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On Sunday, the Who became the latest in a growing list of classic rockers — along with the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Prince — to play a Super Bowl halftime. Why did they do it, what was it like being onstage at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, and why a hits medley? For the answers, we went directly to the Who’s Pete Townshend the day after the performance. For more from Townshend, grab the next issue of Rolling Stone, on stands February 17th.

Relive the Who’s explosive Super Bowl set in photos.

What was your first reaction to being invited to play the Super Bowl?
I really wanted to do it. I felt it would be easy to do [chuckles]. I felt that doing this would be a great thing to do at this particular time because it would let people know that we’re alive and kicking and that Roger and I still do stuff together and intend to do whatever we can in the future together. You feel part of something that’s bigger than you and you feel part of a huge team. It’s a monster gig.

How did it feel being onstage, in the midst of that spectacle?
A couple of people said to me they could have done with more Who and less football. But I suppose it’s best if I tell the truth. I felt nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a great big football stadium or a little club somewhere. As soon as I get close to a stage, I feel very at home and very safe and secure. It feels completely normal. When the NFL started to talk to us about this, one of the things they started to talk about was the numbers. I looked at Roger and looked at them and I said, “I’ve done a solo show in front of 80 million people on TV.” The abstract numbers make no difference.

I heard that Roger and Simon Townshend [Pete's brother and guitarist in the Who touring band] came up with the medley, not you.
That’s right. I thought we’d just do the CSI songs ["Won't Get Fooled Again," "Baba O'Riley," "Who Are You"]. My pitch was just to do three regular-length songs. We could fall back on what was very familiar. But Roger felt he needed something that gave him more narrative scope, as he described it. He and Simon and one of the lieutenants in the crew put together a track and surprisingly I thought it worked really well. Roger and I have a great relationship these days; it’s very warm and close. So I trusted him to do that job.

Were you wearing sunglasses up there?
No, I was wearing reading glasses. I like to be able to see the guitar.

What was it like finally experiencing an American football game?
English people still find the rules almost incomprehensible, like Americans finding cricket incomprehensible. It’s very difficult to understand how the game operates. But it’s a real sporting event and very exciting backstage and very dignified and serious. Some of my friends have been quite sniffy and said, “We watched it and it was like fucking Disneyland.” But when you’re on the inside of it, there’s a real sense of it being a job, a passion. I learned a lot about it yesterday, and it was all good.

What was the most surprising thing about it?
Not seeing a single cheerleader. Not anywhere. It was terrible. There are lot of girls who’ve said, “I used to be a cheerleader once.” But as hard as you try to persuade them, they won’t do it again.

Check out photos of music’s big names rocking football’s big game.

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If any band knows the power of viral videos, it’s OK Go. Five years ago, the band broke through when clips for “A Million Ways” and “Here It Goes Again” (the “treadmill” video) were passed around the Web. The band assumed the same would be the case for the first two videos from its new Of the Blue Colour of the Sky album (for “WTF” and “This Too Shall Pass”). But that was before the music business began groping for any additional ways to generate income in light of plummeting CD sales.

Thanks to a 2006 agreement between Google and the major labels, the two clips are officially confined to MySpace and YouTube and can’t be posted anywhere else. In the Google arrangement, which was renewed with the labels last year, the four majors receive at least 50 percent of ad revenue based on streams of videos on YouTube.

OK Go’s response? Go around the system. In an open letter to fans posted on the band’s site on January 18, singer-guitarist Damien Kulash explained the situation — and then provided a code so that bloggers and fans can embed both videos on their own sites. “We’ll put ‘em up anywhere we can,” says Kulash. “Our label is unlikely to start suing us for putting our videos up.” OK Go plans to make at least four more videos from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, including one in which Kulash will be thrown across a room in a giant slingshot.

According to Kulash, OK Go didn’t realize the restrictions until angry fan e-mails began arriving at the band’s Website. “It’s kind of a stupid decision,” says Kulash. “It doesn’t matter all that much to me if people are passing around our videos on one platform over another. But if the casual person who just wants to stick it up on their Facebook page can’t embed it, they send you a nasty comment and move on. You’ve just lost the two to 200 people who might have read that page.”

