Pro Football Action Vol. 1-3

Three volumes, six albums. At the risk of being overly boastful, this might be the greatest collection of music used in NFL Films and football highlight shows ever put together.

One of my favorite pieces of music as a kid was the theme to Monday Night Football. I can hardly relate now the excitement I felt as a 10-year-old when those strings came in and Al Michaels, Frank Gifford and Dan Dierdorf appeared on the broadcast standing there in their yellow jackets. It meant the next few hours were going to be football, spectacle and that peculiar larger-than-life atmosphere that American television sports had in those days. I still get some of that same euphoria whenever I hear Johnny Pearson's Heavy Action.

I also remember, in my teens, watching old NFL Films highlights, with "The Voice of God," John Facenda, narrating over the frozen tundra, the camera zooming in on a tight spiral, and the slow-motion ballet of linebackers crashing into a running back like armies meeting on a battlefield. NFL Films had a way of making a fairly ordinary October game between two mediocre teams seem like the fall of Rome. The photography and narration were obviously a huge part of that, but increasingly I began to notice something else: the music.

At some point I realized that many of those cues were every bit as important to the atmosphere as Facenda's voice. There were huge brass fanfares, ominous strings, military percussion, funky bass lines, strange electronic passages and heroic themes that made a third-and-six from the 38-yard line sound like mankind's final stand.

In the early days of the Internet, sometime around the late 1990s, I began going online trying to identify some of this music. There was a Yahoo! group dedicated to discussing NFL Films music, and I spent plenty of time digging through posts there. I used Napster, an old reference now understood by a dwindling few, looking for whatever tracks somebody might have bothered to upload. I began to acquire a small, disorganized batch of poorly tagged library tracks.

At this point, I had still never heard the term library music, even though I was already listening to quite a lot of it. That discovery came later, when I finally understood that KPM wasn't some strange little label that happened to make football music. It was part of an enormous parallel universe of records made primarily for television, film, radio and advertising—music created specifically to accompany pictures, often pressed in tiny quantities and distributed only to broadcasters and production companies.

Suddenly the mysterious tracks I'd heard beneath football highlights weren't isolated oddities anymore. They belonged to a whole ecosystem: KPM, De Wolfe, Bruton, Conroy, Rouge, Network and dozens of other libraries stretching across decades and continents. What had started as an attempt to identify NFL Films cues eventually became a much larger obsession with library music itself.

So for about 25 years now I've been harvesting this music. A track here, another one there. Something identified in an old discussion group. Something heard buried in a highlight film. Something discovered years later that I happened upon while playing a random library LP, but which I instantly recognized as a track used by NFL Films. I'd make playlists, lose playlists, rebuild them, find better copies, discover another cue and add it to the pile.

Everyone who collects this stuff seems to have an answer to the question, "How did you get into library music?" Some people came through hip-hop sampling, some through horror films, some through Italian soundtracks, some through television test-card music or old commercials. I have NFL Films to thank for my answer.

The music presented here runs from the late 1960s through the late 1980s, and the three volumes correspond, more or less, to those three decades. This isn't intended as a strict chronological encyclopedia. Instead I've tried to follow the musical evolution you hear in NFL Films and related football highlight programming: from the orchestral grandeur of the late '60s, through the funkier and harder-driving sounds of the '70s, and finally into the synthesizers, big drums and increasingly polished production sound of the '80s. Some of it was incredibly hard to find, as much of this project involved watching a highlight reel and then searching my library of around 10,000 library LPs for the track. One example of this is the opening number on Volume 3, which played during a Super Bowl XXVI highlight in which my favorite player as a kid, Joe Montana, was leading the San Francisco 49ers on a drive against the Cincinnati Bengals, accompanied by the most killer funk track. This track was in my head for DECADES. I searched for DECADES until I finally found it on an obscure Network Music album.