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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,” an German language version of the song.
The lyrics to “Foreign Novelty Smash” aretrue German translations—but 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 actual 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.
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