WSJ Contest — Friday, April 24, 2020

Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Capitalized Words”—Laura’s review

This week, we’re looking for a band that played at Woodstock that would complete the theme. Hey, how many could there be? Thirty-two? It’s gotta be one of those.

WSJ Contest – 4.24.20 – Solution

Let’s proceed [30d: Hastily]: APACE by taking a look at those starred themers:

• [17a: Suburb near O’Hare]: DES PLAINES (pronounced, as Chicagolanders know, dezz planes)
• [20a: Parade performer]: BATON TWIRLER
• [27a: With 50-Across, apostle called “the Zealot”]: SAINT (and [50a]: SIMON)
• [29a: Victor at the Alamo]: SANTA ANNA
• [35a: Seven-time national champions in college football]: OKLAHOMA SOONERS
• [45a: Workplaces involving drudgery, humorously]: SALT MINES
• [55a: Group of kids trying to get home]: LITTLE LEAGUE
• [61a: New Year’s Eve presenter on NBC since 2004]: CARSON DALY

It didn’t take me long to notice that each one of those started with a word that also starts the name of a two-word US capital city, like so:

DES Moines, Iowa
BATON Rouge, Louisiana
SAINT Paul, Minnesota
SANTA Fe, New Mexico
OKLAHOMA City, Oklahoma
SALT Lake City, Utah
LITTLE Rock, Arkansas
CARSON City, Nevada

The band that played at Woodstock that would complete the theme can thus be none other than JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, because JEFFERSON City is the capital of Missouri. This was neat and not too tough, as well as particularly appealing to my classic rock tastes and my liking for music-related metas.

If everything you know about Jefferson Airplane comes only from the sorry travesty into which they devolved in the early 1980s that produced the worst rock song of all time, here they are at their sun-kissed hippie zenith:

If you’ve ever seen the documentary Gimme Shelter, you know that their set at Altamont didn’t go particularly well (cw: nudity, swear words, Hell’s Angels beating people up). As the Grateful Dead sang about it later, “One way or another, this darkness got to give.”