Contained on - Valentino 6162 (Sports Themes), V-CD 13 (Sports Themes) Featured Highlight - Patriots @ Bills, 1988
The Week 8, 1988 episode of NFL Primetime uncovered recently also revealed a "new" Primetime track. The regular version of "Fast Man" was used in the very first episode of the show in 1987 (and many times thereafter), but I had not heard the "Rhythm Only" (i.e., underscore) version on a highlight until viewing this episode. In this clip below, the 3-4 Patriots (QB'd by Doug Flutie) gave the 6-1 Bills a surprisingly good game in Orchard Park.
Unfortunately, the Valentino 1980s compilation album with the regular version of Fast Man does not have the underscore. The full version of V-CD 13 is on YouTube, though (linked above), so you check out the song there (and no place else that I'm aware of).
Contained on - Musikos MS2 (Sports 2) Featured Highlight - Rams @ Raiders, 1988
Godzfire recently uncovered a few NFL Primetime episodes on YouTube from the late '80s. Among them was the Week 9, 1987 episode (or Week 10 if you include the strike-canceled week from that season) that was posted by a classic news/commercials/etc. account named ewjxn a month or so ago. I believe this was the first 1987 episode newly posted on YouTube since Andy Provin posted Week 11 several years ago. There were also two episodes from 1988 that were embedded at the end of a couple Patriots' game broadcasts from the Classic Pats Games+ account. The first of those episodes (Week 3) included yet another Musikos song that I hadn't previously heard on a Primetime highlight. "Instant Replay" is contained on the enigmatic Musikos Sports 2 album, and—just like every other song on Musikos's releases—the artist isn't credited. I figure it's probably William Soden, but I can't be sure. At any rate, that now makes 10 Primetime tracks that come from the Musikos Sports series (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's more).
Accompanying Instant Replay is the third-ever "Battle of L.A." between the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Raiders. The Jim Everett-led Rams prevailed by 5 points over the Raiders, who were in their only full season under future Super Bowl winner Mike Shanahan, in the Coliseum. Special thanks to Godzfire for finding these late-'80s NFL Primetime episodes and immediately ID'ing Instant Replay after watching them.
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.
Song - Tracking Heat Artist(s) - Daniel Holter, Rex Carroll Released - 2001 Primetime Usage - 2021 Contained on - Velocity VL017Q (Metal v2) Featured Highlight - "Largest Conf Champ Comeback Wins" Segment, 2021
Here, as promised last week, is the last unique non-highlight track from the 2021 Conference Championship episode of NFL Primetime. It accompanies a graphic showing the largest deficits overcome in conference-championship history (the 2021 Bengals tied the 18-point record set by the 2006 Colts), as well as a couple clips from the Cincinnati bar celebrations that occurred when the AFC Championship ended. The song is "Tracking Heat," by Daniel Holter & Rex Carroll. Holter is a producer who has composed/co-composed many songs that have shown up on TV, while Carroll is a songwriter who got his start as the lead guitar player & co-founder of the Christian metal group Whitecross in the 1980s. Tracking Heat is found on the Velocity production-music album Metal v2.
Again, special thanks to Godzfire for ID'ing this one.
A couple weeks ago, I noted that Unknown Song #58 (Here We Go) had been identified. That song was used during Keyshawn Johnson's analysis segment of the 2021 NFC Championship. Shortly after that, Booger McFarland did his own analysis piece for the same game. The accompanying clip for that section used a track called "Hardline," composed by Scott Patrick Anderson and contained on the 61st. release (not counting the old NFL LPs) of the NFL Films library. Hardline was actually identified by Godzfire (using the RecognizeSong bot on reddit) about 6 months ago, but—due to busyness and whatnot—I never got around to posting about it until now. Godzfire also ID'd another non-highlight track from the same NFL Primetime episode that I'll write about next week.
