No Country for Old Men

For the past eight years Cindy and I have become ‘regulars’ on the music trivia scene.  We were originally recruited by the ‘Rockin’ B’s’ and played under that name until the woman who owned the Rockin’ B, a local antique store stopped playing with us.  We played with the team name ‘Chicago’ for a few weeks, the result of a Chicago Greatest Hits CD that wouldn’t eject or stop playing on the CD player in my car.  I was to the point that hearing 25 or 6 to 4 caused involuntarily convulsions; flip side is I rarely get any of Chicago’s songs wrong anymore.  Then we tried the name ‘That’s What She Said’ for a while because we got a kick out of hearing the music trivia host say it when she read out each team’s score following every round of songs.  One week we used the name ‘In First Place’ because it was hilarious watching the confusion on the faces of everyone else when the scores were announced:  ‘In third place, the Usual Suspects.  In second place, In First Place.  In first place, the Mufftones.’   I crack myself up sometimes.

The game is pretty simple.  A song is played, and teams have to come up with the title of the song, the artist and the year it was released (plus or minus one year).  Over the years I have religiously studied the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s stations on satellite radio, as all three (title, artist, year) is displayed on the radio screen as the song is playing.  On long drives—to Gainesville, Florida for a Gator football game, for example, I can get in quite a bit of ‘studying’ done along the way. 

The team name we’ve been using the past five years is ‘Fried Mushrooms.’   I wasn’t there the night this particular name was selected, but it stuck.  I don’t particularly care for the name so I never took the time to ask where it came from.  Besides, I appreciate our team name on the answer sheet to ‘FM,’ which sounds a whole lot cooler than ‘Fried Mushrooms,’ although the music trivia host insists on calling us by our full (albeit dumb and inappropriate, for that matter since none of us has ever ordered any fried mushrooms in the eight years we’ve been playing) name.

Our team has quite a few members.  The most we ever had were 23, although the usual number hovers around 10 or 11.  We’ve also played with as few as three.  Regardless of how many are playing on any given night, the prizes are always the same: A $30 gift card to the host restaurant for the first place team, $20 for second place and $10 for third.  So on the night we had 23 players, our first place award equated to approximately $1.30 each, not even enough to cover our gratuities for the evening.  So what we do is accumulate our winnings until we have a sum large enough to pay for the entire team’s meal for a predetermined night that all of the regulars will be playing.  It’s worked out quite well over the years, and if I had to guess I’d say right now we have almost $250 in gift cards that we’ve won in the past few months.

I’d like to introduce you to some of the regulars of the Fried Mushrooms:

·      Ginger, one of the original Rockin’ B’s.  Her specialty is novelty songs, late ‘70’s and assorted pop music she has on her iPod that she listens to during her workouts.  Standout moment: Puttin’ on the Ritz was the song being played.  We knew the title and the year but none of us could come up with the artist.  Ginger went to the restroom while the song was playing so she could think.  Two minutes later she came barreling out of the restroom running towards our table and it was all she could do to refrain from shouting out ‘Taco’ before she leaned over and whispered it to all of us.  From that point forward when anyone else on the team has a similar revelation, we call it a ‘Taco Moment.’

·      Allen’s specialty is country music and songs in the 1978 to 1982 window.  I’ve come to recognize Allen’s ‘tell’ sign that he knows the correct answer: He scrunches up his face, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling to think, pauses for three or four seconds and then tells us his guess that I’ve come to know is not a guess but in fact the correct answer.  Also, if he puts his stamp of 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 or 1982 on a song, it’s a lock.  Taco Moment: Into the Night by Benny Mardones (1980).

·      Tim’s specialty is hair metal, southern rock, songs of the late ‘80’s and songs that may or may not have been popular in strip clubs in the early 2000’s (Tim is a man of mystery, he is).  Tim looks exactly like a miniature Travis Tritt and once correctly identified one of his songs, but other than that he’s like me: Tim doesn’t know hardly any country music.  Taco Moment: Summertime Girls by Y and T (1984) as well as any other music by obscure hair metal bands (Kix, anyone?).

