Recap: Blown away in Philadelphia

It was a bit of a rout, I must admit.

Thanks for welcoming us back to Philadelphia tonight, as BQT door girl/sometime sidekick Sherry and I headed to the City That Loves You Back for yet another Music Quiz Spectacular. (And a very pleasant trip to the observation deck at the top of City Hall; did you know that it's even taller than the U.S. Capitol building? Fascinating.) World Café Live is a honey of a venue—it makes the show look as big as it deserves to look—and Philadelphia is home to some of the most savvy trivia geeks I've yet to encounter. But as I say, it was a rout.

The team called itself Our Influences Are Mainly German (a reference to pretentious art-rockers? skinhead punk bands? Milli Vanilli?), and get this—in the first three rounds, they racked up 45 1/2 points out of a possible 48 (and this was some devilishly challenging music trivia, including the Album Cover Mash-Up video round). Several other teams were holding their own—the Only Team That Matters (nice) and Plenty of Room at the Bar (true enough) weren't that far behind, but OIAMG was killing it. No matter: The Three-Way Finale means all you need to do is make it into the top three to have a chance of victory. And thus, those three teams each send a superstar member onstage. (Not, alas, the two-person Inky All-Stars, the only squad to completely ace the "I Want Your Sax" audio round, even adding the bonus factoid of naming the sax player on "Baker Street," a song one is required by law to include in any saxophone-themed audio round. Here, listen to it as you read the rest of this:)

So the Three-Way Finale changes everything, right? Eh, maybe not. You know, I'm always trying to savor the tension during the finale, but tonight it was for naught: Jim of the Mainly German Influenced took it cleanly with two straight questions: He knew the uniting factor among the musicians who recorded the charity single "Tears Are Not Enough," and he did some quick math to reveal what song by a band from Chicago has three numbers in its title, adding up to 35. Q.E.D., as they used to say in my algebra class, and the $200 cash prize was theirs. I think Jim was the guy inside the Watson machine on Jeopardy! Here's me with the brainiac.

Thank you all, hope to come back soon; like us on Facebook and you'll find out when as soon as humanly possible.