Lythgoe remembers the encounter as extremely unpleasant. “ ‘I can’t let you have him,’ I said to Cowell. ‘Everyone has voted against it.’ He said, ‘I want him.’ This must’ve gone on for three hours, and they’re all waiting there, and he’s just dug his heels in. I said, ‘Well, sort yourself out. I’m saying no.’ ”
Lythgoe’s voice grows softer, becomes uncharacteristically wistful as he continues. “This was the final year that I did it. We had really good talent and he wanted the geeky guy. I said, ‘No geeks this year.’ If the other two had said yes then I’d have been outvoted. I stood my ground, though, and it was just like that was the straw between us. I respect him tremendously and as a producer I respect him. I dug my heels in there, and if you like, I won, but it was a hollow victory. You’re not winning anything. You’re just standing your ground and if anything, you’re losing because everyone hangs their heads, like, ‘Oh, he’s not happy.’ So that was frustrating.”
The anger over this particular issue did not die down easily. When Kyle took his seat on the green mile, he was paired with another contestant. The duo was told that only one of them would make it through. In announcing the decision, Cowell issued a rare public protest, fuming with rage out of all proportion on whether or not the bespectacled nerd, clearly not destined to be the next American Idol, was allowed to go forward. He said, “Kyle, I want you to know, from me, wholeheartedly I disagree with this decision. I think you had done enough because you were different and unique to have made it through to the next round, and I completely and utterly disagree with this decision. I think you should have been given a chance based on the impact you made in Hollywood to be competing further in this competition. I don’t think you’re the best singer, but I think you have something that people will enjoy. And I’m really disappointed. Really disappointed.”
Looking back on the dispute, Cowell has a dramatically different recollection of the argument. He agrees that it was one of the major fights, perhaps the major fight between him and Nigel. “That was probably the most serious one. . . . You can see it on camera. I was furious. I was absolutely furious. The argument went on for a long, long time before. And I couldn’t shake it off when we were filming.”
However, he strongly disputes the notion that he backed Kyle just to have a whipping boy. “I felt really passionate about this boy, because he was so popular with the fellow contestants. I’d seen that in the Hollywood round, and I felt that . . . he’d be a popular contestant on the show. He’d be controversial. He was feisty himself. And it was like casting a show. I felt it was a different type of contestant and therefore interesting. And all of the people being offered in his place, therefore, to me were boring.”
That he wanted to keep Kyle just to beat up on him, he says, “is absolutely not true. And I resent that. I’d given him a hard time, but if I don’t think they can take it, we don’t put them in. He was more than capable of looking after himself. And that was a very weak argument to say that I wanted to beat up on a kid. The irony was, I was the only one standing up for him. There are definitions of beating up on a kid. My definition was by not giving him a chance, he was beating up on a kid.”
As for whether the fight was the last straw between them, Cowell recalls, “It left a sour taste, to be honest. I guess it was principle more than anything else. I felt we as judges had a right to put who we wanted in. Nigel obviously felt differently. And at that point you kind of think, this is going to happen again and again and again. They don’t need the aggravation. I don’t need the aggravation. And yeah . . . that was a turning point.”
The crack was, in retrospect, inevitable. A split had almost come during the lawsuit, but the settlement had allowed them all to take a step back from the brink. But the personalities had grown along with the show, and the underlying issue—one kingdom and too many kings—had not been resolved.
Season 7 marked another turning point in Idol history: the end of domination by female pop singers. There had been male winners, of course—Studdard and Hicks, to be precise—but with the possible exception of season 2, the show had been ruled by its female stars. It wasn’t just that the women’s ranks had supplied the show’s two supernova-sized breakouts of Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, it was that even when the women didn’t win, they were always in the upper ranks.
That all changed in season 7, which ushered in the gritty new era of the boys. For the next three years, a bare handful of female performers would struggle to compete at the highest ranks. The women, who in previous years had benefited from the music choices—heavy on the oldies, the Bacharach, the R&B numbers, the big-note pop songs—now tumbled like cannon fodder before the boys. And not just any boys. It appeared this new era would become a time for “cute” boys. The men of the first epoch who triumphed were markedly not the stuff of teen idols; Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks appealed to many, but no one could call them tween bait. That was about to change.
While the singers of the first years were, in essence, inventing Idol around them, those who tried out now knew exactly what they were getting into. In fact, many of them were reared on Idol from their earliest days. They prepared for it and, in some cases, spent years auditioning for it.
The first sign of a new era came in with a roar. In the bowels of YouTube there exists a video of a young David Archuleta, aged about nine, meeting the cast of Idol’s first season in an airport. To their amazement, the youngster broke out in a powerful voice to sing for them. The moment of Kelly Clarkson hugging young David prefigures a torch of destiny being passed to the young boy who would someday rule the Idol stage.
Archuleta’s pre-interview reveals an almost unbelievably sweet, pathologically shy personality punctuated with nervous giggles that stand in contrast to a flawlessly strong singing voice capable of enormous runs and heartbreaking high notes. He was the perfect Idol candidate, and almost instantly the season was dominated by the legions of tween fans whose screeches punctured the air whenever he stepped onstage.
