Add Robert De Niro and you’ve got yourself an opening night bill trying to please everyone on a show that’s otherwise clearly about targeting young men and their twitter accounts. So maybe the Astral Weeks-pimping Van Morrison fit on the show about as well as he did that silly suit (although “Sweet Thing” is and forever will be the jam), but there was that little thing about how THE ROOTS ARE THE HOUSE BAND, and between their musical versatility and “Slow Jamming The News” comic dexterity, they are actually a perfect fit for this show. (Except for the part about how NBC made them a stage that could only hold like four of the band’s 23 members.) JT was also on, he sang like Michael McDonald (well) and John Mayer (ok) and a Brother Gibb (enough). Also the Roots penned a pretty cool theme song — one of 200+ tunes they’re working on — which Scott pointed out will either be something we’ll hear nightly for years to come, or just a few more times if Jimmy doesn’t step up his game considerably. Watch the highlights and/or the whole show and get Gabe’s opening night post-mortem at Videogum.

New tunes from Van The Man’s thirty-third studio album can be streamed at Lost Highway’s site. We missed the performance in Austin Wednesday night — Van kept it soulful, but free of cell phones and booze, according to NME. If you dig the bluesy, Celtic shuffle of this Simple stuff, there’s even more at BBC Radio 2, along with Q&A (“Nobody knows me,” he grumbles to DJ Paul Jones; then they break out the dictionary and define entrainment). To add a bit of our own pipe dreams to the Morrison news, over SXSW weekend, we were thinking ATP/Don’t Look Back should try to stage Astral Weeks. Anyhow, happy St. Patrick’s Day.

The music mavens at the venerable Time magazine have compiled their list of the “ALL-TIME 100″ albums — unranked and broken down by decade. We’re not sure what’s better: that only five albums of the past five years are among their 100 greatest, or that four of those five were by people who were dead before the ’00s even began. Whatever. Anyway, here’s the list in reverse chronological order (via NY Post):

2000s
Hank Williams – The Essential Hank Williams Collection
Kanye West – The College Dropout
Sam Cooke – Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964
Elvis Presley – Elvis: 30 No. 1 Hits
Muddy Waters – The Anthology, 1947 – 1972
Radiohead – Kid A
Outkast – Stankonia
PJ Harvey – Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP

1990s
Elvis Presley – Sunrise
Lucinda Williams – Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
Radiohead – OK Computer
The Notorious B.I.G. – Ready To Die
Bob Dylan – Time Out Of Mind
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing…
Oasis – (What’s The Story) Moning Glory
Hole – Live Through This
Mary J. Blige – My Life
Pavement – Slanted And Enchanted
Dr. Dre – The Chronic
U2 – Achtung Baby
Nirvana – Nevermind
R.E.M. – Out Of Time
Various Artists – Phil Spector, Back To Mono (1958-1969)
Garth Brooks – Ropin’ The Wind
James Brown – Star Time
A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory

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