I was reading a story about the planned Los Angeles bid to host the 2024 Summer Games, and that took me back to the 1984 L.A. Summer Games, and I was looking at the wiki page … and on the right side of the page it had a link to a snippet of the “L.A. Olympics Fanfare and Theme.” Which of course was done by the composer John Williams and has lots of brass … and I love it to death.

(Williams’s themes are the background music, I think, for the Baby Boomer generation. The huge movie stuff, as much as anything else, from Jaws to Star Wars and all the rest.)

Here is the 1984 L.A. fanfare in all its staccato brassy glory, as performed by the Boston Pops.

OK, it sounds a bit like a few other things.

Like the music from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. And maybe a little like Star Wars and all the other stuff John Williams has done, and pretty much all of it I like, so if this one sounds like that one … well, it’s a good thing.

But I am walking around the south of France sort-of-whistling the 1984 Olympic theme, and wondering how the trumpeters can blow these 16th notes, or that triplet, or whatever those three jammed notes are.

(Check the 16-second mark. That’s the first of those probably nearly impossible-to-play notes.)

The 1984 Olympic fanfare makes for a hell of an earworm. And you remember what those are, right?

This is not the only bit of music to be attached to an Olympics. I can remember covering Summer and Winter Games in which the local theme song was making me crazy by Day 3. (Albertville 1992 comes to mind, as a concept, not as a tune, though I may soon look.)

Two really important, memorable bits of music have been attached to the Olympics over the past six decades. One of them is the John Williams 1984 piece, and the other is called Bugler’s Dream and was written for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, and for 20 years (at least) it was the unofficial “this story is about the Olympics” music.

Here it is. After 46 seconds it shifts back to the John Williams 1984 stuff, which is a mash-up Williams did, in 1984.

But those 46 seconds, with the timpani banging up front and then the bugles … still gives me goosebumps, and it will always mean “Olympics are coming,” probably with Jim McKay sitting at the ABC anchor’s desk. (Back before NBC became the official Olympics station, in the U.S.)

Followed then by the 1984 Los Angeles fanfare.

John Williams also did the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games Theme — Summon the Heroes — but, curiously, it is little remembered, even though it is only 20 years old.

I like Olympic earworms … though it probably would be good if they were replaced by something else in the next week.