Super Bowl Halftime Performances – in my opinion, hits and misses

First off.. Merry Super Bowl Day everyone! ‘Tis the season for 8 hour football game, one million commercials, deflate-gate, Doritos, beer and chicken wangs. Did I cover it all? Nope – Super Bowl Halftime performances.. can’t forget the halftime!

Over the years, there have been some standout performances, flops, malfunctions, etc. There i s a lot of pressure for the everyone involved. A billion or so people watching. It’s live. You (and everyone involved with the performance) has one shot to get it right.. or go down in history as a ‘miss’.

Last year was was a funny mix of good and bad. I’m a musician, so a few details are important. I was sort of blown away by Bruno Mars. My middle school son was really into him, didn’t know much (you know.. these kids today), but damn, it was pretty good. Red Hot Chili Peppers.. caused all sorts of controversy due to none of the guitars had been plugged in.. um.. miss (see above – Flea’s bass with no cable.. or with ultra transparent cable and plug system). I’ll still give Bruno (even though, I haven’t listed to anything else he’s done).. a hit

What personally drives me nuts about halftime performances.. the montage of songs. Okay, we have a time slot, so let’s play 15 partial hit songs as one song and cram ’em all down our throats.  Ugh. Now, I know there are some U2 haters out there.. and to a point, I get it, but the Super Bowl performance in 2002, was pretty great. U2 used their standard tour set up, played well.. and wait for it.. played 3 songs back to back. 3 COMPLETE songs. Post-911, it was a pretty amazing… and I loved every minute of it. Honestly, the way a band *should* do it at halftime. Total hit.

Here is full performance.. check it out:

Now.. this one bugs me, and no one ever noticed it. I remember screaming a WTF in 1999 when this happened. KISS performance at halftime. I get KISS. Flames.. make up, bombastic show. It’s a ‘performance’, but smashing ‘prop’ guitars.. is frickin’ stupid. Sorry KISS-army. I hate people that smash guitars, but it was a prop, so.. double hate.. maybe triple hate.  At 3:10 on this video, you see Paul Stanley, *playing* guitar. 3:14, takes off the guitar.. and switches guitar for the *solo*.. with no strap/cable and smashes it. Yep, don’t want to smash the real guitar.. I get it. But that’s not rock-n-roll. Miss.

In 2007, I was quite surprised. Prince. I mean I dug Prince back in the day. Stuff was good, but I was out of touch, and wasn’t following him for a few years. I knew he played guitar and that he was a good guitarist, but he ripped it on the halftime performance! Yep.. total hit. I would advise following the link below:

http://www.wat.tv/video/prince-superbowl-half-time-4uv1f_2hztv_.html

Not sure why there are no Youtube vids of this… Maybe because he’s Prince. Who knows, but the only full performance I could find was the link above. A few years later, he slayed it again at the Hall of Fame performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Check that out too.

Let me know some more hits/misses. I didn’t even want to bring up the wardrobe *malfunction*, that’s a miss by default regardless of any malfunction that may have occurred.