Title: “Jam Session” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle a rock album from the 1990s.
Answer: no idea!
puzzle 9-ish mins; meta DNF (Matt)
Egad! Was out of town this weekend and completely forgot about the Muller Meta. Finally realized what I’d done tonight but had 90 minutes to solve the puzzle and then the meta! Can I do it? Probably not, especially with an attitude like that, but let’s see what happens (took Jangler 22 minutes, so…)
Solved the grid, which is devoid of long entries (a quartet of 8’s are the puzzle’s longest). So that’s certainly odd.
After a moment I noticed four NBA teams:
18-A: [KFC bits] = NUGGETS. Denver.
38-A: [Another name for cornet valves] = PISTONS. Detroit.
50-A: [Pouched animals that aren’t marsupials] = PELICANS. New Orleans. I have always liked this team name.
61-A: [Sting sorts?] = HORNETS. Charlotte.
What now? There must be more stress on the grid than this, with its lack of long answers; or maybe there’s not, and Pete and the gang didn’t want longer non-theme entries as distractions. But I think probably there is more in the grid.
Looking around I noticed [Jazz great Puente] for TITO at 12-D. That could be nudging is to the Utah Jazz, or maybe it’s just random. I think it’s probably something, since that would be a mean red herring and there were many ways to clues TITO. But I don’t see any other NBA team names in clues.
Let’s look at one other oddity I noticed while solving: 25-D/22-A is [With 22-Across, “Pardon my accidental (?) wordplay?”] = NO PUN / INTENDED. That certainly didn’t need to be there, so probably something (especially with that clue). But what? Hmmm. Well, there are a bunch of punny clues that take a ?, but Pete often includes this without them being meta-related, so maybe not.
Let’s try looking at all the clues that end with a question mark. Eight minutes later: that lead nowhere, but it’s hard to believe that NO PUN/INTENDED is not intentional and theme-related. OK, I’ve only got 22 minutes left so let me go back to the four cities of those NBA teams (and I just now notice NBA [Three-letter sports grp.] at 64-D). Denver could be singer John Denver, and Charlotte could be the band Good Charlotte. But what about New Orleans and Detroit? I can’t find anything.
16 minutes left. This probably isn’t going to happen but let’s give it one last look. My last-ditch effort is to look at a list of prominent 1990s rock albums and see if that triggers anything. The best thing I can find is “Ten” by Pearl Jam, just from the “Jam” in the title (although that could mean a lot things here, most of them not having anything to do with Pearl Jam.
But I have nothing better, so let me know what I missed in comments.
There’s also the San Antonio SPURS at 31D.
Each of the 5 NBA teams has a standard 3-letter abbreviation that can be found as a prefix of another grid entry. In grid order:
DENT = DEN + T
SASH = SAS + H
NOPUN = NOP + UN
CHAD = CHA + D
DETER = DET + ER
THUNDER is not the name of a ’90s rock album (though there are 1987 and 2008 albums of that name), so that can’t be the right answer.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are another NBA team with abbreviation OKC, so we’re looking for an album named something like that. I found Radiohead’s 1997 album OK Computer which fits the bill, though I was only about 90% confident that that was the right answer (the leap from OKC to OK Computer gave me a little hesitance). It was accepted as correct though, so if that’s not the intended answer, then I don’t know what is.
I did the same thing. Usually when I’m able to solve the meta, I am fairly confident I got the right answer. This time, I had no idea. But when OK Computer turned up second on the results list for my “OKC album” Google search (a senior living community in Oklahoma City was first), I thought “here’s goes nothing” when I submitted my guess.
Maybe it was unintentional, but having CHAd directly over HORNETS was a nice hint.
The San Antonio SPURS are also in the grid. My answer (incorrect) was the 1993 Scorpions album FACE THE HEAT, given that (a) it includes the Miami NBA team’s name, and (b) the many, many lists of 1990s rock albums that I consulted did not contain anything that seemed more pertinent. Oh well.
Ah, that’s a nice idea. Wish I hadn’t blanked on the deadline.
Thanks Matt!
191 correct this month.
Three steps to getting the answer, as detailed by Adam Rosenfield above.
Most solvers reported a solid click, but there were some that weren’t entirely sure, mostly because OK COMPUTER has six letters after the city trigram, instead of one or two.
Quite a few regular solvers missed this month!
It was two days before I noticed the NBA teams, and even then I missed seeing the SPURS.
I’ve failed to solve three or four metas this week. It’s a bit discouraging.
I went down the wrong path because of the pure coincidence that new orleanS/detroiT/san antoniO/denveR/charlottE had last letters that spelled out STORE. Which sent me looking for when Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys was released (1989) and whether there were rock albums of the 90s that had a store in the name.
Another coincidence was that the answer NEVER had all the letters of Denver except for the D.
I saw denT/detER/chaD, but I didn’t think about looking for SAS and NOP rather than SAN and NOLA/NEW, and the prior 2 coincidences made me think that this was another coincidence. Those 3-letter team abbreviations come up often enough in crosswords that I need to start learning them!
Does the title “Jam Sessions” just refer to NBA Jam (which apparently is a video game), or is there an additional connection to the meta?
I think the title is just pulling double duty as a basketball reference (jam meaning “slam dunk”) and a music reference (jam session meaning an informal music performance).
As someone who’s familiar with and has played NBA Jam, it did cross my mind that maybe the title was related to that, but I didn’t think it was relevant to the meta and didn’t chase any rabbit holes about it. I suspect that Evan’s right and it probably wasn’t intended as a reference to the video game.
Stopped a step short after sussing out Thunder. Submitted Thunderstruck by ACDC