It's Pro Bowl week! Are you all excited!? No? Well, anyway… here's the other NFL Primetime track composed by Orange Power. It's moodier than Future Champs, but has almost identical instrumentation. I guess me choosing a song called "Higher and Higher" is ironic for the week of the Pro Bowl. You could maybe think of it as, "you have to be high on drugs to enjoy the Pro Bowl." That makes it fit. Right?
Higher and Higher's clip features something a bit more exciting than the Pro Bowl. In the video, Warren Moon put on a show by throwing for 527 yards in Arrowhead Stadium. There's also a little bit of Mechatronics thrown in when Chris Berman discusses a replay review after the main highlight reel is done. Enjoy!
The AFC Championship is this Sunday, and whoever wins that contest between the Steelers and the Patriots will set a new record for all-time Super Bowl appearances. New England & Pittsburgh—along with Denver & Dallas—are currently tied with 8 trips to the big game, so the victor will be the lone NFL team with 9. With that info in mind, it seems appropriate to post a song with the name "Title Holder." Title Holder is the fourth & final NFL Primetime piece from David Reilly's Success album. It has a more laid-back tempo than most, but that doesn't cause its intensity to suffer. Also, like several tracks from this period, the slow intro & bridge sections were edited out by ESPN. It fits well for games that involve good teams doing what they do best.
This week's highlight features the 1989 "Cardiac Pack" doing what they did best: falling behind big and then surging back to make things close. This clip also has what might be the worst line of Tom Jackson's stellar analyst career. When describing notorious bust Tony Mandarich playing his first NFL game, Jackson says "He looks to be everything that's been advertised." Even TJ can't get it right all the time.
We're going back to the Primetime rarities this week. "Solar Winds," by Larry Lee Cansler (or just Larry Cansler for short), is an odd duck. Most of NFL Primetime's songs are either rock (synth or otherwise) or edgy orchestral stuff. Solar Winds, on the other hand, is a textbook-sounding '70s/'80s jazz-fusion number that one might expect to hear from an artist like Chick Corea. I suppose, given that truth, that it's not surprising I've only seen one highlight with this piece. It's not even a good highlight, either, unless you like watching guys in creamsicle uniforms play like garbage. I did at least leave in the Pete-Axthelm-led postgame commentary to shore up the football side, though.
Solar Winds is contained on one of those hard-to-find Up Tempo albums from FirstCom, so you've got your work cut out for you if you want to find it. A low-quality mp3 of the extra-long version of this song (over 7 minutes!) was housed on Cansler's website (larrycansler.com), but that site has been dead for a few years now. That means, as of today, Solar Winds does not exist online in any form that I'm aware of.
Contained on - Hollywood Film Music HFML 15.04 (Reel Adventure)
Featured Highlight - Texans @ Titans, 2005
Whereas last week's highlight celebrated the awkwardness of Week 17 with a truly obscure NFL Primetime song, this week's highlight—the first of the 2016 playoff season—will showcase an instantly recognizable one. "Showdown," the second featured track by Robert J. Walsh, is probably the most action-movie-esque piece in Primetime's history. It doesn't work as a stand-alone piece on the level of a lot of of the more electronic or pop-sounding songs, but it fits as a mood-setter or accompaniment accent better than perhaps any other track on the show. That's why it's surprising to me, after looking through a bunch of episodes with Showdown, that it wasn't used for very many good games. The one I picked—a bout between two bad teams from late in NFL Primetime's final season—is more notable for its humorous, bumbling ending than anything else. Well, I guess it would also be the late Steve McNair's last win as a Titan, but it's not like his career was anywhere near over at this point. Anyway, enjoy the video.
As for obtaining this song in (legal) clean form… good luck. I have no idea where music from the Hollywood Film Music Library (founded by Walsh himself) can be accessed. I touched on this in my Bad Company post, but it seems to be separate from the "Hollywood Music" library currently contained on FirstCom's website. Showdown can easily be found on a some of the bootleg rips/youtube posts online, though.
