I refuse to believe the Chilly Peppers couldn`t come out with one new song in the allotted time. I knew they were gonna perform back in November.

Maybe Flea was right, ....no choice.

The halftime show should be more adult oriented, adults by the tickets for super bowl and spend millions at the cities hosting , are there kids there sure.. but they are not spending the money.. then comes halftime and what do we get teeny bopper pop..... souless music and not done very well by the standards of those who made that genera . I tried to watch the grammy's what a joke it is all about money and no substance no real music just pop and crap.... sorry to be so negative but really these pop clones of yesterdays performers are really getting boring! If Bruno Mars is imitating James Brown he is doing so very poorly..

I thought so too. It was Brown who did ...Living in America well.

All these people are comparing Bruno to the greats, PLEASE This is crap packaged very nicely. James Brown and Jackie Wilson and the other comparisons are innovators not a copy !

Scott,

Yes, it became "all about the money" a long time ago and that is of course what has taken it to what it is now. Even though I am a HUGE football fan, what the Super Bowl has become is to me a "bummer" anyway. Of course, I'm a (nearly) life-long KC Chiefs fan (since they moved to KC in 1964) and they've not been there since I and IV... :(

Bill

Flea came out yesterday and said they were pantomiming to the song.

I prefer Weird Al's version.

Weird Al,...Now there`s a halftime show !I

And that is the point; one cannot afford failure. Let's be honest for a moment - if these bands played 100% live which is, of course, possible, what would we be saying here and millions of people be saying across the globe if a guitar was out of tune, drum mics didn't work, a performer could not hear his ear mix, or a bass player performed at the level of the Denver Broncos? It would be a flame war and not only that, it would be seriously detrimental to an artist's career.

I have produced plenty of live events with minimal to nearly non-existant set change times. As an example, I produced a live event at the Ryman Auditorium last summer with 23 national level artists playing in three hours on one tiny stage with change-over times that ran on average 120 seconds. That is nerve wracking for me and my team and also nerve wracking for performers who realize they have very little control over the outcome of their performance. When broadcasting live to millions of viewers, you just are risking way too much.

I don't think many here realize just how complicated this is. You can't just go thump thump and see if you have a bass drum signal. You have to confirm every input at the monitor desk, the FOH desk and the broadcast truck. Now multiply that by the number of inputs for three drum kits (that alone is probably 8 bass drum mics my friends), two bass rigs with at least two inputs each, however many guitars there were and how ever many inputs each required, etc., etc. You could easily be over 60 inputs so that is required confirmation of 180 lines and that is just to ensure they pass signal. If any one line does not work, the stage patch technician has to do a repatch and that has to be communicated and confirmed in all the desk locations. Add to that the wireless nightmare. Any NFL game is a wireless-rich environment and a Super Bowl would be even worse. Let's say you had 14 performers on stage, there are now 14 stereo broadcast frequencies required (minus any that could be hardwired, but those would have to be confirmed as well just like the inputs) just for ear monitors. All other ancillary performers could monitor both program feed and Director's cues via simple FM broadcast. Now add all the wireless mics and wireless packs for guitar and horns and you now have a world of potential issues. Once all that is confirmed and working, we still haven't taken into account the change in temperature, humidity, moisture, the atmospheric effect of 80,000 fans and the adreneline rush of the artist that will drastically impact monitor mixes and therefore performances.

So, does one bet millions of dollars on that fact that it might go "OK" or does one bite the bullet and produce a show where the potential of poor entertainment quality is mitigated. It would be horrible personally and professionally for either Bruno Mars or RHCP to step up and fail on that size of a spectacle. I like live music as much as the next guy of course, but this is not walking into a club and busking it. At all.

Would life be easier if only one artist group performed the whole halftime show ?

Sure, but it would still be pretty unreasonable to pull off effectively.

I had mentioned on another forum that the idea of rock shows of this scale started with the Beatles at Shea Stadium. While that was a seminal and iconic moment in pop culture history, it was far from a great performance. Four tiny English lads on a tiny stage over the pitcher's mound with a vast array of woefully inadequate Shure Vocalmaster columns. No one could see them and no one could hear them. They played live but was it a great live performance. Probably - if you were sitting on the field. Otherwise, it really didn't matter.

It became immediately obvious that there had to be another way to produce live events on a grand scale such as this but it really wasn't until the video projection technology got to a place where Journey was able to start using large format video, that large live events really became something unique as opposed to a counter-culture experience.

The Stone's Steel Wheels set the standard as to what a football sized stadium spectacle could be. This followed by Voodoo Lounge, U2's Zoo TV among a very few others (Johnny Halladay for all our friends across the pond) really raised the bar. Artists realized that to communicate to audiences on that scale required something beyond simply playing great.

In the early 90's the NFL jumped on the bandwagon and dumped marching bands and Up with People in favor of New Kids On the Block. Understanding the need for spectacle on a grand scale with a minimum of turnover time and a lot on the line for the NFL, the company with broadcasting rights and the artists themselves, it became apparent that playing live was not an option.

Think about it, live performances on TV are a relatively new thing. I always thought SNL was way ahead of the curve in that regard. It wasn't until fairly recently that artists even played with their own bands on talk shows. This has been going on since the invention of broadcasting and is nothing new. Sometimes it is the time constraints and the need for perfection (as in this case) and sometimes it is the lack of infrastructure as in the case of a lot of local TV shows. Sometimes those shows are live and you almost wish they were not as they sound so bad.

I get that a lot of musicians don't like the miming thing and I understand why. It does not, however, mean that it is a bad thing to play to tracks. If producers opted to go ahead with live tracks and the results were less than stellar, do you think that would help the overall plight of live music in the public consciousness?

As you may have guessed, to me the glass is not half full nor is it half empty. Instead it's just twice as big as it ought to be. I am a rugged realist.