Featured Clip - Steve Young Talks about Rex Grossman's Mistakes, Super Bowl XLI
The final unknown track from the Super Bowl XLI episode of NFL Primetime, "Unknown Song #62" accompanied Steve Young's roasting of Chicago QB Rex Grossman's "flippant" turnovers in his team's loss to the Indianapolis Colts. The song isn't as clear to hear as US #60 or US #61, but you can tell it has a bit of a bass-heavy blues rock motif going on. If you can identify this piece, don't hesitate to comment here or on YouTube.
Featured Clip - Inside the Numbers, Super Bowl XLI
Unknown Song #61, which is from a little bit later in the Super Bowl XLI Primetime episode than Unknown Song #60, is also clear and easy to recognize (please comment if you can ID it). It was used for the Inside the Numbers segment that highlighted Colts running back Joseph Addai's rookie exploits. Fun fact!: because Addai backed up Dominic Rhodes throughout the 2006 season, he became the first running back to ever rush for 1000 yards without starting a single game. Thanks Wikipedia!
Featured Clip - "Won Super Bowl in 1st. Appearance, QB Drafted 1st. Overall" Segment, Super Bowl XLI
It's back to the Purgatory Primetime era (2006-18) for another unknown non-highlight track! Unknown Song #60 has a simple & memorable repetitive hard-rock hook, so it should theoretically be easy to identify. It was used for the Super Bowl XLI episode of NFL Primetime where Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, and Steve Young highlighted Peyton Manning's first Super Bowl win. Also added as a bonus to the end of the video is the following return-from-commercial bump where US #60 is briefly used again. As usual: if you can identify this song, don't hesitate to comment here or on YouTube. Thanks!
Contained on - Musikos MS1 (Sports 1) Featured Highlight - Seahawks @ Patriots, 1988
Song 2 - At the Buzzer
Artist(s) - William Soden (likely)
Released - No later than 1988
Primetime Usage - 1988
Contained on - Musikos MS1 (Sports 1) Featured Highlight -Seahawks @ Patriots, 1988
In getting ready to make a post for this week, I wanted to find a early NFL Primetime clip with decent audio quality that also featured the two teams playing in Super Bowl LX. Lo & behold, I found one! This clip is actually long enough to contain two different songs, both (probably) William Soden specials that ended up on those infamously elusive Musikos CDs (LINK1, LINK2, LINK3). It's quite nice that this Seattle vs. New England highlight uses these two tracks in particular because the quality of the original clips (Grand Prix, At the Buzzer) I posted of those songs weren't too good.
The real Super Bowl LX will likely have a bit more offense than this 1988 matchup. In this one, the Seahawks visited Foxboro Stadium and lost to Doug Flutie and the Patriots 13-7. Seattle only had 2 first downs the entire game. Ironically, the Seahawks would then score 40+ in their final two contests and win the AFC West (their last playoff appearance until 1999) while the Patriots—who also finished 9-7 (their last winning season of the Pat Patriot era)—would miss the playoffs.
Here's another higher quality clip of a late '80s NFL Primetime track. "Marathon," by Hal Brown & Brad Kelley, was used seemingly every week in 1987 (I haven't seen Week 2) and most every week in 1988. Finding a clean cut of this song is difficult. The original album was released on LP, and Marathon was never put on FirstCom's later CD releases like some of the other Primetime tracks from the Up Tempo series were (e.g., Powersurge). The Up Tempo albums have never been made streamable online AFAIK, either. The only way I know of to get a clean cut of Marathon is to find an album rip on a site like Library Music Themes or something.
The new & improved highlight for Marathon is one of the entries in the Chuck Noll/Jerry Glanville rivalry from the late '80s. Noll & especially Glanville were outspoken about their contempt for each other, which is something you'll see a bit of at the end of this Primetime clip. As for the game itself, the Houston Oilers would clinch their first-ever sweep over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the penultimate week of the season. This would allow the Oilers to finish the year 9-6 and make the playoffs for the first time since owner Bud Adams fired Bum Phillips following the 1980 season. The Steelers, meanwhile, would finish 8-7 and miss the playoffs for the 3rd. straight season.
I'm not done writing about new NFL Primetime songs, but pretty much everything left to post that's new or unidentified is from New Primetime (i.e., the 2019-present ESPN+ edition of the show). Unfortunately, my YouTube posts of New Primetime stuff don't get a lot of views. The videos with highlights from the '80s and '90s—the classic era of NFL Primetime—definitely seem to get more action. Some of those clips, however, were not the best quality (especially the ones from 1988). GodzFire's acquisition of that huge lot of early NFL Primetime episodes last spring created an opportunity to post better quality videos with some of the songs from that era. I was originally planning on posting those after posting (most) everything from New Primetime, but I kinda feel a need to try and rejuice my channel first—getting closer to the views I was getting last spring-to-summer at least. As an experiment, I'm going to post a few "Higher Quality" clips of older tracks before getting back to New Primetime stuff. I plan on going back-and-forth between the two post types (or something like that) afterward. I hope you enjoy it!
