I dearly love baseball. I like hockey and soccer. I’m indifferent to basketball. But I hate football. I think George Will is a pompous windbag but I do like his description of football as “violence punctuated by committee meetings.”  The Super Bowl is today and as much as I dislike the sport a couple of good things have come from the football championship game. Hunter Thompson’s account of the 1973 Super Bowl is hilarious, and it’s always a good day to go to the deserted hardware store. People get very excited about the television commercials that air during the Super Bowl and I can understand the argument that they’re often more interesting than the game itself. But for me the really interesting thing is the halftime show.

In the early days of the Super Bowl halftime was sort of a necessary evil and they just threw a marching band on the field to kill the time. But the moguls in charge of the NFL eventually realized that the halftime show could drive higher TV ratings and so they began to book popular artists. So here’s some music played and/or originally performed by artists who have played the Super Bowl halftime show.

Taco “Puttin’ On The Ritz” (Fred Astaire)
In 1984 the NFL presented a “Salute To The Superstars Of The Silver Screen” as played by two college marching bands. The extravaganza was produced by the Walt Disney Company, who showed a little more imagination than they did for their previous Super Bowl halftime show. That one was entitled “It’s A Small World”. This was one of the songs that they played. And it’s a fitting song since it’s probably one of the songs most often associated with 1930s musicals.

Taco is an Indonesian-born Dutch singer who made it big in Germany before he became a one-hit wonder in the U.S. with this song in 1983 thanks to MTV. This song is more than just a cover, it contains snippets of a half-dozen or so Irving Berlin songs.

Concrete Blonde “Ghost Riders In The Sky” (Vaughan Monroe)
In 1987 they got Disney to produce the show again and the imagineers showed a puzzling lack of creativity by throwing together “A Salute To Hollywood’s 100th Anniversary.” Complete with marching bands, drill teams, George Burns and Mickey Rooney. The music was a weird mishmash of television show theme songs, music from Disney cartoons, and this tune. This was kind of Disney’s Dark Days, so maybe we can excuse them for doing halftime shows about Hollywood movies every time they got the chance.

Hearing Concrete Blonde usually makes me reach for an ice pick to plunge into my ear canal, but somehow they got this song right.

Motorhead “Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl Perkins)
I’m sorry I missed the 1989 halftime show. Diet Coke presented “Be Bop Bamboozled.” In 3D, no less. Featuring some Elvis impersonator named Elvis Presto, who also did card tricks. Wikipedia doesn’t have a set list for this one, but I can’t imagine that 3D Fake Elvis didn’t do this bit of standard repertoire.

I wanna be like Lemmy when I grow up. This is without a doubt the fiercest Elvis cover ever recorded.

Shinehead “Billie Jean” (Michael Jackson)
It wasn’t until 1993 that the NFL moguls realized that they could rake in advertising bucks by getting real live musical stars to play at halftime instead of having college marching bands play popular hits. Michael Jackson had not yet become the tragic/pathetic self-parody that he was to become in later years and acquitted himself quite well.

This song works surprisingly well with a reggae arrangement.

Kate The Kat “I Was Made For Loving You” (Kiss)
1999 saw one of the most misbegotten Super Bowl halftime shows. It was a “Celebration of Soul, Salsa, and Swing.” Which is kind a weird concept since those musical styles don’t seem to me to have a whole lot in common except for the fact that they all begin with the letter “s”. Couldn’t they have just picked one and filled 15 minutes? But the most bizarre aspect of the show was that one of the featured performers was Kiss. Say what you will about their music, I don’t think anybody would describe it as soul, salsa, or swing.

For some reason I have a fairly extensive collection of lounge covers of Kiss songs. This one’s a favorite of mine.