In private, his sweetness and shyness never ceased; the world has yet to produce a single story of diva behavior on the part of David Archuleta. However, that shyness also revealed the hothouse flower nature of his youth. Raised singing since he could walk, David was like an Olympic athlete whose entire development had been funneled into his performance. Talking with him offstage, you rarely found him totally relaxed or unguarded. But when a strand of music would float through the air from a neighboring room or down a hallway, he would latch on to it like a lifeline, reciting the lyrics quietly to himself, moving his head with the rhythm.
In an interview at the end of the season, when asked for the millionth time when he might get a girlfriend, and when he explained for the millionth time that he was focusing on his singing, I pressed him, saying, “You know, this is not how teenagers typically think about life.” He became quiet and thoughtful before whispering, “I’ve just always loved to do this.” When I pressed him further about what music had meant to him, he explained that growing up, like so many awkward young people, he had never felt comfortable expressing himself in words, had never felt he could say what he meant, but in music he could let people know what he was feeling, what was going on inside him. “And you don’t even have to get the words right. If you sing, they can connect with you,” he said.
The girls had had their mini-heartthrobs before: Anthony Fedarov, Kevin “Chicken Little” Covais, and of course, Sanjaya. But none had matched that call with such powerful vocal skills. That visceral connection to the girls of America would awaken a sleeping giant.
And standing in its way were the women of season 7.
Idol had been hit with cries of “ringer” before, but those revelations usually came after the season ended, when, inevitably, word of an earlier recording career and stint in Hollywood tumbled out. It was a tradition that dated back to Kelly Clarkson, but despite its recurrence throughout the years, the mythology of Idol was so strong that anything that threatened to shake it, as
one singer was to find, would be met with fury.
At age fifteen, young Carly Hennessy had moved with her father from her native Ireland to pursue a singing career in Los Angeles. The angelic-voiced, raven-haired teen had been singing onstage since she was all of four, and had toured as a youth with a production of Les Miserables. Before she could even get her driver’s license, Carly hit the jackpot, getting signed to MCA records. She was prepped for stardom by legendary music mogul Miles Copeland III, founder of the iconic I.R.S. Records. However, in between the recording of her album and its release, disaster struck and the label went belly-up. It was the beginning of the decade-long implosion that would sweep the music industry, and the album was dumped on the market with no promotion and no support, all but unloaded for scrap. Worse was still to come, however. A Wall Street Journal article on MCA’s meltdown would credit practically the entire overhead of the company in those final months, two million dollars, to promoting Carly’s album—even though no promotion outside of the offices had occurred. Not yet eighteen, Carly had become the poster girl for the reckless ways of the recording industry.
She spent her early twenties carving out a living on the margins of entertainment. Her early jobs included recording a demo of a Diane Warren song for presentation to Carrie Underwood. In 2005, running out of options and open doors, she traveled to Las Vegas to audition for Idol’s season 5 and won a ticket to Hollywood Week. At the close of that year’s auditions, Simon Cowell had told the New York Post about a season that included Chris Daughtry and Katharine McPhee: “The only person I can genuinely remember from the auditions that I’ve done for this season is an Irish girl that we saw in Las Vegas who now lives in America. I think she sang a Chaka Khan song and afterward I said, ‘I think we may have found someone as good as [Idol winner] Kelly Clarkson.’ ”
Unfortunately, the winds of fortune were still not blowing for Carly, and she learned before Hollywood Week that her visa status would not allow her to appear on the show. Forced to withdraw, she left Hollywood and moved with her recently wedded husband, a tattoo artist named Todd Smithson, first to Atlanta and then to San Diego, where she kept the barest embers of her dream alive by singing in a pub where she waited tables.
Until season 7. That year, Idol auditions came to San Diego and Carly stood in the same line with David Archuleta to give her dream one more try. Yet again, Idol was stepping into the gap that the imploding music industry was leaving behind. That, however, was not the fairy tale held dear by Idol viewers, and, more to the point, not the story that legions of Idol haters and amateur sleuths felt Idol was obliged to live up to. Whereas at Idol’s dawn, it had taken traditional muckrakers months to dig up the dirt, now whatever people had buried in their past—naked pictures, an arrest, or a recording contract—was up on the Internet within hours of a singer’s first appearance. “Smithson’s Secret Past,” touted Yahoo!’s music blog. “Pick the Plant,” Vote for the Worst challenged readers. Everywhere, the old Wall Street Journal misinterpretation was dredged up as fact.
Lythgoe leaped to Carly’s defense, pointing out that David Archuleta had appeared on the Star Search revival—and won—when he was eleven. “Nobody said this is an amateur competition. This is something that people are making up for themselves. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had a professional contract. Kelly Clarkson had a professional contract. Bo Bice had a deal. Taylor Hicks has got records that are out there. This is nothing new.”
Once again, Idol was faced with viewers who were more Catholic than the pope, wanting the show to enforce rules that didn’t actually exist. The immediate furor blew over, but it would remain in the background for Carly during her entire Idol run.
