When 'Fallon' Was Cool
Jonathan Cohen on bringing Lorde, Frank Ocean, Deerhunter and more to 'Late Night' in the peak SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS era
My debut book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is available now for pre-order. I explained the concept a bit in my previous post and went into further detail at Stereogum, where I’m the managing editor. The short version is that it’s about the evolution of indie in the 21st century: how indie rock changed the mainstream and how the mainstream changed indie rock, what the developments in 2000s indie wrought in the 2010s, things of that nature.
One of the ways I decided to promote the book before I could really promote it was by creating accounts at Twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram that recirculate music videos and TV footage from the era covered in the book. As I began to search for relevant clips, I realized I could have written more about the role late-night TV played in the pipeline from underground hype to actual fame. Back when people still watched live TV, shows like Letterman and Conan were important venues for leveling up, where online buzz could translate into sustainable momentum and an exponentially larger audience. Even in the early YouTube era, when the public became more likely to consume late-night shows in bite-sized clips, the right performance could put a band on the map: Think of Future Islands, whose Samuel T. Herring danced his way to virality in 2014.
From 2009 to 2014, there seemed to be no cooler venue for this kind of glow-up than Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. At the time, this came as a surprise to me. When I learned that Fallon was taking over Conan O’Brien’s Late Night desk, the one that once belonged to a young David Letterman, I was skeptical. I imagined Fallon, a cheeseball glad-hander best known for failing to keep a straight face during SNL sketches, would put together something utterly edgeless—something not unlike the version of The Tonight Show he currently hosts, full of saccharine, lowest-common-denominator bits designed to delight the least interesting people you know. One factor piqued my interest, though: Fallon had recruited the Roots to be his house band.
The Roots were not at their peak of popularity in 2008, but they’d maintained their reputation as hip-hop’s greatest live band. Questlove, their drummer and bandleader, was among the most respected figures in music. Maybe some rap fans considered them corny, but compared to your average late-night TV muzak-slingers, they were ultra-hip. The Roots were the hardest, smoothest, tightest live band in hip-hop. They made “The Next Movement.” How would they ever jibe with Fallon’s shtick? The band was indeed roped into many “cute” and “funny” bits, like the recurring segment where they join Fallon and a guest to play popular songs with classroom instruments. But on Late Night, for a glorious half-decade, their aura rubbed off on him for a while. Rather than being dragged down, they made him cool.
Also helping to make Fallon cool in those days was Jonathan Cohen. When Fallon got the Late Night job, Cohen had been working as an editor at Billboard for nine years. “If you would have asked me back then, I probably would have said I’d be happy to work there forever,” he told me in a video chat late last year. Instead, his career took an unexpected pivot. Like many of us, Cohen was impressed and intrigued when Fallon landed the Roots. He was even more surprised a few months later when, through an unexpected series of conversations, he ended up in charge of booking the music on Late Night for Fallon’s full run.
In our conversation, Cohen painted a far more flattering picture of his former boss than the one I laid out above, noting Fallon’s enthusiasm for music and interest in letting his staff cook when it came to artist bookings. Working closely with figures like Fallon and Roots bandleader Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Cohen made Late Night a place where genres and generations collided—where breakout stars like Lorde and Frank Ocean made their American TV debuts, cult favorites like Jawbox would get together for high-profile one-off reunions, and countless talents joined forces with the Roots. Under his guidance, the show became a reflection of a music landscape where pop stars appealed to hipsters and indie bands were trying to be pop stars.
Cohen left NBC a year into Fallon’s tenure hosting The Tonight Show. He has since worked for the David Lynch Foundation organizing benefit festivals (our interview was conducted before Lynch’s death) and, more recently, as an editor at the music industry trade publication HITS Daily Double. But his time bringing the noise to Late Night continues to loom large in his career.
Below, check out excerpts from our interview about his time working for Fallon.
How did you end up booking music for Late Night?
I had been talking to a publicist friend of mine. I think we had been just kind of remarking to one another how cool it was that the Roots had been hired as the band for the show. Then weeks went by and he randomly got back in touch and said, “Hey, I want to introduce you to someone I know that works there because they're having a hard time finding a music producer.” And so he connected me with his friend, who I didn't know who had been hired to book the celebrity guests.
And my recollection is that within a matter of days, I was asked to come in and interview. And mind you, the show was—I think it was about a month away from starting, maybe six weeks. It was very soon beforehand. And they had cobbled together parts of the first month in terms of the calendar. But maybe they were in need of someone to look after that full time.
