Where's Jim Croce when I need him?

This week, my Sherman & Tingle Song Challenge moment marked my latest bid to win a prize on the radio. It didn't go as I'd hoped.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, one television program that I enjoyed watching was “Name That Tune,” which pitted contestants against one another in a duel to see who was more adept at rapidly identifying songs.

Being just a kid, I had no clue most of the time, but sometimes I’d recognize a ditty played by studio musicians.

As I grew older and heard innumerable songs—and a core batch of a few thousand over and over and over again—I began to enjoy identifying those familiar tunes (along with the musician and even the year it was released sometimes). I thought maybe I could have a shot at winning a prize for my musical knowledge.

That’s what moved me to dial in this Wednesday morning on The Sherman & Tingle Show, for their 7:30 Song Challenge on 97.1 FM The Drive.

As their web page states, “Each weekday morning at 7:30, Sherman & Tingle will play snippets of seven Classic Rock songs. Correctly identify the titles of all seven songs within 30 seconds and you’ll score a prize! If you don’t get all seven, caller nine benefits and walks away with the prize.”

I’m a veteran radio contestant, starting with winning scores of pizzas from my hometown radio station in Marshfield, Mass. over a four-year span—they eventually brought me into the station a few times to be on the studio side of the sports trivia questions.

As an adult, I’ve won other prizes, including a White Sox jersey in 2005 from a Chicago sports radio station and a bounty of random goodies from a Hawaii radio station during my 10-day visit to Kauai in 2000.

So, I’m not shy about trying to get on the air. And on this occasion, I timed my call just right. Instead of the customary busy signal, a producer picked up and asked for my name and hometown, then told me to shift from speakerphone (via my Bluetooth device) to directly speaking into the phone.

I had about five minutes of waiting on hold, driving westward along Interstate 88 to my job, and then here’s what happened next:

A few take-aways from this humbling, but still fun, experience:

• It’s all the luck of the draw—I can see getting four, five, maybe even six songs correctly, if they played stuff in my sweet spot.

• That luck can go both ways: if they’d shuffled the second and third song, I’d have been the latest member of the ignominious “Not-Even-One Club.”

• It’s a lot easier to hear the songs as a radio listener than when it’s over the phone—it comes through pretty fuzzy. It took me three seconds on the first song to even start to have my brain wrapped around the sounds—by then, I was nervous that it was taking too much time. A few seconds later, I declared “pass.” For the next tune, it took me five seconds to detect Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” with confidence. Should’ve been two or three seconds.

• It pays to be the person in the wings—in this case, the ninth caller—if you want to get the prize (on this day, it was a pair of tickets to see The Who). A year ago, I was that backup caller—as noted in this column—and scored a couple of tickets to see John Fogerty (which I passed along to a friend, due to a scheduling conflict).

• Even if you flop, it’s still more fun to be the one who gets on the air.

• Next time, I’ll try to be more prepared—the station provides clues on its website the day before and, as might be painfully obvious, I hadn’t bothered to check that out in advance. I’ll know, too, that you can only “pass” on one song.

• It’s fine to enjoy the moment and banter a bit. At the start, I told Sherman and Tingle that I’d been preparing for this moment for 43 years—as my siblings know, I sort of “discovered” music when I was 14. One of the hosts good-naturedly turned my 43-year observation back on me when I stumbled out of the gate.
  
  After the final buzzer mercifully ended my attempt, I teasingly questioned why they hadn’t played any Beatles or Bachman-Turner Overdrive songs, then concluded, “Where’s Jim Croce when I need him?”¹

• To capture the moment for posterity, be strategic in identifying whom to contact to see if they can be your chronicler. After getting picked as the on-air contestant and then going on the air, I had six minutes. I used that time to text a friend who I suspected would be available and who I knew was technologically savvy enough to know how to capture the audio.
  
  I didn’t know if he’d seen the messages until a few minutes after being on the air, when he sent the 89-second clip above. I picked wisely. Thank you, Dan Moroney!

And as for those two songs I couldn’t place—would you have been able to ID them? Answers are in the footnote, below.²

The Easy Way Out

Earlier this week, Substack sent me a message:

“Share an old post

You originally published "Immaculate Upgrade" 3 years ago. Consider sharing it again with your readers. Sharing relevant old posts is a great way to engage your audience who might not have seen them already without having to create new content.”

That’s a crutch I hope I never use. But it’s been a busier-than-usual week, hence why this is going out in the afternoon instead of the morning.

Anyway, a quick follow-up from that Immaculate Upgrade column, which was actually just a week over two years ago:

In contrast to the glow I felt in 2023, when I described it as bringing me “daily nostalgic nourishment,” I hardly ever play it. In fact, I just looked it up: I’ve done so a mere 21 times in the past year. In baseball terms, that’s batting .057.³

Photo of the Week

This was what my eyes beheld last night on the campus of Northwestern University, where Bridgett and I saw our alma mater squeak past the Leathernecks of Western Illinois University, 42-7.

Glad that our Wildcats won, but we were even more grateful for the opportunity to check out this temporary home for the football team while their regular stadium is in the midst of a kazillion-dollar renovation. Right along Lake Michigan, with the Chicago skyline in the background, it’s virtually impossible to take a bad photograph in this venue, especially as the sun is setting.

1. Jim Croce is one of my favorite musicians of all time. His death at 30 is one of the biggest tragedies in the annals of music.

2. First song: “Breaking the Law,” by Judas Priest. Third song: “Too Late for Love,” by Def Leppard.

3. Coincidentally, the friend who tipped me off to the Immaculate Grid (Dan) is the same one who recorded my ill-fated radio segment this week.