“It’s not a music show,” Paul Shaffer, the leader of the Letterman band, told me. What style they possess is mostly a matter of demographics: soul on David Letterman, jazz on Jay Leno, rock on Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien. Talk-show bands tend to be anonymous tribes, thrown together solely for the show. They’re a hip-hop band that plays instruments, social activists in an age of gangsta rap, outsider artists who occasionally appear on Nickelodeon. The Roots have one of the stranger careers in popular music. “It’s been a long week,” the guitarist, Captain Kirk Douglas, told me, peering bleary-eyed from behind his shades.
(The video has been viewed more than eleven million times on YouTube.) Today, they would play in front of fifty thousand people at Bonnaroo, the mammoth Southern music festival. Yesterday, they’d recorded an arrangement of “Call Me Maybe” for kazoo and assorted kids’ instruments. They’d flown in the night before from New York after taping an episode of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” where they’re the house band, and would fly out again the next morning, after an eighteen-hour workday. But right now I’m stressed.”īeside him, under the carport, the other members of the Roots were strung out along the curb in various stages of bedragglement. “It was supposed to be this magical moment for everyone. “This was supposed to be so great,” he said. He looked less like a genie than the bottle it had escaped from. His body was slumped at the shoulders and baggy at the hips. His head, usually surmounted by a large Afro, like a champagne cork, was demurely capped with braids and a do-rag. But he was tired this morning and feeling deflated. Oversized and onion-bellied, with steeply raked eyebrows and a wild tangle of beard, he could look as sly and as fierce as the genie in an Arabian tale. He stood in front of the Loews Vanderbilt hotel in a rumpled black hoodie and black sweatpants, bobbing nervously from leg to leg. One critic says, “His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless.” Art by Kehinde Wileyĭowntown Nashville on an early June morning, nine o’clock, and Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson was waiting, as usual, for D’Angelo. Questlove grew up in a show-business family.
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