Austin music trivia smackdown

I've been drafted as team captain of Team ACL in a music trivia contest called Mind Over Music being held tonight in Austin, with proceeds going to benefit the music education organization Grounded in Music.

This was originally pitched to us as an "underground" music trivia contest. So I'm assuming that all my reading, re-reading and re-re-reading of the Trouser Press guides will serve me in good stead. Unless they mean Animal Collective, the Dirty Projectors and all that shit. Then we're hosed.

Wish me luck.

Best of luck, Michael. Here's a nugget that may come in handy: Patti Smith was NOT in Scandal. It is the case, however, that the lead singer of Men At Work later became the U.S. Secretary of State.

I am picturing Cliff Claven on Jeapordy. The categories: Cheap Trick, The Finn Brothers, "Skronk", The Church, Late 70's New Wave, Ike Reilly, LWTUA covers, The Fall, etc....

You'll knock 'em dead, Toland!



Post Edited (02-01-10 13:37)

If those are the categories, hell yeah!

And it'll all be thanks to Trouser Press. I'm not being ironic. TP has been an invaluable source of info for me over the years.

Random nugget to remember for trivia contests:

The only celebrity guest at Elvis and Priscilla's wedding was Redd Foxx.

More trivia

What group topped the UK charts 2 times, 30 years apart with totally different line-ups?


The English Soccer team

We came in second. We lost by one point to the Austin Chronicle team. Which ain't a bad team to lose to. And the event raised about $2000 for Grounded in Music. It was a lot of fun.

Congrats, MT. What were the questions? And which did you persoanlly answer? (just curious)

Everything from "What street was CBGB's on" (Bowery and/or Bleecker, which we instinctly knew but second-guessed ourselves out of answering) to "what was the name of Fugazi's first studio album" (which was one of the ones I answered) to what songs did Bruce Springsteen win Golden Globes for (title, film and year) to how many positions in a one-night stand in Prince's "Gett Off" (23) to what artist began a series of baseball-themed singles with "Willie, Mickey and the Duke" (Terry Cashman - only one person in the 140 of us knew the answer to that).

There was also a listening round, with about 15 seconds of 8 songs from Austin artists, and a guess-the-album-cover round. The latter had 8 album covers with the faces replaced by wookies and the letters replaced by gibberish. Those were easy except for #8, which turned out to be a New Kids On the Block album. They made a mistake, though - one of the album covers was Kraftwerk's Man Machine, but they forgot to obscure the print in the lower left hand corner, so the title was there for all to see.

There wasn't a heck of a lot of TP-worthy questions - it was more mainstream than I thought it would be. Since we mostly collaborated on the questions, it's hard to which ones I personally answered, since most of them were reached by consensus amongst the team.

We had myself, two of ACL's producers, ACL's publicist and the ACL marketing/brand manager, who used to work at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, so he was invaluable on the 'rock & roll landmarks" round. All of us contributed and we had a great time.

Oh, and one of the toughest questions was: what gay male porn star put out the single "Pop You in the Pooper?" They weren't making it up.

The answer was Jeff Stryker. (I had no clue and just made up a name: Rod Wrangler.) A couple of folks there knew that.

The jokes tend to write themselves as far as posts like this are concerned.

Apparently the country album from which "Pop You in the Pooper" was taken is called Wild Buck. You can't make this stuff up.