With the news of Prince’s death last week, Super Bowl Halftime Shows have been in our social media feeds lately, especially the 2007 edition that featured the late music icon’s legendary performance of “Purple Rain”. The last 20 years of Halftime Shows have been very much hit or miss (remember Black Eyed Peas in 2011?), but R.E.M.’s Mike Mills suddenly got us daydreaming about some “what-ifs”?
In a twitter chat last night, Mills says that R.E.M. declined an invite perform at an upcoming Halftime Show. “Turned it down when we were still together,” he wrote back to a fan. Hat tip to eagle-eyed Annie Zaleski for spotting it in a sea of other questions.
Turned it down when we were still together. https://t.co/ACQOkuU9gj
— Mike Mills (@m_millsey) April 29, 2016
Of course, Mills didn’t go into detail on which Super Bowl slot the band turned down, so commence a fun round of guessing until someone at R.E.M. HQ elaborates. It’s likely the offer would have come sometime between the late-’90s and the band’s 2011 breakup (their last tour was in ’08), so our wild guess would be Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, held at the Georgia Dome in R.E.M.’s home state. A Disney production called “Tapestry Of Nations”, with Phil Collins, Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias, Tina Turner, and Toni Braxton, did the honors. The previous Super Bowl was held in Miami and featured Gloria Estefan, so maybe the NFL was favoring locals at the time.
But perhaps we’ll never know.