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Song - Fast Drive

Artist(s) - Mary Therese Matthews, Sally Anne Griffith, John Bähler

Released - 1985

Primetime Usage - 1987-88

Contained on - FirstCom UT103 (Lightning), FirstCom A2 (Intense)

Featured Highlight - Raiders @ Packers, 1987

To shift the focus from this blog's first couple posts, here's an NFL Primetime song you may not remember.  "Fast Drive" was only used during the first two years of the show and, as such, has become long forgotten compared with the songs I featured earlier.  That doesn't mean it's bad, though.  Fast Drive's '80s hair-metal sound fits the time well and works adequately for sports highlights, too.  I wouldn't say it's one of the best Primetime tracks, by any stretch (in part because I've only seen it used for dud games), but it's still pretty enjoyable.  It was composed by Mary Therese Matthews, Sally Anne Griffith, and John Bähler.  I couldn't find any bio info on Matthews or Griffith (they did contribute to other Primetime songs that will be featured here later, though), but John Bähler was apparently one of the singing voices for The Partridge Family back in the early '70s.

Fast Drive may be obscure for NFL Primetime fans, but you might recognize it if you're a fan of pro wrestling.  It was the theme song for the tag-team duo Stars and Stripes (The Patriot & Buff Bagwell) that competed for WCW in the mid-'90s.

The difficulty in finding this song is similar to Powersurge.  There isn't anywhere to stream it in full, official legality (that I know of), but there's a good chance you could pick up FC-A2 Intense on eBay if you're willing to go that far.  FC-UT103 is harder to find, though, and I'm pretty sure all the FirstCom Up Tempo albums are LPs.

As I mentioned above, the only games I've seen with Fast Drive were relatively uninteresting ones.  Here's a clip from the very first episode of NFL Primetime where John Saunders highlights the final Tom Flores Raiders team going to Lambeau and giving the Packers their first shutout loss in 9 years.