The first-HQ-post belong to Zack Laurence's "New Prospect." New Prospect was one of the staples of the first two years of NFL Primetime. It was used seemingly every regular-season week from Week 5 of 1987 (or Week 6 if you count the cancelled Week 3) up through the end of 1988. This time, the included game highlight is the Dolphins' visit to Veterans Stadium to play the Eagles in '87. The contest featured two star quarterbacks, Dan Marino & Randall Cunningham, albeit playing for middling teams that would not make the playoffs that year. There's also a nice production blooper at the beginning of the video. Have fun watching!
Contained on - Classic NFL Orchestral (as well as some other NFL Films albums like Autumn Thunder Vol. 6) Featured Highlight - Packers @ Cowboys, 2023 Wild Card
Sam Spence gets his third-straight post on this blog. "Classic Battle" is another NFL Films classic that most any football fan will recognize. As with "March to the Trenches," Classic Battle was only used for the intro of the attached game highlight. That highlight is the Packers/Cowboys Wild Card game from a couple years ago where Dallas decided to play flag football on defense. Classic Battle accompanies Chris Berman's recaps of the Ice Bowl and the 1995 NFC Championship Game. Also, as with "The Equalizer," I don't know exactly when Spence composed this piece or when it debuted on NFL Films. It's not on any of the old NFL Music LPs, and the earliest album with it I know of is NFL CD 005 Magnificent Eleven from 1996.
Contained on - NFL music compilations like Autumn Thunder (Soundcloud song link) Featured Highlight - Steelers @ Cowboys, 2020 (Intro)
Another Sam Spence classic. Unfortunately, "March to the Trenches" was only used once on NFL Primetime as far as I know, and it was only used for a highlight intro. The 7-0 Steelers visited a Dallas Cowboys team that was having to play their 29th. string quarterback. March to the Trenches accompanied Chris Berman's remembrance of the two franchises' glory years in the 1970s, while the rest of the clip uses Arnold. The Cowboys actually gave Pittsburgh a good game despite being a clear underdog, but they couldn't hold the lead.
March to the Trenches oddly doesn't appear to be on the official NFL music website. I'm pretty sure it isn't on any of the old NFL LPs, either. It is on most of the NFL Films music compilations, though, and it's very easy to find just by searching Google or whatever.
Contained on - Classic NFL Orchestral (as well as some other NFL Films albums like The Power and the Glory) Featured Highlight - Packers @ 49ers, 2021 (SNF)
One of the songs most synonymous with famed NFL Films composer Sam Spence nowadays is "The Equalizer." When getting ready to make this post, I started to wonder "Why is it so comparatively popular?" It has nothing to do with the quality of the song. It's a good song, though I wouldn't say it's my favorite Spence composition or anything. It's more because I can't figure out when The Equalizer originated or what video it was first used with. It's not on Autumn Thunder, and it doesn't seem to be on any of the 1970's-'80s NFL Music Library LPs either. The earliest album I could find with The Equalizer was NFL CD 004 (On to Victory) from 1996, and I have no idea when it debuted on NFL Films' stuff. Could its modern popularity come from gamers remembering it from Madden '06? I don't know…
Anyway, the accompanying highlight is the Packers/49ers Sunday Night Football game from Week 3 of 2021. Green Bay blew a 17-0 lead only to pull out a 2-point win with a last-second field goal. This would be a Pyrrhic victory for the Packers, however, as we all remember what happened between these two teams in the Divisional Round later that season.
I linked an official source for the song above (the current NFL Music site), but they only allow 30 second previews if you're not signed up or whatever. If you want to hear the full version, though, it's easy to find by searching Google or YouTube or whatever.
