proof positive that — after years of snubbing their noses at glitz and glamour — Northwest musicians have finally become insiders in the national music industry. Local artists are nominated for five Grammys this year.

The force behind that subtle but seismic shift is the congregation of recording artists and others who make up the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), which presents the Grammy Awards.

Turning a scrappy batch of anarchists and outsiders — grunge-rock guitar players, geeky studio engineers, alternative-club operators and indie-record-label owners — into a nationally recognized industry force was no walk in the park, says Dave Dederer, former chapter board president and guitarist in the rock band The Presidents of the United States of America.

"Our inclination to be distrustful of anything that comes from New York or L.A. as overly showbiz was a real obstacle," he says. "That whole Northwest, bohemian-yet-blue-collar, 'I'm-a-logger-and-I-read-Sartre' thing."

Yet it did get done, in large part thanks to two unlikely characters: Deborah Semer, a near-recklessly determined former heavy-metal drummer, and Dave Meinert, a deceptively laid-back band manager who sometimes seems to have his hand in every pot on the Seattle pop-music stove.

How these two helped transform Seattle from a business backwater to a power player in the music industry is a fascinating story. The Academy's efforts have transformed the politics of local music, bringing on what some insiders call the most explosive local scene since grunge.

That double-nominated rock group, by the way, is Modest Mouse. And Hawaiian is the ethnic-music category, the creation of which is oddly connected to the Northwest.

Hendrix never won

Historically, Seattle has been on the periphery of the music business — a good place to be from, but not to hang around. Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, for example, both played music as young men on Seattle's Jackson Street, but didn't start winning Grammys until they left town. (Grammy scorecard: Quincy 27, Ray 12. The late soul singer Charles is nominated for seven awards this year.)

Another Seattle musician who left town to make it — Jimi Hendrix — never did win a Grammy, though that's understandable, since the year he released "Are You Experienced?" (1967) was the same year the Beatles put out "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The Beatles won.

It would be a long time before a musical force as strong as Hendrix or the Beatles would burst on the scene, but in the late '80s and early '90s, Seattle grunge-rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam did the trick, revolutionizing rock music. Soon the trend of leaving town to make it big started to change.

The grungers not only won Grammys — two for Soundgarden, one each for Nirvana and Pearl Jam — but many also poured their energies into the scene back home.

DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES Deborah Semer, a former rock 'n' roll drummer, is credited with helping to organize the local music industry during her tenure as executive director of the local chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard built Studio Litho, and the band did benefits for the budding hip hop/punk nonprofit club, The Vera Project. Krist Novoselic, who played bass with Nirvana, lobbied fellow West Seattleite and soon-to-be Mayor Greg Nickels to create a music office, then joined the NARAS board.

Gradually, says Ben London, current executive director of the local chapter, Seattle began to acquire a critical mass of "lawyers, booking agents and publicists."

An unlikely champion

Semer, London's predecessor, was in some ways an unlikely person to bring everyone together. Raised in Puyallup, she played rock in college and worked at the Millionair Club, a charity that serves the homeless and unemployed, before taking the job as executive director of the Pacific Northwest Chapter in 1998.

The cheeky Semer combined her social-service background with a passion for the arts, overcoming native skepticism, says Dederer, by convincing people the Recording Academy was about more than the Grammys.

"The Grammys was the turnoff for people up here," says Semer. "So we would talk about all the other things we did."

The academy chapter here is closely affiliated with the Grammy Foundation, which sponsors education and advocacy initiatives, and the MusiCares Foundation, which has given out $114,000 to Northwest musicians in need of financial help over the past two years.

Dederer says Semer persuaded him to join the chapter by explaining that side of the organization.

"I had been nominated for Grammys twice," he says, "but I knew nothing about the process. I learned that the Recording Academy takes the revenue from the Grammy telecast and puts it back into education and social-services programs for music people. It's the only place in the music business where that happens."

Membership ballooned to nearly 750. It's now around 650, with 350 qualified to vote for the Grammys.

"Deborah Semer took us from being a very small branch in the hinterlands to being a fully fledged chapter with as much power as the other chapters in the rest of the country," says Seattle studio owner Glenn Lorbecki, who served as chapter president.

Ironically, part of Semer's strategy for the local chapter was to take up a cause thousands of miles away: Hawaii's decades-old dream of establishing its own Grammy category.

