Questlove’s Book Tells Us How The Roots Ended Up With Jimmy Fallon

If you’ve missed that Philly’s favorite son, Questlove, has a new book out this week, well, you don’t follow his Twitter account, where he’s been promoting it relentlessly. (Nifty tidbit: Salman Rushdie is a fan of The Roots.) Anyway, Buzzfeed highlights the answer to a question we’d never really seen satisfactorily answered: How did The Roots end up with Jimmy Fallon? These days, the pairing seems to have worked pretty well for both sides — but at the time it seemed like Fallon was a huge dork who was overcompensating for his own lack of cool.

So what happened?

The drummer had initially been set on declining Jimmy Fallon’s invitation to have The Roots become his house band. But after he invited Fallon to one of their shows, that all changed. Fallon had been hanging backstage, and after just ten minutes, Questlove came back from an interview and saw something he never thought he’d see: Jimmy “with almost the whole band — Tariq, Tuba, Owen, Frank, Kamal, and others — making a huge human pyramid.”

The group was laughing; in general, the band had been enjoying themselves and having more fun those days. “Jimmy brought all of that to a boil, in the best sense,” Questlove writes, “and I couldn’t help but laugh at how silly they all looked. Oh, shit, I thought to myself. We’re stuck with this guy, aren’t we?”

A human pyramid? Just think how a game of Twister might’ve changed the course of entertainment history.