The Roots Wowed Michael McKean With His Fallon Walk-On Music

As Jimmy Fallon’s house band of fifteen years, The Roots are known not only for their musical prowess, but also their encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. There’s perhaps no better example of that than the deep cut they pulled out as Michael McKean’s walk-on music for his first visit to Fallon’s Tonight Show.

First, the backstory: five years before he landed the role of Lenny Kosnowski, one half of Laverne & Shirley’s ‘Lenny & Squiggy’ duo, McKean had joined the comedy group The Credibility Gap. McKean was a part of four albums of satirical music that The Credibility Gap put out through 1979, but the track The Roots played that night can’t be found on any of them. Questlove dug deeper.

The group’s 1973 record, A Great Gift Idea, featured a style parody of The Osmonds called “You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Hair.” The group managed to get their label, Reprise Records, to release it as a single with a previously unreleased track on the flip side: “Foreign Novelty Smash,” a German-language version of the song.

The lyrics to “Foreign Novelty Smash” are true German translations—just not of the phrases heard in its English counterpart. Instead, McKean and company subbed in nonsensical German phrases that fit the song’s meter. (One line: “My brassiere is too worn.”)

“Foreign Novelty Smash” was eventually released on a compilation record in 1985, The World’s Worst Records, Vol. 2, but has largely lived in obscurity since.

Ever the music historian, Questlove dug it up in 2016 to welcome McKean onto The Tonight Show. McKean gave The Roots a look of recognition as they played him in, but it wasn’t until after the taping that he fully realized that The Roots had not only performed a spot-on rendition of the music, but sang the original German lyrics, as well:

Michael McKean is set to make his second visit to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon tonight, Monday, May 12. Time will tell what walk-on music The Roots will dig up this time around.

2 Comments

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  1. Tom Roche says:

    This article made me do a deep dive about this particular song, in that I’m a big fan of the “A Great Gift Idea” album. The album actually has a distinct and historic connection to Late Night TV, which I’ll get to. The Credibility Gap only released two singles according to Discogs: a Christmas record on Warner Bros and later a one-off single on Rhino. (There was a second group called The Credibility Gap, a late 60s short lived flower power outfit, on Capitol.)

    So your article states that the German language “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Hair” was released as a single, but that’s not quite right. According to the liner notes of the LP “The World’s Worst Records Vol 2”, it was slated as a single because Reprise thought it had potential, but then the single was not released. So there are no known copies of a 7-inch called “Foreign Novelty Smash” or “No Info Available.” Most oddly, the Wikipedia entry for “The World’s Worst Records Vol 2” has a hyperlink under “Foreign Novelty Smash” and when the link is clicked, it takes you to the Wiki page of “One Bad Apple” the #1 single by The Osmonds… as a sort of Easter egg joke by someone I guess.

    Now, finally here is some crucial info (not that the preceding wasn’t): The “A Great Gift Idea” album concludes with a 14:40 audio tour-de-force (or farce) spoofing “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” If you have not heard it, it is rather incredible. It received airplay on trippy “progressive FM” stations at the time. Of course, in 1972, The Tonight Show was absolutely untouchable. Anyone who spoofed it or spoofed Johnny Carson did so under the threat of career suicide. The Credibility Gap, being young upstarts did not care and fearlessly went to town. Harry Shearer does a perfect Johnny Carson, Michael McKean is a most off-color Don Rickles, Richard Beebe is a booming Ed McMahon, David Lander is a gay rights activist, and there’s multiple other characters in this densely-layered bit. The track is called “Where’s Johnny?”, (as opposed to “Here’s Johnny!”) The whole sonic masterpiece is a less-than-gentle spoof of the bombastic and sexist idiocy of the un-hip Carson shtick of that era. The Tonight Show theme is slightly mutated by a few notes to avoid copyright problems, the audio mix – certainly under the direction of Harry – is pretty incredible with the, “Hey-o” and canned laughter and rimshots hitting exactly on target. Then, the whole thing is processed through mono compression to mock the poor quality of network audio at the time. The link on Youtube is here
    https://youtu.be/J0eD6tus0TM?
    and again, oddly, the YT graphic for “A Great Gift Idea” is mistakenly (intentionally?)that of a forgotten rock LP by The Kings on Elektra.

    I urge you to check it out.

    1. Jed Rosenzweig says:

      Wow, Tom. Thank you for unearthing all of this.