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!
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.
That was fast… Thanks to Godzfire's sound-editing skills and his use of an audio fingerprinting program, US #59 has already been identified as the underscore version of a song called "Rainwater." Eric Cunningham & Chris Lang, the composers of "Pure Glam," also feature on this one, as well as some guy named Chris Wright (I couldn't find any info about him). Rainwater is housed in a different library than Pure Glam, though—the Killer Edge label from Killer Tracks. It's on EDGE2, titled Rock: Alternative 2. I listed the year as "1999?" for the release of EDGE2 because the Universal website says it was released in 2000, but Discogs has EDGE13 coming out in 1999. Universal has the release date for the first umpteen Killer Edge albums as all being January 1, 2000, so I figure they just weren't being too thorough there.
Two weeks ago, I profiled the use of "Pure Glam" for the AFC Divisional Preview from the 2006 Sunday Wild Card episode. The NFC Divisional Preview from earlier in that same episode also used a new song. This song has not been identified, however. It sounds like a generic grunge instrumental with some loud, punctuating drums. I'm not sure what more to say about it than that, but please reply or contact me if you know what this track is.
Song - Pure Glam Artist(s) - Eric Cunningham, Chris Lang Released - 1999 Primetime Usage - 2006 Contained on - Chronic Trax CM014 (Chronic Rocks, Vol. 1) Featured Highlight - AFC Divisional Round Preview (from Wild Card Sunday Episode), 2006
After ESPN traded Sunday Night Football for Monday Night Football following the 2005 season, they lost the exclusive long-form highlight rights to the Sunday NFL day games that led to the launch of the show in the first place. What followed (until ESPN+ New Primetime began in 2019) was what I like to call the "Purgatory Primetime" era. During this era (2006-18), almost all of the real NFL Primetime broadcasts aired during the postseason. There was still a show called "NFL Primetime," but it was a bastardized version that aired Monday afternoons without Chris Berman or Tom Jackson. The closest thing left for NFL Primetime junkies was The Blitz, a Primetime-like segment hosted by Berman & TJ (& others like Trent Dilfer) during Sunday evening SportsCenter that featured shorter highlights and longer talking segments. The Blitz was passable—and both it and the Monday NFL Primetime used the classic music everyone reading this blog is more than familiar with—but things still weren't the same compared to the pre-2006 NFL world.
The 2006 postseason marked the first real return of NFL Primetime since the end of ESPN's Sunday Night Football. Aside from ditching the 2005 title song and returning to the 1998-04 piece, the episodes looked and felt just like the ones from the previous year's playoffs. One quirk, however, was the addition of several new non-highlight tracks. The first, the most interesting, and the only one that's been identified as of this post, is "Pure Glam" by Chronic Trax co-founder Eric Cunningham and "Blow the Stack" co-composer Chris Lang (assuming it's the same Chris Lang). It was used one time for each Wild Card episode and also once in the Conference Championship show. Below is Pure Glam's accompaniment of the AFC Divisional Round preview late in the Sunday Wild Card episode. Special thanks to Godzfire for identifying this song.
