Exactly 27 years ago, in a Lower Manhattan apartment, a lifelong New Yorker equipped with a synthesizer and drum machine unknowingly recorded a demo that would become the college football soundtrack for a generation.
At the time, Lloyd Landesman simply hoped that the song — which took about eight hours to write and record, start to finish — would be chosen by CBS Sports for the intro to Super Bowl 21. As writer for a production company and an avid New York Giants fan, getting a track for such a major event was a milestone in a career built around writing music for television.
“I was excited and looking forward to the game,” Landesman recalled this week. “Of course, the Giants were in the Super Bowl, so it was kind of a doubly positive experience. But I thought it was a one-time game.”
However, when CBS broadcasts the Southeastern Conference championship game on Saturday, the enduring power of this music will be readily apparent to fans. Since the 1987 season, Landesman’s theme song — which has never been named — has opened every college football broadcast on CBS and has become a sort of anthem for the SEC, which broadcasts its featured game on the network every on Saturday afternoons.
The familiarity between the music and the SEC brand is so strong that CBS Sports President Sean McManus said the network has concluded several times over the years that changing it would be a mistake. It’s so ingrained that sometimes live marching bands in the stadium play it “at just the right moment” as CBS breaks out of commercial, McManus said.
“The way it’s put together, it looks like college football,” McManus said. “It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for NFL football or other professional sports, but it definitely feels like a Saturday afternoon. For some reason, it resonates in your mind, and consciously or unconsciously, you remember of some of the great matches of this music.” surrounded. Longevity helps, but the quality of the music and the image it projects is important. “
In Landesman’s niche, the longevity of a piece of music is rare. Although his work has been associated with major brands like Cheerios, Subway, Burger King, Budweiser and Dr. Pepper, advertising campaigns usually come and go. Only on a few occasions – like when he coined the familiar, catchy slogan “Every kiss starts with Kay” for Kay Jewelers commercials – did anything endure.
But nothing has been as successful as CBS’s college football theme, which doesn’t sound much different today than it did in 1987, even though it’s been remixed with more modern instruments and synthesizers . This, in itself, is remarkable given how out of place most sports theme music from the 1980s would be on today’s television shows.
“I think there’s a certain heroic nature,” Landesman said. “The harmonics are reminiscent of (Aaron) Copland pieces – not that I took them from there – but very Fanfare-esque, gladiator-like. And also, in all honesty, the repetition helps too. When you hear something all the time “The time, you expect to hear it. At first, no one knows if it will spread, but obviously, even after a few listens, it burns into their branches. “
How Landesman arrived at this familiar, triumphant sound – opening with a burst of brass, followed by a rhythmic snare, 16 notes and then a rapid crescendo – is not something easily explained. His production company’s mission, he recalls, was simply to write something for sports television that would be submitted to CBS along with entries from other companies.
Immediately, Landesman scanned his memory for songs like Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll, Part 2” to give him a foundation on tempo and the feeling of being at a sporting event. He also drew inspiration from his own past as a fan when he was a young boy watching the Army-Navy game.
Although Landesman said there was no specific flash or moment of inspiration, he recalls that the melody formed very quickly, in part because it had to be changed in tight deadlines. Shortly afterward, Doug Towey — the late CBS Sports executive credited with putting “One Shining Moment” at the end of the NCAA basketball tournament — chose Landesman’s song for the Super Bowl.
“What I’m not sure people realize about composition is that usually this kind of thing comes to mind,” he said. “These things are prepared throughout their lives, I think. Composers gather musical information throughout their lives, and it’s stored in their heads and when they’re asked to perform a certain task compositionally , they can draw on their musical experiences. Sports music. and some of the things that I was into earlier in my life merged, and that’s what came out.”
Landesman, now 61, said he still receives a royalty check each year, although it’s not an amount of money that will allow him to “go out and play golf” anytime soon. Far more important than the money, he says, is the thrill of hearing the song while he’s channel-surfing on Saturday afternoons in his Brooklyn apartment or seeing his fans track him down by email. and ask him how to purchase a copy of the disc. .
Landesman said he did not have a recording and did not know how to obtain one. Usually he just directs fans to YouTube.
“I don’t even know where the master of this thing is; nothing was digital back then,” he said. “At least I know I’m touching people. That’s what music is supposed to do.”
