With the assistance of several organizations, including sponsor Awesome Real Estate, the Fayette County Special Olympics will be the recipient of a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Trivia Show” fundraiser being held Sept. 18 at the American Legion Post 25.
Recently, John Timmons — one of two hosts for the show — explained how he and his brother Dave Timmons, originally of Mt. Sterling, came up with the show.
“We have done this ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Trivia Show’ at a lot of venues, but this will be a new one,” John said. “We call it that, but it is more popular top 40 music, too. I don’t want people to think it is just rock ‘n’ roll, we do soul music, some disco, some folk singers, if it was in a top 40 at one time we do it.”
According to John, the brothers have been longtime music fans since they frequented a record shop in the Village of Mt. Sterling. He said the person who ran the store would fill the jukeboxes, and the used records he would sell for 20 cents a piece.
“So I built quite a collection of hit records,” John said. “In that record shop they would have them on shelves — they would keep older records — and they had the tabs that showed side A and side B. I got quite familiar with the groups and the songs they made, when they were released. I became kind of this walking rock ‘n’ roll encyclopedia even as a young kid.”
Growing up the Timmons brothers would become engulfed in musical knowledge of various kinds and John said they really balanced each other out on their knowledge of music. He said it was only natural that they did trivia shows together because of all of the information on artists, records and songs they had and that they had not seen a show such as the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Trivia Show” they would go on to create.
“Finally, in 2006 we talked about putting together our own traveling show and by 2008 we made our performance,” John said. “At that point we did 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, and since then we have added 90’s music in there as well.”
John explained the show is set up similar to Jeopardy with two boards that have progressively harder questions for the audience to answer. Prizes are given out for correct answers and according to event organizers they are receiving donations from various businesses around Washington Court House.
“We are looking forward to giving out a lot of prizes when people can guess the artist, song title or maybe even some other questions about the content of songs,” John said. “If they get it right they get a prize, but here is how our game is different than Jeopardy, we also do audio stumpers. They get to pick a decade and pick a number and we play about 20-25 seconds of a song to see if anyone can recognize — well sometimes I ask for the artist, the song title — the piece. People love it because it brings back a lot of memories, they get to hear a song maybe they haven’t heard in awhile and we get a combination of really familiar songs. Sometimes we get songs that aren’t quite as well known. And sometimes you get people just like us who are very knowledgeable and you have to really work hard to stump them.”
The event will be held on Sept. 18 at the American Legion, 1240 US Route 22 in Washington C.H. Similar to their monthly breakfast (on the third Tuesday each month from 8 to 10 a.m.), the Legion will be donating the space and breakfast. The breakfast will be from 8 to 9:30 and the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Trivia Show” will be from 8:30 to 10 a.m. Only 170 tickets will be sold and they are $30 a piece with all proceeds benefiting the Fayette County Special Olympics’ bowling program.
For more information about the Timmons brothers, visit timmonsrock.com. On the website the Timmons brothers have posted podcasts, photos, summaries and more from the duo.
Reach Martin Graham at (740) 313-0351.
