Idolator

So a few months ago it looked like Henley and Frey Ltd. were going to ruin the year's most expensive TV time slot, with the Eagles rumored to be the entertainment for the 2008 Super Bowl halftime show. Well fear not, one-day-a-year football fans, because although the Eagles are still on track to outsell just about every other musician on the planet in 2007, the National Football League has wised up and instead chosen some weirdo with a fetish for cannibalizing Victorian schoolgirls.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers will play the coveted halftime slot at the Super Bowl in Arizona on February 3, organizers of the year's No. 1 television event said on Sunday...

Petty's performance will mark a rare occasion where the veteran rocker is closely aligned with a corporate sponsor, in this case the North American arm of Japanese tire firm Bridgestone Corp, which has lent its name to the halftime event.

Now that he's aged enough to play the old rock crank with a straight face, Petty is "an outspoken opponent of sponsorship of rock concerts," but he must have overcome his aversion when he saw the checkthought about bringing the rock to all those hundreds of millions of American girls. So now we won't accidentally nod off during the middle of "Hotel California," and the NFL gets to placate the portion of its audience who loves those John Mellencamp Chevy commercials. Hey, maybe they should have gone with the Coug, since he doesn't seem so bothered by auto-industry sponsorship.

Tom Petty To Play Super Bowl Halftime Show [Reuters]