You know you’re in trouble when the Super Bowl half-time show – delivered by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – can’t hold a candle to the Grey Cup’s halftime blowout featuring Lenny Kravitz. Petty’s snooze-worthy set looked like a sleepwalk compared to Kravitz’s energized set last fall.
What were the Super Bowl suits thinking? Past performers have included legends with substance – McCartney, Michael Jackson, Prince. Even Shania Twain had more going on than Petty and company in their Matrix-reminiscent long black jackets.
After last year’s incendiary performance from Prince, we got a middling songwriter, giving us his whiniest offerings. I Won’t Back Down – there’s an intelligent thought – typifies the dumb, macho songbook from this three-chord wonder.
And if we have to get this tired guy at all, can we at least get the song that made him a rock star. Or is the Super Bowl just too corporate to tolerate a lyric like “Everybody’s got to fight to be free.”
That’s from Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee, a song the band didn’t play at half-time and the only tune Tom Petty wrote that really matters.