Reaching to Hawaii

Hawaii has a huge, indigenous music scene that includes slack-key guitar — enormously popular on the mainland, thanks to pianist George Winston's Dancing Cat label — ukulele music, "Jawaiian" music (Hawaiian reggae), rap, traditional hula chant and an array of contemporized traditional forms. Mountain Apple Co., a distributor, estimates total sales of Hawaiian music at 2 million to 3 million CDs per year.

Yet no Hawaiian musician or group has ever won a Grammy — not even Don Ho or Israel Kamakawiwo`ole, whose version of "Over the Rainbow" sold half a million records after it was used on an e-Toys TV ad.

Seeing an opportunity to stabilize chapter membership while helping the Hawaiians get their Grammy, Semer pushed for the Pacific Northwest Chapter to become the official home for Hawaiians and started exploring the new category.

Efforts in the past had failed because no one could agree on what a Hawaiian record was and because the national group wanted an informed voting bloc on the islands. After two years of intense discussions, Semer got all sides to agree that eligible recordings would have a 51 percent minimum of Hawaiian-language content (instrumentals would be decided on traditionality). Along the way, she snagged the Hawaiian territory for the Pacific Northwest and recruited 71 new voting members.

Of the five Hawaiian albums nominated this year, two have deep Northwest connections. "Amy and Willie Live," featuring a reunion of diva Amy Hanaiali'i Gilliom and blues rocker Willie K, was recorded primarily at Seattle's Pier 62/63 and produced by WorldSound, a label based in Seattle and Honolulu.

"Slack Key Guitar Volume 2" was produced by guitarist Charles Michael Brotman, who grew up on Mercer Island and attended Cornish College and The Evergreen State College.

Dave Dederer, former president of the local chapter.

A political force emerges

Before the Hawaiian encounter, Semer had won an important battle back home. In 1985, the city had imposed restrictions that made it virtually impossible to present all-ages dances.

When NARAS joined the fray against the Teen Dance Ordinance, people in power started to listen.

Councilman Peter Steinbrueck, the swing vote in this hot-button issue, distinctly remembers when Semer and Experience Music Project's Robert Santelli, who now sits on the chapter's board, came to his office.

"It was a pivotal moment," he said. "The two of them came in and they presented the case very well. Deborah played an important part in helping to organize the music community. They hadn't been a political force. Now, I think, there's been a learning curve here. If you ignore the politics, it's at your peril."

The council replaced the ordinance with the more flexible All Ages Dance Ordinance in 2002.

After that, says Meinert, who co-owns the ultra-hip Lower Queen Anne nightclub the Mirabeau Room, and manages the Seattle band Maktub, "A lot of people kind of went, 'OK, we won. What do we do with this?' I think that's where the Recording Academy became really important. [It] really stepped in with a vision of how the music community can interact with government in a proactive way. Before that, everyone had been operating in this reactive way."

Selected for the Mayor's Economic Task Force, Semer followed up on an old idea of Novoselic's: to create a city music office. Mayor Nickels folded music into the Mayor's Office of Film, which then completed an economic-impact study of the local music industry. The study, which came out last year, revealed that the Seattle music industry has aggregate financial activity of $1.3 billion per year.

As an illustration of how much things have changed, Meinert, the current chapter president, says that when he recently discovered that the state liquor board was suggesting a rewrite of the rules for all-ages shows, "We went straight to Donna James [director of the Mayor's Office of Film and Music], and she went straight to the mayor."

The suggestions were abandoned.

Another explosion

Of course, without great music, all of this politicking would be meaningless. There are indications that Seattle is poised for another explosion.

Sub Pop, the label that launched grunge, had its biggest sales in a decade last year, shipping over a million albums. Fellow label Barsuk, which popularized the alternative rock band Death Cab For Cutie, sold 700,000.

"The Northwest right now is so happening," says Sub Pop General Manager Megan Jasper. "You have Modest Mouse, which just recently went platinum. You have Death Cab for Cutie, Built to Spill, Sleater-Kinney, Pretty Girls Make Graves. Postal Service is just about to go gold in the next couple of months. That will actually be our first gold record since Nirvana's 'Bleach.' "

So does all this newfound clout mean Modest Mouse and Amy and Willie are going to win tonight?

Hey, you never know.

The most popular Northwest rock song of all time, the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie," was almost adopted as the Washington state song.

But it never won a Grammy.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247

or pdebarros@seattletimes.com