Song - Shrails Artist(s) - Daniel Holter, Rex Carroll Released - 2001 Primetime Usage - 2006 Contained on - Velocity VL017Q (Metal v2) Featured Highlight - "Saints magical season" Segment, 2006 Divisional Round
The same sequence celebrating the 2006 Saints' rebound that featured Crash and Burn had a second clip with a unique NFL Primetime track. Accompanying the "Saints magical season" segment was the song "Shrails." The portion of the clip with music is short, but Shrails tells you all you really need to know about it right away—you're not missing anything crucial by listening to an abbreviated portion. Shrails was written/performed by the familiar duo of Daniel Holter & Rex Carroll. If you don't recall those names, they were the same pair responsible for the New Primetime non-highlight track Tracking Heat. The heavy-metal instrumentation between both songs is quite similar, although Shrails is less melodic and features more shredding. Both Shrails and Tracking Heat are actually on the same album! It's a little weird that ESPN would use two different songs from the same album 15 years apart, but whatever…
Special thanks to GodzFire for identifying this one, too.
Song - Crash and Burn Artist(s) - Mark Wood Released - 1994 Primetime Usage - 2006 Contained on - OmniMusic OMN-0072 (Hard Rock) Featured Highlight - "Saints Season" segment (from Divisional Round Saturday Ep.), 2006
Having now exhausted all the known songs from the early years of NFL Primetime, it's time to return to 2006 and the Purgatory Primetime era. The '06 New Orleans Saints were a big story. After the disaster that was their 2005 Hurricane Katrina season, where the team went 3-13 and was unable to play a single regular-season game at home in the Superdome, the Saints hired Sean Payton and grabbed QB Drew Brees from the Chargers. The result was a surprising 10-6 record, the third division title in franchise history, and a divisional-round win over the Eagles. This positive development was seen by many, and reported by many in the media, as a key healing event for the traumatized city of New Orleans. A brief clip near the end of the Saturday Division Round episode touched on this story, and it was accompanied by a never-before-heard (on Primetime) song called "Crash and Burn." Crash and Burn primarily features a ton of virtuostic guitar—or maybe electric violin—shredding and was composed by Mark Wood. Wood is primarily known for being (according to his website, which is linked above) the "Eddie Van Halen of the Violin World" and also played with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for a time starting in 1999. He is also an accomplished string arranger and, in that capacity, worked with famous pop artists like Celine Dion.
Song - Supercharged Artist(s) - Derek Austin Released - 1983 Primetime Usage - 1988, 1990 Contained on -Amphonic AVF16 (Supercharged), Amphonic AVF64CD (Hit the Heights) Featured Highlight - Cowboys @ Redskins, 1990
Last year, I posted what was believed to be the only NFL Primetime highlight to use the song "Supercharged" by Derek Austin. That San Francisco/New Orleans video from Week 1 of 1988 was unfortunately blocked by NFL copyright bots, so I had to go with an audio-only post. As it turns out, that 1988 clip was NOT the only one with Supercharged attached. ESPN brought it back in Week 3 of 1990 for the Dallas @ Washington contest. The highlight itself is relatively uninteresting; the Redskins unimpressively got revenge after giving Dallas their only win of the season in RFK Stadium the previous year. It's still the only known NFL Primetime clip to use Supercharged that isn't blocked by the NFL, though. This also marks the only instance of a Primetime song that debuted in 1988 ever being used again after the 1988 season (of course, it was only 1 time each). So… I hope you get even more enjoyment from listening to this song with actual visuals attached than you did watching a still picture of the original NFL Primetime logo for 5 minutes.
Also, the Amphonic album(s) with this track only seem to be streamable on YouTube at the moment. The later CD release was on Nichion, but—again—Nichion has now been down for some time.
It's the weekend before the biggest election in human history, and I know what everyone's looking for! What? New swing-state polls? No, I don't have, uhhh… that… I do have classic NFL Primetime highlights, though! After adding another Sonoton song last week, it also turns out we weren't done with David Reilly's Success album. "Quest for the Best 2" ("2" in this case means underscore) is the fifth song from that album to be used on Primetime. It was only used 4 times that I'm aware of, putting it fourth among the five tracks (Inter Conference was used only twice). It's a good piece, but its obvious similarities to Title Holder make it unsurprising that it was infrequent. I think it was also a good call by John Colby to go with the underscore and not the base track. Quest for the Best 1 marginalizes the bass too much, and that caused the song to lose the power it has in the underscore version. Special thanks to GodzFire for ID'ing this track.
Some bad news about the Success album, however. It seems the Universal Production Music site is no longer hosting the album. The only streaming source I can find now is a YouTube post of the entire album linked above, though Quest for the Best 1 is posted all over that site thanks to its apparent use in Spongebob Squarepants.