·      Mark is another member of the former Rockin’ B’s whose specialty is late ‘70’s, early-to-mid ‘80’s and identifying individual members of the more notable bands of the last four decades that comes in handy when the host asks for that sort of information.  Taco Moment: Driver’s Seat by Sniff ‘n the Tears (1979).

·      Tracey, Mark’s wife is another member of the former Rockin B’s.  Her specialty is mid-to-late ‘80’s and country.  When a song from the mid-to-late ‘80’s is played, Tracey pulls out a pen and a napkin and starts writing a series of numbers that all I can figure is some sort of formula leading her to ‘discovering’ the year the song was released.  Taco Moment: What I Am by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians (1989).        

·      Cindy’s specialty is ‘70’s and to a lesser extent ‘60’s.  Cindy doesn’t have any special superpowers, tricks up her sleeve or what-have-you.  She either knows it or she doesn’t.  Wait, let me amend that by saying she is able to tell if a song is NOT from the ‘70’s, that on occasion comes in handy for the rest of us.  Taco Moment: Best of My Love by The Emotions (1977).

·      Dan, Mark’s brother (making him Tracey’s brother-in-law) is a county sheriff and it gives our team additional cred with he walks in with his firearm in plain sight.  His specialty is country and the occasional novelty song no one else seems to know.  Taco Moment: Lovefool by The Cardigans (1996). 

·      Laura is our newest member, and she does particularly well with country, hits of the last 15 years and identifying what movies songs were featured in (a skill that occasionally comes in very handy).  Taco Moment: Identifying some song that was featured in some movie, neither of which I can remember but appreciate her knowing because I sure as h*ll didn’t. 

·      Karen is the sister of Mark and Dan.  Her area of expertise is country, the mid-‘70’s and periodically pulling the answer to the ‘final jeopardy’ style question at the end of the game out of her a**.  Taco Moment: Identifying the youngest woman ever to win a Grammy (LeAnn Rimes). 

·      Kenzie is the daughter of Mark and Tracey.  She was six when our team was formed and used to love running our answers up to the host; now she’s 14 and we take the answer up ourselves.  Taco Moments: Identifying songs by Taylor Swift.  

·      ‘The Mom’s,’ Les and Betty (mother to Tracey/grandmother to Kenzie and mother to Mark/Dan/Karen, respectively).  Their collective specialty is songs from the late ‘50’s and early ’60’s.  Taco Moment: Filling in the blank for songs the team knows the title and artist but has no clue about the year it was released.  Taco Moments: A whole slew of songs from 1955 through 1962.

·      My specialty is late ‘60’s, ‘70’s, songs from the ‘80’s that had an accompanying music video on MTV and early ‘90’s (excluding boy band songs).  Achilles Heel: Country.  One night I wrote our team name down as ‘No Country for Old Men.’  I wasn’t kidding.  I have to add that not once, twice but three times our team had trouble identifying the artist of a country song and all three times I suggested it was Confederate Railroad (I was guessing each time.).  I was right all three times; I only regret it took them three times to believe me.  Taco Moment: Identifying Vangelis as the artist of the theme from Chariots of Fire (I wasn’t sure if I was making up a word—Vangelis—or if deep down I knew it was correct).

Over the years the Fried Mushrooms have won our fair share of competitions, including one night when we missed the year of release by… forty-three years!!!   When the song played it sounded to me like a young Aretha Franklin, so we (meaning ‘I’) went with 1965 as the year of release.  The song (Mercy) was actually by a new artist named Duffy.  The year of release was actually 2008.  In my defense, I ask that you play the song sometime; then tell me it doesn’t sound like a young Aretha Franklin.         

It would be difficult to miss the year of release by 43 years, but if I was in charge of identifying it for a country song I’m sure I could do worse.