Launching Coaches into Space

Song - Space Rock

Artist(s) - Adrian Baker

Released - 1983

Primetime Usage - 1988

Contained on - Bruton BRL 12 (Industrial Video)
Featured Highlight - Chiefs @ Chargers, 1988

"Space Rock" was only used once on NFL Primetime.  That's probably a good thing.  The song itself is alright, but it doesn't really work for sports highlights.  This is especially true for the portions that sound like a knockoff of Gary Numan's hit, "Cars."  Space Rock was composed by Adrian Baker.  Baker was the singer for the '80s band Gidea Park, which is probably best known for doing the cover of "California Girls" that accompanied the snowboard-chase sequence from A View to a Kill (thanks Wikipedia!).  The track (Space Rock, I mean) is available for streaming.  Sometime in the recent past, a website called Usample that uses Universal's streaming/website engine put up most every old Bruton album from their LP heyday (I also mentioned Usample when I plugged a new source for Good Morning America! a couple years ago).  Industrial Video, which houses Space Rock, was thankfully no exception.

 

Space Rock's only highlight clip wasn't memorable.  In Week 16 of 1988, the San Diego Chargers hosted the Kansas City Chiefs in a game that figured to be the final game for both head coaches.  The people doing the figuring were correct, as KC's Frank Gansz and SD's Al Saunders—a Brit who somehow ended up serving as an American Football coach for nearly five decades—were both fired following the game.  Gansz and Saunders would be never be head coaches again, either (Gansz died in 2009, Saunders hasn't coached since 2018).  Appropriately enough, the final highlight featuring Al Saunders was narrated by none other than John Saunders (no relation… I assume).

Special thanks to GodzFire for identifying this one a few months ago by posting it privately to YouTube and getting a copyright flag.

Underscores & Nicknames

Song - Solar Winds (underscore)

Artist(s) - Larry Lee Cansler

Released - 1985

Primetime Usage - 1987

Contained on - FirstCom UT103 (Lightning)

Featured Highlight - Chiefs @ Raiders, 1987 (Replacement-Game Week 1)

John Colby apparently loved playing underscores throughout the first year of NFL Primetime.  By my count, there were 7 underscores/submixes/rhythm-only versions of songs used at least once throughout the show's 1987 season.  In fact, the underscore of Powerhouse was used most every week of 1987 while the regular version was seemingly used just once.  The Solar Winds underscore, the only one of those seven that I hadn't posted about yet, was used a couple times during the strike.  It's a pretty standard underscore in that it just removes the solo melody parts from the original and leaves the rhythm and bass stuff intact.  It's not like the bizarro Action Scene submix that sounds like some sort of abstract experiment in minimalism.  The Solar Winds underscore doesn't work with highlights as well as the regular version, but it's passable and not off-putting.

Throughout the 1987 players' strike, NFL fans had a lot of fun coming up with mocking nicknames for the replacement squads.  For example, there were the San Francisco "Phoney-Niners," the Miami "Dol-Finks," and—as you'll see at the end of the highlight below—the Los Angeles "Masque-raiders." (credit to this article for giving me the first two).  The game itself wasn't that interesting, but at least it had some humor attached.

Not Quite a Non-Highlight Track

Song - Northern Lights (specifically Northern Lights (a))

Artist(s) - William (Bill) Soden

Released - 1986

Primetime Usage - 1987-88 (just non-highlight stuff in 1988)

Contained on - NFL 131 (LP) (Front Runner) (track link)
Featured Highlight - Buccaneers @ Cardinals, 1987

The early years of NFL Primetime didn't really have any tracks used exclusively for non-highlight stuff.  Of course, episodic segments like Inside the Numbers, Game Balls, and TJ's Extra Point didn't exist yet either.  The only non-highlight events with music were clips illustrating commentary segments by Chris, Tom, and Pete, and—if you count them as really being NFL Primetime—Sunday Night Football preview segments presented by Mike Patrick & co.  The songs used with those clips were always songs used for highlights, though.  "Northern Lights," composed by William Soden and contained on the final NFL Films LP, was almost an exception.  Northern Lights was used at least a few times for commentary segments, but it was only attached to a highlight once.  The St. Louis Cardinals, playing in their fourth-to-last game at Busch Stadium before moving to Arizona, came back from a 28-3 deficit to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Unfortunately, the directorial organization of this John Saunders clip isn't very good.  Most of the comeback was skipped over, and Saunders's telling of it removed all suspense.  It seems a lot of the John Saunders highlights from this era were short shrift like this.  It's still an entertaining watch, though.

 

*EDIT* - The song is now available for streaming on the new(?) NFL music site linked above.