Ah, Week 17… the most awkward time of the NFL season. It's a week where 2/3 to 3/4 of the teams have nothing concrete to play for, either because they're out of the playoff hunt or because their playoff seeding is already secure, while the rest often have convoluted tiebreaker scenarios to worry about. The radical difference in motivation makes for some intriguing matchups, like mediocre teams being favored against dominant teams because the better ones might be resting their starters. There are some interesting contests in this year's edition of Week 17, too, but the recent intradivision-only mandate has honestly taken a lot of the fun out of this annual holiday event. I mean, who can forget the famous Packers/Panthers "points war" from 1999? There's almost no chance something like that would happen today.
I figure the best way to commemorate the weirdness of Week 17 would be to post one of the most obscure songs in the NFL Primetime arsenal. "Automotive Industry" was only used on the show one time that I'm aware of. That time wasn't Week 17, unfortunately, but it was in 1990—the first year to have a Week 17. 1990 was also the worst year in the history of the New England Patriots, their only season under head coach Rod Rust. For all of you familiar with classic video games, this season is why the Patriots are the most laughable team in the original NES version of Tecmo Super Bowl. Also video-game related is that Automotive Industry contains a
similar feel & instrumentation to many of the songs from the Growlanser strategy-RPG series.
Automotive Industry's composer, Warren Bennett, is—like many of the artists featured on this blog—a highly prolific production-music writer. He's also associated with longtime British rock stalwarts Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the band that made his father, Brian Bennett, famous. Sadly, Automotive Industry is the only known Primetime track composed by either Bennett, and it was only used one time at that.
With the John Colby marathon now over, it was only a matter of time before I'd get back to posting Sonoton stuff. "Leaders," the only known NFL Primetime track composed by Gerhard Narholz's son, Christoph, uses much the same instrumentation as the other Sonoton songs I've identified. It is a bit repetitive & bland, comparatively, but ESPN nonetheless used it quite frequently throughout Primetime's Sonoton era (1989-90). In fact, Leaders is the only Sonoton piece to be used in all eight '89/'90 NFL Primetime episodes I've logged.
The accompanying highlight for Leaders serves as eerie foreshadowing. As the preview thumbnail shows, Bo Jackson ran for 117 yards on just 8 carries in the Raiders' 1990 regular-season contest against the Bengals. Jackson also had a breakaway run where he was surprisingly tackled from behind by a Cincinnati defender that kinda previewed his career-ending hip injury against the Bengals in the playoffs later that season. Just like the following postseason meeting, though, the Raiders came away with a double-digit victory. Also interesting about 1990 is that it is still, to date, the last time the Cincinnati Bengals won a playoff game (they beat the Jets in the Wild Card).
Artist(s) - Mary Therese Matthews, Sally Anne Griffith (?)
Released - 1985
Primetime Usage - 1987
Contained on - FirstCom UT104 (Powersurge)
Featured Highlight - Eagles @ Redskins, 1987
The John Colby saga may be over, but that doesn't mean I'm done posting NFL Primetime music. "Communique" is a perfect track for any football game that seems "frozen," either from excessive cold or from exhausting heat. The song doesn't really go anywhere, per se, but it's a perfect mood setter. The only Primetime use of Communique that I'm aware of was for a rather warm contest between the Redskins & Eagles at RFK Stadium in the 1987 opener. That game served as the coming out party for Doug Williams in what would be his best NFL season, though he would give way to incumbent starter Jay Schroeder for much of the regular season after this.
I'm actually not 100% certain if Mary Therese Matthews & Sally Anne Griffith were the composers of Communique. I haven't been able to check the UT104 album cover for the credits, and this song doesn't seem to exist anywhere else (there's also virtually no info on Griffith or Matthews, either). There is a song with the name "Communique" attached to them in the ASCAP database, though, and these two were frequently credited on FirstCom stuff around this time.
