Questlove (Photo credit: mikeywally)

By Sean Manning

Did you know that Marvin Gaye once seriously considered leaving music to join the Detroit Lions, and that it’s Lions players who provide the famous chatter at the opening of What’s Going On? Questlove does. The Roots’ drummer, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, and newly minted bestselling memoirist knows basically everything about popular music. This spring he even taught a course at New York University called “Topics in Recorded Music: Classic Albums.” (VH1: Please bring back Rock & Roll Jeopardy! solely so we can witness an epic face-off between him and Mark McGrath.)

His encyclopedic knowledge was on full display last week at The House That Jimi Hendrix Built, Manhattan’s subterranean Electric Lady Studios. There, surrounded by hallucinogenic spaceship murals commissioned by Hendrix, in the very same spot where Stevie Wonder recorded Music of My Mind and some 30 years later he himself collaborated on D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Questlove joined designer John Varvatos for a listening party hosted by McIntosh to celebrate the release of the 64-year-old audio brand’s MT5 Precision Turntable. The pair picked 11 songs, and after listening to a couple minutes of each on vinyl — “What’s Going On,” Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine,” Gary Clark Jr.’s “When My Train Pulls In” — told stories of how they discovered and fell in love with them.

Questlove kept the intimate crowd riveted with fascinating facts ranging from the meticulous hand-looping of samples on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (19 different drum tracks in the first minute of “Shake Your Rump” alone) to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s tireless quest for permission to parody Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (“As long as it’s not about food,” Kurt Cobain finally told him.) In three hours of near continuous talking, he was at a loss for words only twice. The first time came after hearing Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” funneled through the neon-illuminated, $6,500 MT5. “I never heard the frets in the guitar, and the rasp in his voice,” he said. “I’ve lived with this song for 40-plus years and I’m only hearing it now. I’m speechless.” The second instance when articulation failed him was following the event, as he and I spoke in the hallway outside the studio.

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