And now for the highlight… In Week 6 of the 1989 season, a Bears' loss to the Oilers opened the door for the somehow 3-2 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to actually tie Chicago & Minnesota for first place in the NFC Central. And all they had to do was beat an 0-5 Detroit Lions squad (with then-rookie Barry Sanders out) in the Big Sombrero, too! Would they accomplish their seemingly simple quest!? If you're familiar with the Bucs' "success" in that era, you can probably guess how that went…
It turns out we weren't done with the Sonoton era, after all. "The Big Push," by the familiar pair of the late John Fiddy (he died in 2017) and Sonoton founder Gerhard Narholz under one of his common aliases, was used twice during the 1989 season of NFL Primetime. Like a lot of infrequent Primetime songs I've mentioned recently, it's a piece that doesn't quite fit sports highlights. It sounds more like something scored to fit the shot-by-shot particulars of a war-movie battle sequence or a corporate promo video than something that would work here. John Colby mitigated this problem somewhat by axing the slow, quiet intro, but it's still apparent why this track wasn't used much.
The Big Push may have only been attached to a grand total of two NFL Primetime highlights, but it did get one of the most memorable games of the 1989 season. The Green Bay Packers, who had lost 8 straight to Chicago coming in (Chicago's longest winning streak in the history of the rivalry), edged out the Bears at Lambeau after a controversial replay reversal that wiped out an illegal-forward-pass penalty on Packers' QB Don "The Majik Man" Majkowski. This result, along with several others, led to Green Bay earning the "Cardiac Pack" nickname that would define their 1989 season.
Special thanks to GodzFire for identifying The Big Push. Also, the video posted below is a whopping 6 minutes and 14 seconds, the third longest I've posted only behind the infamous Points War (Theighs Mon) video and New Order (the actual highlight is longer for The Big Push than New Order, though). So… enjoy!
Contained on - Valentino V-CD 23 (Medium Tempo) Featured Highlight - Patriots @ Dolphins SNF Preview, 1988
I've been aware of this song/clip for a while, but I was reluctant to post it because I'm not sure it really qualifies as NFL Primetime music. "Veil," one of many Primetime tracks by then-ESPN music director John Colby, was attached to a small segment of the Sunday Night Football preview that aired early in the Week 12 episode. Despite being housed on an album titled Medium Tempo, the song is actually quite energetic and up tempo. I wouldn't be surprised if Veil was used for a highlight or perhaps other clips on NFL Primetime, especially since it was composed by Colby, but I haven't seen any evidence of that thus far. Special thanks to GodzFire for rediscovering the album this track is on (I stumbled on it a long time ago somewhere, but I forgot about it).
I decided to post the entire preview segment with Mike Patrick & Joe Theismann even though the song is only played for about 20 seconds of it. Hope you enjoy it!
It's probably good this one wasn't used much, either. "The Motivating Factor" isn't a bad song on its own, but it's too filled with solo/bridge segments to really work as a sports highlight track. It's contained on the first(?) album from the relatively obscure Aircraft Music Library. The song's composer, Greg Wardson, is literally credited for nothing else on Discogs besides a few songs on this album. There is (was?) a professor named Greg Wardson at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but I can't be sure he's the same guy. Anyway, special thanks to GodzFire for getting this track identified.
There were a whopping two highlights to choose from for The Motivating Factor, and only one of those exclusively used that song. Ironically, the video that used a second song was the best choice. The Rams/Eagles highlight from Week 10 of 1988 was unusually long (about 3:30), but—compared to the other option—it had better video quality and better audio balancing. It also showcased a more interesting and more important game, and it played through The Motivating Factor in its entirety before switching to the Fast Man underscore for the final minute.
"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.
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.
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.
The recent acquisition of most every NFL Primetime highlight from the late '80s has unearthed a few interesting one-off songs. One of these, "Forerunner," is actually pretty good. It has nice aggressive energy and definitely works well with action highlights. It would probably work better if some of the excessive bridge sections were edited out, but I'm still surprised it wasn't used more than once on the show. Even the underscore is good! Most underscores could be accurately described as "lamer version of main track," but Forerunner's underscore emphasizes the sweet rhythm-guitar part that isn't as audible on the main track. Forerunner was composed by Craig Palmer. According to the archive.org snapshot of his now defunct website (linked on the Discogs page that's linked above), Palmer somehow became the music director for The Regis Philbin Show in San Diego when he was only 18. In later years, he composed many library pieces that were used for movies & TV. Special thanks to GodzFire for ID'ing this song soon after we acquired the Primetime clip.
NFL Primetime's only use of Forerunner was during Week 6 of 1987 (or Week 7 if you count the canceled week), which was the first week back after the strike ended. In this highlight, Mark Malone actually leads the Steelers to a close home win over division rival Cincinnati. You might remember Mark Malone as an ESPN reporter, a professional Tom Selleck lookalike, and the most hated man in the history of Pittsburgh, PA.
