Up Past Midnight With The Roots: Hanging With Jimmy Fallon's New House Band

With due respect to Paul Shaffer and the Max Weinberg Seven, when Late Night With Jimmy Fallon premiered on March 2nd, the Roots instantly became the hottest band on late-night television. Rock Daily recently caught up with ?uestlove and the Roots as the hip-hop vets rehearsed for their full-time gig as the house band for Fallon's show — check out the video above for shots of the group in action and ?uestlove giving us the scoop.

Fallon recently told Rolling Stone that because the Roots are serving as his house band, "there's no way anyone's falling asleep." The group was faced with an almost insurmountable task leading up to the debut episode: Write around 200 new songs for the program, as ?uestlove told the Smoking Section (because NBC won't pay royalties for other band's songs). "I'm personally saying now that I don't want the rehearsals to stop. This is the most we've ever written as a group," ?uestlove says. "I think that once we get 200 songs under our belt, I'll lay off the three-to-five hour rehearsals."

So how did NBC convince the prolific road warriors to settle down on one stage? Incentives like spending more time with their families and rehearsals on NBC's tab definitely helped, as did the increased pay for the decreased workload. "If you total up the seconds we appear on TV, we're on camera for 640 to 800-something seconds a week," ?uestlove says. "That's the equivalent of 10 nights on the road. Our manager would not let us take this gig if it didn't match or surpass what we get on the road.

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

More Song Stories entries »

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