What I got out of Jimmy in that first meeting was basically that he definitely wanted to use the Roots a lot, which, of course, made perfect sense. And his general concept for the booking philosophy was that he wanted the show to feel like someone's iPod on shuffle. So it's a very dated reference, but it's what we were using in 2009. So from that I took that he didn't just want it to be indie rock band after indie rock band, which was great. And that he was up for having a cult classic on from time to time, maybe one that hadn't been on TV in 30 years. And didn't want to ignore other genres that the average late night viewer might have expected us to ignore, just given the pedigree of Conan’s show and being on at 12:30 in the morning and all that stuff.
I walked out of that interview not feeling like it was like a slam dunk. I thought it was a very enjoyable conversation, and I was still a bit bemused at the fact that I had even been asked to interview for this. And I came in for a second interview. We kicked around some ideas about dream bookings or what would be the craziest thing we could do. And shortly thereafter, someone from the NBC Business Affairs Department called me at home one night and offered me the gig. So off I went, out of journalism and into TV.
Do you remember some of the ideas you kicked around with Fallon during your interviews?
I know we talked about Prince because I think he had probably talked to Ahmir about that as being someone that both of them mutually really wanted to have on the show. I remember talking about a bunch of classic rock people—Springsteen, David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, those type of folks that Jimmy listened to a lot growing up in upstate New York.
What were you covering at Billboard before you did this job?
When I started there, which was in ’99, the billboard.com website didn't really have much content on it other than the Billboard charts. So I was hired to basically start populating it with content—writing news, figuring out ways to repurpose stuff from the magazine. And I eventually settled into basically the guy that oversaw all of the editorial on the website for the last maybe three years that I was there. I had a dual role on the magazine side as well where I was essentially overseeing all of the artist-related coverage in the print magazine as opposed to the more business-related stuff. So I assigned a lot of the features and cover stories. I oversaw the reviews. I was kind of doing like three or four jobs, but most of us were at that point.
But suffice to say, Chris, I had booked some punk shows in Bloomington, Indiana, but I had certainly never booked anything beyond that. And I had also never worked in TV, which is why this whole idea seemed kind of crazy to me when it was first broached. But I think the more brain power I gave to it, I realized that, as in many endeavors, it's a relationship-based thing, and all of the people that I had gotten to know over nearly a decade at Billboard were the same people I would be needing to talk to, to try and convince them to come on the show.
You mentioned that you came in just a few weeks before the show was going to launch. How far out do they usually book a show like that?
Once we were up and running, I was usually booking about three months out. You wanna try to leave yourself some flexibility if some crazy thing falls into your lap like two days before, but generally it was about three months out.
Do you remember any lessons that you learned early on? As you were figuring out how this whole thing works, does anything stand out to you, like, “OK, we need to do things this way”?
Well, yeah. I mean, basically everything was a lesson at that point. Because like I said, I had never worked at a gig like this before. And by the same token, the Roots had never been a house band for a television show. They're a touring band and a recording band. Jimmy is an extremely accomplished comedian, but he had never hosted a show like this before. So we were all figuring it out on the fly.
There was an early booking where Public Enemy played with the Roots. I think that was the first time we specifically booked someone knowing that we wanted to pair them up with the Roots. And that was a bit of a eureka moment where we could see the potential for utilizing [the band] in that way and how unique that was in the late night landscape to have a band so accomplished at our disposal every day.
In those first few weeks, in the first couple of months, everything was a work in progress. So even finding time to just sit with Jimmy and be like, “What do you like? What do you not like?” That was difficult. And at one point, one of the writers who was a friend of Jimmy's from childhood actually grabbed his iPod for me so that I could actually look through it and be like, “Oh, OK, he likes this. He doesn't like this.” And for a hot second, that was what I had to go off of.
Eventually Jimmy and I started meeting regularly, and we could be a lot more productive in terms of what our goals were. But at first, you had to grab that info any way you could.
How much were his preferences driving the bookings versus what you thought was cool as someone paying close attention to what was going on in music?
I don't know that I could quantify it in terms of percentage, but Jimmy was extremely involved in the music side. And I never booked anything without checking with him first. But there were plenty of things that were purely him saying, “Hey, I want this,” or, “Hey, I heard this, let's go get it.” There were definitely times when I brought stuff to him that he didn't know about yet, and maybe twisted his arm a bit because I knew it would be good. There were many, many times where Ahmir would suggest something, or he and I would sit and plot stuff together and then bring that idea to Jimmy mutually.
Some of these stories have been told before, but the one example that gets brought up a lot of something like Jimmy heard and Shazam’d and came to me and was like “I love this” was Neon Indian, who I was aware of but didn't think was quite ready to do our show. But he heard this one song and loved it. And so we booked it.
