The Lower Frequencies

My wife and I went on a cruise to Cozumel, Belize and Roatan last week (which explains why there weren’t any updates to my blog last week…well, I suppose the lack of posting could be just par for the course, too.  Shut up).  Great time – the countries are beautiful and we were accompanied by friends from Arizona whom we don’t get to see often enough.

...and the air was just right for drinking.

I’ll write at more length about the places we visited later, but wanted to brag about our victorious day 6 of the cruise in this one.

We had been competing in the various trivia sessions held on the boat while at sea with some success but never winning the valuable prizes.  But after our last excursion in Cozumel (swimming with sea turtles for the wives; ATV mudding in the jungle for the guys), we came back to the ship and, looking through the rest of the day’s schedule, saw that the 4:15 trivia’s theme was “’60s and 70s Rock.”

Oh yeah.

Jeff and I got there a bit early to get seats and had a few beverages to pass the time.  Soon enough, the host, Fritz from Philly (the Phillipines, that is), started setting up and, while doing so, cranked some Journey for those who had gathered.  Jeff started talking to me about Journey’s new singer, Arnel Pineda, and how the band had discovered him. The dude sounds EXACTLY like Steve Perry – it’s amazing, really – and is from the Phillipines.  If  you’re not aware of the story, read it here.

So while Jeff is telling  me this story I’m listening to the Journey blaring and recognizing that the songs sound remixed (slight differences in instrumentation) and suggest to Jeff that we were listening to the Pineda incarnation of Journey (it made sense – Fritz, as I said, is Filipino).  Jeff went to ask about that and when Fritz found that Jeff knew about Arnel, he immediately  came over and sat down with us and told us all about him.  Apparently Fritz was good friends with him before he was discovered. Fritz was a character – every time he cracked a joke he’d give a low “mwuah-ha-ha” laugh after (which grated when we first attended one of his sessions, but then became  endearing).

So then the trivia began.  Fritz would play a snippet of a song and we’d have to name the title AND artist. I gotta admit, I was pretty confident – I KNOW classic rock as it’s all I practically listen to these days, whether on terrestrial radio or Sirius. Fritz started off with Styx’s “Come Sail Away” (appropriate, being on a boat and all that), moved into Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” and Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” and then “Sgt. Peppers…”.

We didn’t miss one. Here’s the list:

How would you have done?

Checking the score sheets was a blast: Fritz would play more of the songs and most of the time the whole bar would start singing along.  Damn near sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” in its entirety.  And Fritz could WAIL.  Awesome. After scoring, only one other group had a perfect score (out of about 20 groups) so it came down to the tiebreaker song –  I immediately recognized “Black Dog” and only had to turn around to see the other group looking at each other trying to come up with the name of the song to know we had won.  Fritz asked for both group’s “final answers” and when the other group said “Rock and Roll” I started in with the high fives among my group, a kiss for my wife.

Come to find out the prize this time was a Royal Caribbean cap – something sold on the ship for about $20.  Everyone in the group got one and then we had a picture taken with Fritz:

We Are the Champions

During the game Laura kept saying that I would have/could have won by myself – which is true – although I would have had to buy my own beer (we had what I thought was a sweet arrangement with our friends). But I also know that I have friends here at home who would have been able to match me song for song – we’d probably still be trying to break that tie if BRP had been competing against me.

Anyway, thanks to Led Zeppelin for the hat:

This entry was posted on February 16, 2011 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Vacation with tags arnel pineda, fritz, journey, royal caribbean, songs, trivia, vacation, zeppelin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.