Solution to Foodstock

WOK AND ROLL

The well of food+band puns is deep, and we couldn’t resist dipping into it.

There are two ways to approach this puzzle. You can start with the 10 headliner bands on the poster. Each is a real band name, turned into a food pun.

Bean Folds Five → Ben Folds Five
Chief Beef → Chief Keef
Habanerosmith → Aerosmith
Lattelor Swift → Taylor Swift
Mackles'mores → Macklemore
Miley Citrus → Miley Cyrus
New Gourder → New Order
Pho Fighters → Foo Fighters
tUnA-yArDs → tUnE-yArDs
Wu-Tang Clam → Wu-Tang Clan

Then you also have 10 punny song titles, taken from 10 real songs:

Calamari Corn Creation → Californication
Call it Barramundi (But Satay is just as Bad) → Call it Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)
Chai Gruel Never Ends → High School Never Ends
Don't Kefir The Reaper → Don't Fear the Reaper
It's A Shame About Raisin → It's A Shame About Ray
Millet with the Butter-fried Wings → Bullet with the Butterfly Wings
My Rumps → My Humps
Only Canape with Choux → Only Wanna Be With You
Plumday → Someday
The Ring of Carrot Flour → The King of Carrot Flowers

Once you have the correct bands and the correct titles, you have to find a connection between them. The key is to start looking at the list of bands who wrote or made famous the songs in the song list — each of them has a legit food reference in their names:

Bullet with the Butterfly Wings → Smashing Pumpkins
Californication → Red Hot Chili Peppers
Call it Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad) → T-Bone Walker
Don't Fear the Reaper → Blue Oyster Cult
High School Never Ends → Bowling for Soup
It's A Shame About Ray → Lemonheads
My Humps → Black Eyed Peas
Only Wanna Be With You → Hootie & The Blowfish
Someday → Sugar Ray
The King of Carrot Flowers → Neutral Milk Hotel

Now you can connect everything together. Each of the food-based artist names has a food connection to the punny headliners. In other words: Punny song → real song → real artist ↔ punny headliner ← real headliner.

The only remaining piece of info is stage numbers. There are several options about what text to use those numbers to index into. The rule of thumb in this situation is that whatever text is the most cloaked, that’s the one you’ll probably need to use for the extraction - which is what we did here! Using the stage number to index into the food-based artists names (the third column above), and read in song order, you get WOK AND ROLL.

Notes

• This puzzle got 5047 submission emails in the 48 hours the solve window was open.

• This puzzle started out very differently. We built a whole version of the puzzle where you were given 10 concert locations that ended up being anagrams of a big hit by each band. So like you’d be given Bread Zeppelin and the fake city of Karsh, MI, and then realize that KARSHMI is an anagram of “Kashmir.” Then there was another layer that involves dates that turned into indexes. It was fine, but we knew we could do better, so I tore down the puzzle and rebuilt it.

• Our list of pun band names was extremely long and extremely fun to make. The full list is below.

• We came up with so many good names, but we only needed 10. So we decided to include a smaller list at the bottom, like you’d see on most festival posters. When we moved to the idea of showing Stages, it made more sense for the design to show smaller bands on each stage. We needed a way to make it clear those weren’t part of the puzzle, so we put in an acrostic. Their first letters spell NONE OF THE SMALL BAND NAMES ARE CLUES.

• Some other possible titles for this puzzle: Poachella, Kitschfork.

Notes from solvers

• Courtney said: “I guessed the answer to Foodstock as soon as I read the puzzle bc it was the name of this restaurant near my old office and it just popped into my head. Realizing I had been right all along after solving it was maybe my most thrilling moment of quarantine.”

• Someone wrote a whole set of lyrics to “Calamari Corn Creation.”

Long list of bad band puns, please enjoy

Ace of Bouilliabasse / Alanis Vinaigrette / Alice in Grains / Ariana Gravy / Banana Del Rey / Bell Peppers and Sebastian / Billie Relish / Biscuits On the Block / Black Eyed Pizzas / Bon Bon Ivor / Bon Bon Jovi / Bone Thugs n Hominy / Bread Zeppelin / Brie Gees / Bruce Springroll / Bruno Mars Bar / Bun Direction / Bun Jovi / Buns n Roses / Cake / Carly Rae Jeppson’s Malört / Celine Dijon / Clay Bacon / Coldplate / Collard Green Day / Cyndi Poppers / Death Cabernet for Cutie / Def Peppard / Depeche a la Mode / Donna Summer Sausage / Egg Sheeran / Elton Scone / Fallout Po’boy / Fiona Apple / Flana Del Rey / Flapjack Johnson / Flavor Flav / Fleetwood Mac n Cheese / Florence and the Tagines / Gladys Knife & The Pith / Gloria Esteflan / Grapeful Dead / Hootie and the Goldfish / Iggy Poptart / Katy Perrier / Lana Del Monte-Ray / Linkin Pork / Lobster the People / Macaroon 5 / Mackles'mores / Mamas and the Tapas / Marrowsmith / Merlot Haggard / Miley Citrus / Modest Mousse / Mumford and Buns / New Squids on the Block / Nicki Fromage / Olivia Fig Newton-John / Oreo Speedwagon / Pancake! At The Disco / Pear Jam / Peayonce / Pho Fighters / Pickleback / Plums n Roses / Pork Floyd / Rabe Zombie / Radicchiohead / Rage Against the Tagine / Salt N Pepa / Scone Roses / Shonen Fork / Skrilleggs / Spaghetti Vedder / Spam Smith / Steely Bran / Stevie Wonderbread / Sugarcubes / Talking Breads / Talking Cabbage Heads / Tater Kinney / The Beet-les / The Beets / The Carp-enters / The Leeknd / The Mamas and the Tapas / The Peach Boys / The Rice Girls / The Rolling Scones / The Yeastie Boys / Tofu Fighters / Troutkast / Turmeric Astley / Umphrey's McCheese / Wheylon Jennings / Wu-Tang Clam / Wu-Tang Flan