There was another change introduced to the rules in season 7 that, of all the tweaks, would perhaps turn out to be the most important. In season 7, the show first allowed singers to use instruments. It was an example of the fellowship between the different Idol incarnations around the world, each of which had grown along their own lines. Instruments had first been introduced on Australian Idol and had been adopted on Norwegian Idol and Canadian Idol, the latter of which was much more strongly rock oriented than its American counterpart.
The change had an immediate effect, opening the door to a more diverse pool of musicians than had previously been seen. Bar rockers, jazz pianists, and contemporary singer/songwriters would all be represented in the coming years. Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the inclusion of instruments was the man who would become Idol’s first rocker champion, David Cook. A bar rocker from St. Louis by way of Tulsa, Cook finished the revolution started by Chris Daughtry, each week brazenly reframing his song choices, whatever the genre, in a gritty rock key that ground down the melodies and slowed the tempo to an angry crawl. Little did it matter that some of his reinventions were borrowed from other bands, such as Chris Cornell’s version of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” Cook’s sultry renditions so electrified the set that each week the thrill of wondering what trick Cook would pull off became the season’s growing storyline, even competing with Archuleta’s.
Chris Daughtry, of course, managed to dominate the stage without the benefit of instruments, as would Adam Lambert in season 8. But it would be no coincidence that the next three champions of American Idol would all be guitar players, cute white male guitar players, to be specific. The edge that playing an instrument gave in performance would prove unbeatable in the years ahead.
In season 7, four of the top five were musicians who leaned heavily on their instruments. They would include, in addition to bar rocker Cook, pianist prodigy David Archuleta in the Josh Groban vein, Jason Mraz–inspired, guitar-and-ukelele-playing hippie crooner Jason Castro, and Brooke White, a Carole King–inspired singer-songwriter. It was a range of styles entirely new to the Idol stage, but these more esoteric traditions would come to dominate the show in the years ahead.
There was another singer-songwriter who made a splash with his story in the early days of the season. Nineteen-year-old Josiah Leming’s story was heavily featured in the auditions and during Hollywood Week. A native of a severely impoverished family in East Tennessee, Josiah told of coming to Nashville and living in his car while he tried to make a singing career. The tears flowed in rivers down the intense young singer’s face as he told his story. Offscreen, however, the other contestants who dealt with him remember a highly erratic mischief-maker who could turn the waterworks on at will and who, after his on-camera interview, bragged to his fellow contestants that he had “told them I live in my car,” leaving the others to wonder, “Well, how are we supposed to top that?”
The end of auditions also brought the annual parade of skeletons tumbling out of the closet. This time it was Arizonan David Hernandez who was revealed, thanks to a research assist by Vote for the Worst, to have worked as a stripper in a gay nightclub. The previous year had seen the revelation of nude or scantily clad photos of semifinalist Antonella Barba. When Idol had ruled the photos were not disqualifying, that ruling had sparked a mini-flood of outrage as some commentators, including Rosie O’Donnell, wondered why Frenchie Davis had been ousted four years earlier but Barba was allowed to stay, speculating that Barba was the beneficiary of a racist double standard. The Hernandez accusations, however, barely even prompted a debate, the show declaring almost immediately that they would leave the judgment to the voters. As it turned out, the voters were, in the short term, okay with it, voting Hernandez through from the semifinals to the top twelve. He was, however, the first to be eliminated on the big stage.
Once the contestants arrived on the big stage, the Archuleta frenzy put the female contestants behind the eight ball. Their awkwardness was increased by the addition to the set of twin mosh pits in front of the stage, which, filled with gushing recruits from local high school water polo teams and the like, became hives of gale-force shrieking for Archuleta and the contingent of his sultry young companions, David Cook, Jason Castro, and Michael Johns. Syesha Mercado remembers trying to perform before the eye
s of the mosh pit. “I tried to be as comfortable as possible with the audience, because it’s those people who I’m really performing for, and sometimes it was a little hard because those little girls would be staring at me like, ‘Where’s David Archuleta at!’ ”
There was also, they would soon find, the letter gap. “My fan mail was, like, three letters,” recalled Ramiele Malubay. “At the most I got, like, six letters. That’s at the most, six letters a week,” says Mercado, who climbed to the pinnacle of third place. The boys would get hundreds.
Their struggle against the prevailing tween winds was made no easier by the judges, who seemed poisoned against the women from the start. Ramiele Malubay and Kristy Lee Cook never received a second glance from the panel after their initial dismissals. Brooke White found herself ricocheting back and forth between being the judges’ darling and their target, and fought to control herself from talking back. After embracing Carly, Cowell turned against her with a particular venom. Some speculated that after marking her as a favorite early on, Cowell was knocking her down in order to dramatically bring her back up later on. Others thought he was incensed that she had failed to live up to his early hopes for her. Whatever the case, it was not pretty. On the second of the two Beatles weeks, he trashed her choice of “Blackbird,” saying she had squandered her opportunity by singing a song “about a bird,” a choice he called “self-indulgent.” Two weeks later, when David Cook sang “Little Sparrow” on Dolly Parton week, he said to Carly as he went onstage, “Here I go, about to sing a song about a bird.” In this case, Cowell loved it.
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