And that’s definitely an early example of our music related technology, which was still fairly nascent at the time. As were things like Twitter and Instagram, which became huge tools [for] spreading the word about what we were doing. That was an example of where, a year before there wouldn't have been a way to quickly figure out whatever song it was that he was hearing, but we could move so much more nimbly because of things like that. I mean, I think he was on the show within a month, maybe even less.
But just to reiterate, I mentioned that because that, that's an example of something Jimmy heard, loved, and decided he wanted on the show. My role in that booking was merely to figure out who the rep was and make them the offer and then get him in the building.
So what's an example of one that you pitched to him?
Well, I tried not to let my own personal taste dictate what we were doing too often, but from time to time there were things that would come up that I felt were worthwhile. And I think the first and biggest early example of that was getting Jawbox to get back together. We had had Sunny Day Real Estate on, I think a month before that, and I don't think they had played in close to a decade. And Jon Stewart had called Jimmy that morning to congratulate him on the booking because I think the only TV they had ever done previously was in the mid nineties on Jon's show. And, you know, I definitely had to twist Jimmy's arm a bit to book Sunny Day. But I think another host calling him and being like “wow, this is so cool” validated the idea that even if it's something Jimmy himself wasn't super familiar with, that there was fertile ground there with bands like this.
So Jawbox was reissuing one of their records, and I had known those guys a bit prior to that. But I was close with their publicist, and I literally just casually threw out the idea, “Hey, do you think they'd ever want to come play?” And I think the reply was like, “Probably not, but we'll ask.” And lo and lo and behold, some momentum started building. And they hadn't played in 12 years. And they didn't play again for another decade. Like, that didn't lead to a tour, that was truly just a one-off. And, you know, that's a fairly niche band, but we were able to create something very special out of it on national television and honor the legacy of a group that meant a lot to a certain scene and to a lot of people.
On my @suchgr8heights Twitter account I posted footage of Deerhunter’s performance on the show, which you responded to. That is a fairly legendary performance between the costuming and Bradford [Cox] walking off the stage at the end.
That was the one where he had a bloody hand.
Yeah, bloody hand. And then like at the end of the song, he just kind of walked off into the hallway over to the elevator and the camera followed him. I assume he didn't rehearse walking into the hallway?
No, we rehearsed that. I don't want to pull back the curtain too much. But, there's only so much—it's tough for a show like that to stay on the tracks if things are happening that the crew is not anticipating. So we did conceptualize that or we were prepared for it at least. And obviously we had to sign off on all the crazy wardrobe and just the concept in general. But again, that's a credit to Jimmy's love of music and his willingness to do something different with the format, which honestly, on many nights on other shows was just the last four minutes of the episode. You know, it was just sometimes just a way to fill time, but we never treated it that way. We always were motivated by the desire to hopefully expose the audience to something that maybe they didn't know about or were unfamiliar with or that we thought they would like.
My book is indie-rock-centric, but part of the concept is how all these other things kind of came under the umbrella of “indie,” either because Pitchfork liked them or your average Brooklyn music fan was into them or whatever. So I guess examples of that would be like Odd Future or Lorde—Lorde being a pop star, but she's singing about Broken Social Scene. Or Odd Future being the punk version of a rap group. So those are both artists that I talk about in the book, and those are both artists that kind of made big splash appearances through you.
With the Odd Future one, I remember watching it either live or on video the next day and just, like, cackling with joy. That seems like another one where it was kind of chaotic. They're going off the stage and stuff. How excited were you when you booked that? Because there was a lot of buzz around them at the time.
Yeah. Truthfully, I was nervous. And he had been asking me about them for a while, and I actually kind of slow-walked him because I was worried about what they would do. But I also wasn't entirely sure if they were ready. But he really wanted to do it. So we set it up, and like, I'll have to double check this, Chris, but my recollection is that they weren't even signed when we first started the conversation. And they had signed a deal by the time the booking happened because, you know, they had like a QR code printed out on stage. That was a very early example of that. And there was a little bit of label budget behind the concept for the stage presentation.
But yeah, I wasn't quite sure. And Tyler was pretty well-behaved during rehearsal. But, I know I said a minute ago that everything is usually very planned-out, but him coming over to the desk and also jumping on Jimmy's back at the end was not planned. Neither of those things were planned. And the first thing, I ran over to Jimmy when we wrapped that episode and was like, “Are you cool?” Because I wasn't sure if he was going to be upset that that happened. But he was totally into it, into the anarchy of it.
And that night, that was at a time when Mos Def sometimes would show up and go sit in with the Roots and just be out there. And he came that day unannounced specifically to watch Tyler, which is why you see him at the end. So as if we needed further proof that this was the right move, Mos proactively endorsing it was nice to see. And again, that's a perfect example of Jimmy's intuition being spot-on because all Tyler really needed was that one look on national TV. And absolutely off to the races from that second onward.
