Performing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Drumming for TLC on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Every musician dreams of playing to the biggest audiences imaginable. Indeed, if I could launch into space and perform for the whole of Earth, Mars, and maybe a few moons, I’d be slipping into my spacesuit. For me, the desire for fame emerged in my teens as I envisioned myself as the famous drummer for a chart-topping multi-platinum group performing in front of tens of thousands each night. At first, it was RUSH. Practicing alone in my bedroom, learning song after song, honing my craft, and aching away all those lonely years of self-development, the gilded stage—as RUSH’s drummer Neil Peart so aptly described it—seemed just the place for me. A mythical, musical home relentlessly beckoning from a distant future. Day after day, fully absorbed in the magic of the band’s very existence, I pretended I was RUSH’s drummer, embodying every beat, delighting in Alex’s meaty chords, imagining Geddy’s approval, and feeling waves of applause wash over me. Later in Stone Mountain High’s jazz band, I cosplayed Buddy Rich as I struggled with his blisteringly perfect single strokes, pretending I was the heart of every performance. In college, Dave Weckl’s buttery magnificence consumed the whole of my attention. At any moment I could be found trying to deconstruct the complexity of his articulation, hoping to one day see my face on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine like him. And after a lifetime of such lofty wistfulness, I was finally getting my shot. In a week or so, I would grab my sticks, jump on stage, and perform with TLC—the largest-selling all-girl group in the history of music—on the most popular prime time broadcast in the country, The Tonight Show, and play “No Scrubs” in front of Jay Leno’s live studio audience. And the rest of the world. 


I had performed on the west coast many times before, but this was different. We now climbed aboard airplanes and were speedily ushered to and fro in limos instead of lumbering around in vans trailed by rickety, fishtailing U-Hauls. We reclined in our own private, luxuriously appointed mini apartments in what is now known as Le Parc Suite Hotel near Melrose and LaCienega, finally relegating to the past the sardining of four people into a single boxy room at your average roach motel. Food would now arrive freshly cooked rather than torn from vending machine packaging. Myriad assistants would now cheerily attend to our every need and fastidiously maintain our darting itineraries as opposed to cold voiceless wakeup calls startling us into yet another Groundhog Day on the road. We would perform in front of packed houses bursting with furious applause instead of cheerlessly playing (rehearsing, if I’m being honest) for a mere scattering of drunks in dark, sticky bars that stunk of dreams long since deceased. I was finally arriving. The biggest record I would ever play on was now topping the charts, and I was about to fly to the Pacific Coast and take one of the world’s most iconic televised stages.

Fast forward one week and I’m in a makeup chair getting ready for the show. After a short wait in a green room blanketed with a plentitude of snacks (though I never eat before a show), assistants peeked in with instructions to follow them to the stage’s back entrance. It was finally time to perform. As we walked out, I snatched the cardboard placard reading TLC MUSICIANS off the green room door, secreting it into my back pocket and then reverently traced the footsteps of all the legends that preceded me. It was surreal. I thought of my family and hoped I'd make them proud. I was, after all, stepping onto the very stage that lit up their late-night televisions for decades.

I must say that the production of each episode of The Tonight Show is a master class in televised perfection. Nothing is left to chance. If you’ve ever wondered how their camera operators somehow always know precisely when and where to point their lenses, say, at the guitarist’s sudden riff, or at a drummers’ mid-groove fill, or at a group of background singers’ harmonic embellishment, it’s not by chance or luck. Such cues are forged through a rigorous, repetitive rehearsal of the three and a half minutes (give or take) required to play a song. Indeed, if we had never rehearsed No Scrubs prior to arriving at NBC Studios, it would surely be tour-ready shortly after lunch. With rehearsal after rehearsal upon rehearsal and precious little time in between, each run-through provided the camera operators, sound engineers, lighting crew, and show directors yet another opportunity to pinpoint, illuminate, and showcase even the least significant contribution to the performance. For the musician, this is pure heaven. For the singer, it can be downright hell on earth. But it’s entirely worth it: our eventual performance of No Scrubs poured forth without effort, spotlessly clean, pressed, and buttoned up, complete with boutonnière, cane, and top hat. And the Tonight Show cameras caught it all.

