The lights on the stage went dark and the crowd in sold-out Memorial Auditorium went wild Saturday night as the hip-hop band The Roots shook the stage in the annual Big Game Concert. Five bright strobe lights flashed across the crowd, scorching the audience’s collective retina, and then there they were: Black Thought on the mike, ?uestlove on the drums. As the crowd hushed, the two remaining original members of the Legendary Roots Crew took control.

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Damon “Tuba Gooding, Jr.” Bryson plays the sousaphone for the hip-hop band The Roots at the Big Game Concert on Dec. 1. #gallery http://daily.stanford.org/image/full/8291
Courtesy of Jesse Gross

Damon “Tuba Gooding, Jr.” Bryson plays the sousaphone for the hip-hop band The Roots at the Big Game Concert on Dec. 1.

?uestlove’s — a.k.a. Ahmir Thompson’s — drumsticks flew, striking snare and crashing cymbal with incredible skill. Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter rhymed fast and hard, with an intensity that captured the crowd immediately. For a few minutes, it was just the two of them, then Black Thought and ?uestlove were joined by the rest of The Roots: keyboardist Kamal Grey, percussionist Frank “F. Knuckles” Walker, bassist and former Roots producer Owen Biddle, Kirk “Captain Kirk” Douglas on guitar and Damon “Tuba Gooding, Jr.” Bryson on sousaphone.

That’s right, I said sousaphone. The Roots are a hip-hop band with a tuba player. And that’s what makes them legendary: since their 1987 inception in Philadelphia, The Roots have worked to bend and re-define what it means to be hip-hop artists. The fact that they are a band is unusual in itself: most rap groups perform over pre-recorded beats, with a DJ providing all instrumentation. The Roots are also constantly redefining themselves, giving them a range of sounds from jazz to funk to straight hip-hop. The group lives on the cutting edge of the hip-hop genre, which has earned them great respect from those in the know. It has also made the band members teachers of style and precedent-setters; in fact, it would seem that both of last night’s opening acts — student hip-hop bands “Von” and “Jidenna the Chief & the Good Knews Band” — consider The Roots one of their main influences. Like The Roots, both of the student bands delivered stellar performances: Von got the audience moving and excited, while Jidenna the Chief blended song and rap beautifully.

Unfortunately, The Roots’ experiments in hip-hop and their intelligent lyrics have perhaps prevented them from becoming as famous as they might otherwise be. To their credit, The Roots seemed to understand and accept that, especially at Stanford, much of their music would go unrecognized. To counteract this, The Roots tacked on a riff or lyric from another famous song to nearly every one of the songs they performed. Again showing their genre-bending, collaborative nature, these bits and pieces ranged from Jay-Z to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

The highlight of the show, in fact, was a cover performed by Captain Kirk, ?uestlove and Tuba Gooding, Jr. of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” It was not the show’s highlight because of the song itself — in fact, much of the audience had probably never even heard of it — but because of the performance. Captain Kirk did his best Jimi Hendrix, playing the guitar upside-down and walking into the audience, and Tuba Gooding, Jr. high-stepped his sousaphone around like he was in a funky marching band. But neither could compare to ?uestlove: his several minute-long drum solo, for which he was alone on the stage, can only be described as a virtuoso performance. His hands began to blur as the sound of his attacks on the bass drum, the crash cymbal and the tom-toms resonated throughout the auditorium. People wept — well, okay, I wept, I don’t know about anybody else.

After “Masters of War,” The Roots closed their show with their own songs, including “Seed 2.0,” perhaps their most widely-known song, as their encore. Their reception was fitting given their high-powered performance; students and audience members cheered on The Roots with the same vigor and intensity they used to cheer on the Stanford football team in its Big Game win over Cal. Which is appropriate, given that both the Stanford football players and The Roots turned in truly legendary performances Saturday night.