"-MIKE-" wrote in message
...

NO, just a couple of old guys pretending while playing their music.

I've seen those old guys nine times in the past decade, they routinely mop
the floor with the much younger bands who open for them. No, they aren't as
they once were, but they're still pretty damn good. I wonder why rock
musicians can't do what blues or jazz or classical or country musicians do
(play as long as the audience will still come to see them) without this sort
of snotty comment?

The vocals were live, the guitars were live, the drums were live for at
least parts of it.

For halftime shows and TV shows in which they have lots of acts
performing, they always record their performances during rehearsals. At
this point in time, it's a logistical impossibility to have those shows
completely live.

What you end up hearing over the air is a mix of live performance and
recorded performance. While some of it is technically "pantomimed," they
are do that to what they did actually play, a couple days before.

Many people don't seem to appreciate that the halftime show is more a
theatrical production than a musical performance--as you say they can't
leave anything to chance, not with 150 million people watching. Backing
tracks and the use of black box technology like Auto Tune is routine for
such major productions.

From what I could tell, most of Roger's vocals were live, except his
patented scream.
All of Pete's guitar was live. Some of the drum may have been live, the
jury's still out for me on that one. I didn't pay attention to Pino's
bass or the keyboard or other guitars, but they were very likely all the
recorded performance.

I heard from somebody who helped set up/tear down the stage (set up in four
minutes!) and he said the band's rehearsal on the 4th was superior to the
actual Super Bowl show. I suspected Daltrey's vocals were from a backing
track from the beginning. If the drums were taped then Zak did an amazing
job of hitting everything to a small fraction of a second. This certainly
wasn't Pete and Roger at their best, I'd give it a B or maybe a B+, but it
will seem like perfection in comparison to the acts that will take that
stage in years to come when all the "classic rock" generation is gone.