?uestlove doesn’t really take days off anymore. It’s not something he’s quick to admit. He doesn’t grab the mic and start rattling off all the things he’s had to do. No, it’s something that he tells you after an hour of conversation, after you’ve pretty much had the time to figure out on your own that the Roots’ drummer is pretty believably the hardest working man in music since James Brown.
He’s been even busier since the Roots geared up for their role as house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, which gets rolling on March 2, but ?uest still found the time to meet up with Béla Fleck last Saturday at Memphis’ Ardent Studios for a Q&A and 20-minute jam session. I was lucky enough to be in attendance, perched in the front row like a kid on Christmas day with my right foot resting on the kick drum.
The hour Q&A was sort of treated as a “Roots for Beginners” session, but the 16-year veteran did offer up some quotables.
On launching the careers of so many hip-hop and neo-soul artists who never actually were part of the Roots:
“We wanted to take that ‘Best Hip-Hop Band’ label and just run with it. So we would jam in my living room. We’d just have people come over and run sessions, and the pizza guy happened to be Musiq Soulchild. Bilal was only 15; he should have been in bed. The Roots were kind of like Mediterranean Avenue or Baltic Avenue [on a Monopoly board]: Not that important, but the first thing you get to when you roll a two.”
On Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, an unlikely friend:
“We’re just two music geeks trying to feed off each other.”
On “Hip-Hop’s Bob Dylan”:
“The one artist that kind of got penalized unfairly and managed to survive it, I think, is Nas. There’s a different pressure when your first album’s your defining moment. Luckily for us, our defining album was our fourth, so we were able to build up to that.”
On producing Al Green’s Lay It Down last year:
“I think he wanted the Jill Scott treatment. I told him, ‘You do realize the standard we have for you is between 1968 and 1977. Let’s make this the follow-up to The Belle Album.’ I wanted to make it sound like 1978.”
The secret to maintaining an amicable relationship with the Roots after 16 years on the road:
“Separate tour buses.”
The opportunities presented by working on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon:
“One, this is the first time we’ve been writing songs together since Do You Want More?!!!??!. Two, we’re getting five to six hours of practice every day. Three, Tariq [rapper Black Thought] is finally getting the chance to unleash his soul-singing beast he’s been keeping from you all for so long.”
This article appears in February 27 • 2009.