Other curious facts about filming The Tonight Show include how abruptly the internal temperature of the studio hits your core. Upon walking in, your mind instantly inundates you with visualizations of igloos filled with huddled eskimos or packs of polar bears galumphing across an icy tundra. I quite liked it. I grew up in Georgia—a place known for its jungle-like humidity, snowy pollen, and boiling summer temperatures—in a home without air conditioning or ceiling fans. Not even our vehicles were outfitted with freon. Mom used to joke about our having “240 AC”: two windows down at 40 miles an hour. Yeah…it wasn’t funny back then either. It must be said that because of sweating out my younger years in that hotbox of a home (which arguably thinned my frame due to the massive caloric expenditure required to cool such feverish existence), I have forever committed myself to ensuring that my sons never know such agony. If anything, they’ll end up raising my grandkids in houses with fireplaces in every room and adorning their little bodies with long sleeves, thick wool socks, and parkas while reminiscing about being raised in the North Pole with granddad. Such is the pendulum of life. Anyway, it was cold in there.

Another shocking reality is just how small the Tonight Show studio really is. On TV, audience members seem countless in numbers, disappearing into the horizon like a massive thicket of bushes creeping up a sprawling dusky mountainside when in fact you could easily cram the entire room into your average high school auditorium and still have enough space left over to set up a ticket booth and refreshment stand. We can thank wide angle lenses for this particular visual foolery. It’s what they’re built for; to distort reality by bear-hugging the periphery of an entire scene and squeezing it into full front view. The natural result is the relative size diminishment of everything, which is what makes the upper seats look like nosebleeds when in reality you could casually toss your keys to anyone in the back row with little effort. It’s not exactly claustrophobia-inducing, but it is a bit like seeing your favorite radio DJ for the first time after years of listening to them in your car. You immediately think to yourself, “Wait…so that’s what you actually look like?? I imagined you much taller and much more handsome.” Or, if you’re like me, the thought escapes your brain by way of your mouth and you suddenly find that everyone—including the DJ—is now staring at you in a frozen, hushed fremdschämen. The only thing missing from the scene would be the movie trope record scratch preceding such awkward silence. (I promise I’m not being pompous with the word fremdschämen; it’s the only word that means what it means. I ventured off in search of a word that meant ”other people feeling embarrassed for something you did,” and sure enough there it appeared—a lone, three-syllable foreign word sparkling in its unpronounceable glory and carrying with it the exact meaning I needed. Hey, just commit it to memory and proudly announce to others that you know a German word that isn’t “kindergarten” or “gesundheit”. I’m sure no one will ask you to pronounce it, or spell it, or—God help you—use it in a sentence thus forcing you to experience its definition.)

But I digress.

I would also like to argue that “The Tonight Show” is somewhat misnamed—at least from the perspective of an on-show guest. Do they film it in front of a live studio audience? Yes. Does it all happen in a single hour just as it appears on television? Also, yes. Is it broadcast in the same fashion as a live sports game in progress? Not in the slightest. You might be surprised to learn that anyone who ever appeared on the show was very likely nestled in bed and watching themselves on TV alongside you (although we may presume from the vantage point of a whole other bedroom). By the time our episode hit the airwaves, I had already consumed a rather hearty meal, showered off the confetti of our performance, and tucked myself into my lawn-sized hotel bed with TV on and volume set to maximum. My sincerest apologies to neighboring guests. (Not really.)

To say that it was easily the most gratifying moment in my career is to fail miserably at conveying all the emotions flowing through me as I watched myself perform on national television with a legendary, record-setting group whose music I genuinely loved. I felt like a star. As it turns out, the surprise of a mid-afternoon taping was a blessing: In a single day I got to visit Burbank’s NBC Studios, amble through the back hallways pausing now and again to peer into the sets of other popular shows of the day, rehearse for hours in the dark air-conditioned emptiness of The Tonight Show set, perform live with TLC in front of a screaming audience, wrap an arm around Jay Leno’s neck for a selfie, grab a Tonight Show t-shirt as a souvenir, and still make it back to my room to watch it all unfold on TV at the same time as my family—all of whom were glued to their sets like me. Incomparable.

That week, we claimed California as a surrogate home while helping TLC’s record label spend generous sums of money on flights, ground transportation, hotel accommodations, assistants, crew members, and meals—all for 3 minutes and thirty seconds of prime-time television. It worked. The album continued climbing the charts and selling millions of copies while the label released more singles and music videos from the album. TLC management scarcely slept as plans for a full-scale tour began to take shape. One-offs shows like Jay Leno occasionally arose over the next few months, and I would find myself in yet another city on yet another TV show. And when I wasn’t bouncing from one side of the globe to the other, I was busy learning every song from TLC’s catalog in case it ended up on the tour setlist. And in the spaces between, I simply relaxed in my home—the very spot where decades ago I had envisioned myself on just such stages—beaming with joy and marveling at just how far I’d come.

It was the most exciting time in my musical life.