Did the fact that you guys had Tyler help with getting Frank?
Yes, because at the time it was the same team. It was before Frank went off and did other things. But yes, it did help. And I had been keeping my eye on Frank for a long time before we had him on, and also before he had signed to Def Jam. So, you know, it was a little different that time because we were able to be really strategic about the timing of it and to make that appearance a key aspect of his album rollout. We were able to announce that the album was out the second after his performance, which I don't know if it necessarily would have otherwise been. I have to go back and check what actual day of the week it was. But that was working with Universal to make sure that everything was set up on their end for the record to actually be live. And a great example of synergy, I think, and how artists can think very smartly about ways to capitalize on an opportunity like that.
Lorde, that's another one where obviously she's super young. You've mentioned a couple of times being concerned about whether somebody is going to be ready. Is that an example where, like, this thing is just blowing up so much, we gotta do it?
The song was already pretty huge, but I went to see her first New York show, which was at Le Poisson Rouge. I think she was 17 at the time. And we had already been talking to her team about doing the first TV, but I wanted to see it myself. And I was blown away by that show. I went to say hi to her afterward backstage, and she was incredibly shy and kind of looked down at the ground the whole time. But I found that pretty endearing. And, yeah, she killed it when we finally had her on.
It seemed like you guys were the first TV appearance for a lot of these acts that were—like, I think Tame Impala also.
Someone made a Wikipedia page that lists a lot of them. I sometimes even forget some of them. But most good indie bands who were on the come up at that time or were on their first cycle, we probably had them first.
Were you competing with Letterman?
Very much so. And, you know, sometimes those bookings get pretty competitive. There were times when we, as the new show, were on the short end of some aggressive negotiating tactics where we lost a booking because another show I think felt that they simply couldn't not have that artist first. But that didn't last long. Once we were starting to get established, we made it pretty clear to people that we wouldn't tolerate that kind of thing. Sometimes shows would—like, let's say we had an artist booked on a Tuesday. There were some New York shows that would slip in at the last minute and be like, “Oh, we'll have them on on Monday,” which puts us in a position of having to consider canceling our booking, right? Because we don't wanna condone someone jumping in there and snaking it from us. But I'm proud to say that at a certain point, we didn't really have to worry about that. Because what we were doing spoke for itself and the value proposition I think was pretty clear.
And also, this completely started from Jimmy and from the top down, he wanted the day and the environment to be something somewhat tolerable. Because it's a long day. You know, when you come in the morning, you sit around for hours before it's time to tape. It's why a lot of people don't like doing TV. But we really paid attention to those small details to make sure that people felt welcome. And that, hopefully, through word of mouth, they would tell their artist friends, “Hey, normally TV sucks. But we had a great time at NBC.”
I remember pretty quickly developing the impression that, “Oh, the Fallon show is cool.” Like, the Roots are on there, and they're doing cool stuff. So I think you probably had that going for you. But I imagine it being the 12:30 versus 11:30—probably there are some bands that you're going for that the 11:30 shows weren't even aware of, but on the other hand, if an 11:30 show comes along, they're gonna want to get more eyeballs in front of them. So that was probably an interesting dynamic.
Yeah, it was. But, again, I've mentioned relationships before. If you play your cards right, it doesn't matter what time the show’s on. Like, I have worked very closely with Pearl Jam for a long time, and they rarely did TV in that era. And it would have been on paper more logical for them to do an 11:30 show because, as you mentioned, more people would see it. But thanks to the relationship that we had, that wasn't really even a factor. They wanted to do it because they liked me. They like Jimmy, they love the Roots. And we created a situation where it wasn't the slog that they were used to on the handful of times they had done TV.
And then we built the whole show around them. We had Eddie [Vedder] in a comedy bit. We catered it to them, and that's definitely something at 12:30 that we have the flexibility to do. Whereas The Tonight Show, it's much harder to pull something like that off.
My avatar on Twitter is the Dismemberment Plan album cover. You guys had them on the show too when they reunited. I assume that one was a you thing.
That was a me thing. I've known those guys since ’97. I used to see them in basements in Indiana. And Travis, I think, still lived in New York at that time. So we were in touch even when the Plan wasn't active, and the minute that I heard some rumblings that they might be getting back together, we pounced on that one. And that's the thing. We had a lot of bands like that. We had Superchunk. We had great indie bands who never played TV, or maybe did it once in the ’90s and early 2000s, just because there wasn't really a forum for them to do that. So, when appropriate, I love being able to give a little shine to important groups like that who deserve the recognition but maybe didn't get it when they were initially active.
SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.