NEW YORK - It's 10 minutes to show time backstage at Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson is wondering what the Roots have gotten themselves into.
"There are two sayings: 'The grass is always greener on the other side' and 'Be careful what you wish for,' " says the drummer and bandleader of the Philadelphia hip-hop-plus ensemble. Since March 2, when Fallon replaced Conan O'Brien at 12:35 a.m. on NBC, the group has been aptly introduced to America as "The Legendary Roots Crew."
The big man with the even-bigger Afro, which is now being puffed out to maximum mushroom-cloud size in a makeup room at 30 Rockefeller Center, pauses. And laughs.
"I cannot wait till we're off and can play a week on the road," he says, smiling. "Those shows will now seem like vacation time. This is way more work than imaginable."
Not that ?uestlove is complaining. In earning an unquestioned reputation as the greatest live band in hip-hop, the Roots - formed in the late '80s by Thompson and rapper Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter when they were at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts - kept a globe-spanning, 200-show-a-year, 2½-hour-a-night pace for more than 15 years.
