Solved At Last! The Last Cars and Songs Puzzle

[Otto Puzzell]

No, not that song - thought you've identified elements of the correct song.

[Tom_I]

Is it Johnny Rivers (Artist J) and Song 8, "Lights on the Highway"?

[Otto Puzzell]

Is it Johnny Rivers (Artist J) and Song 8, "Lights on the Highway"?

Yes!

[Oguerrerob]

Are this guys left well-known?

[Otto Puzzell]

Absolutely not. Incredibly obscure.

[Oguerrerob]

Are they American? 90s?

[Otto Puzzell]

They may have existed and performed in the '90's. To my knowledge, they recorded only one album, after the 1990's were through.

[Otto Puzzell]

Clue to the last remaining artists...

You might recognize these guys. One was well-known for years, one enjoyed 15 minutes of fame.

Or, a lazy puzzler might have the folks in Mountain View ID them for you. If the solution comes from outside the US, I'll be 99.9% sure that you did just that.

[Tom_I]

At last - Artist O and Song 15. In fact I had the answer months ago, but thought it was wrong.

It's The Corvair Song by the Joe Parr Band.

If you Google "Corvair song" it comes up in the first few hits, on either web or image searches, but I just couldn't match any photographs I could find of the Joe Parr Band (and there aren't many) with any of the artist pictures in the puzzle, so I rejected it as a possibility.

Then I eventually came back to the clues. I recognised the first guy, but couldn't remember who he was. I didn't know the second, but from the cards he's holding I guessed he might be a quiz show host. In fact he wasn't, but a Google image search on "quiz show host" did find him, albeit on page 42, with images restricted to black and white only.

The name Jack Paar made me think back to the Joe Parr Band, then in one of those moments I remembered who it was in the first clue. We get extensive (if not excessive) coverage of US Presidential election campaigns in the UK, and Mr Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber" was no stranger to our screens in 2008.

So Joe Parr looked like the answer after all, but I still couldn't square it with the photo. I found that Joe Parr has some photo albums online - 49 of them in fact. I'd skimmed a few, but they are mostly friends and family, and to an outsider, I'm afraid they are excruciatingly boring. But this afternoon I decided to go through them methodically, and luckily I only had to look through the first eleven before the puzzle picture came up.

I'm not sure that it's the standard line-up of the band, but at least Joe Parr is in it (he's the one with the saxophone), and I can at last offer the answer with some degree of confidence.  ;)

[Otto Puzzell]

That's some fine sleuthing, Tom_I

This puzzle has proven to be an excellent example of the power of detective work, and leveraging clues.

It's clear that Google's Search by Image served to identify many of the artists (you know who you are - no need to concoct a story about how you've long been a collector of pop and rock music about cars). OK, fine - at the time this puzzle was posted, that wasn't technically against the rules. As it turns out, it led mostly to a lot of wild guesses. It was fitting that the people who did actual detective work scored most of the points.

The points awarded are as follows:

Tom_I   8
Amsterdam   4
Oguerrerob   2
Ray B.   1