07 February 2010

Who Dat? No, really, who is that?

If you twist my arm and force me to pick, I'll go with the Saints to win the Super Bowl, but this is one of those years when I'm fine with either team winning. I just want to see a good game.

A bigger issue for me is the fact that The Who are the half-time entertainment. My reaction when I first heard this was "WTF?"-with the 'W' standing for 'Who' instead of 'What'-because The Who doesn't really exist in a modern form anymore. Unless Keith Moon and John Entwistle come tumbling out of the Miami sky, what you'll see at half-time ain't gonna be The Who.

I love The Who. Have since I was thirteen or so, whenever "Faces Dances" came out. And what a treasure it was to realize a few years later that that was far from their finest work, and that there was a whole trove of earlier stuff to discover.

And I love what Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have done together and alone, both when the Who was still whole and after. Townshend's "White City" is my favorite album of all-time. But they are 65 and 64, respectively, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what they are doing performing at half-time of the Super Bowl.

Uh oh...follow me to...the horror.

The game is being televised by CBS!!!

The game is being played in Miami!!!

DO YOU SEE WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!?!?!?!

Three...is a magic number.

1. CBS has three "CSI" shows-Las Vegas, New York, and (gulp) Miami.
2. All three shows have opening theme songs written and performed by...The Who.
3. Super Bowl half-time shows are usually three songs long.

If the half-time show by The Who today are "Who Are You" (theme for Vegas), "Baba O'Riley" (NY) and "Won't Get Fooled Again" (Miami), I'm going to be physically ill.

Well, spit: I just went to The Who's Wikipedia page to verify the spelling of their songs, and there's a snippet at the end that claims "Pete Townshend says the band will play a medley of their hits consisting of "Pinball Wizard", "Who Are You", "Baba O'Riley", "Won't Get Fooled Again" and the finale of Tommy.


If you told me back in 1979 that this was going to happen, I'd've started listening to opera instead.