Although EMI declined to comment (but did not dispute Kulash’s claims), a YouTube spokesman confirms that the label made the decision to prevent those particular videos from being embedded elsewhere. OK Go manager Jamie Kitman says the band asked the label if they could skirt around the rules. “But they said, ‘That’s the policy — what can we do?’” he says. “It’s unthinkable to us that they wouldn’t want to spread videos virally, but they have a corporate policy.”

Kulash says he understands the industry’s rationale. “As fucked up as the industry is, it does provide investment money for bands,” he says. “For them to continue to do that, they do need some income.” But he also says that’s about all he comprehends about streaming videos and additional income. “Basically I have no fucking idea how it works. The last accounting we saw said that for 600,000 streams, we got $31. How can that be worth this?”

With Natalie Maines on an indefinite hiatus, the other two Dixie Chicks — guitarist-banjoist Emily Robison and her sister, fiddler Martie Maguire — have recorded an album on their own, as Court Yard Hounds (a reference to the best-selling novel City of Thieves). “Emily and I had the itch,” Maguire says, “and every time we’d call Natalie and say ‘are you ready?’ she wasn’t ready. She wanted a clear-cut break.”

Recorded mostly at Maguire’s home studio in Austin, the intimate pop-folk album features Robison’s first-ever lead vocals and songs inspired by her recent divorce from country act Charlie Robison. “When Natalie’s singing a song it has to strike a chord with her,” Robison says. “These songs are very personal.” Robison is joined by Jakob Dylan on “See You in the Spring.” The duo will debut their new band at South by Southwest in March, with the album dropping in May and a tour to follow.

Check out photos of the Dixie Chicks, onstage and off.

Although Robison and Maguire insist the Chicks haven’t disbanded, they admit they rarely see Maines, who lives in L.A. “I’m hoping she’ll come out to one of our shows,” Maguire says (the group’s last album, Taking the Long Way, came out in 2006). “Maybe it’ll inspire her to want to do music again.”

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In 1980, music journalist Robert Palmer was invited to drop by the sessions for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy in New York. When Palmer arrived, Lennon was adding background vocals to “(Just Like) Starting Over.” Palmer noted that Lennon had sung his parts perfectly in key. Lennon, impressed by Palmer’s ear, said, “You’ll do.”

As Lennon learned, Palmer — who died in 1997 of complications from liver disease at 52 — led a life immersed in music. He was an author (of Deep Blues, a history of Mississippi Delta music), a record producer, a documentary filmmaker, a college professor, even a horn player. But Palmer was foremost a critic equally skilled at writing about John Contrane, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Philip Glass — and his work has been anthologized for the first time in Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer.

Compiled by Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, Blues & Chaos collects revealing interviews with Eric Clapton, Jerry Lee Lewis and William S. Burroughs; liner notes for box sets by Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles and Bo Diddley; and in-depth stories on the history of Texas blues and the early years of the Band. Palmer was so prolific that DeCurtis spent years tracking down thousands of old clips. “Bob deserved that treatment,” says DeCurtis, who was Palmer’s editor at RS in the 1990s. “This is somebody who really believed that music could take you to another world.”

Rolling Stone editor Ed Ward recruited Palmer to write for the magazine in 1970, which he did for the rest of his life. In 1981, Palmer became The New York Times‘ head pop critic, introducing readers to everyone from Sonic Youth to blues-guitar great Otis Rush. In 1988, Palmer left the Times and returned south — to Mississippi and later Louisiana — to teach and also to deal with addiction to cocaine and heroin. Fighting hepatitis C, he fell ill in 1997 and died while awaiting a liver transplant. In a sign of the regard with which Palmer was held, Patti Smith, Allen Toussaint, Alex Chilton and others played a series of benefits to help pay his medical bill.

“He talked the talk,” says Robbie Robertson, who met Palmer in Arkansas in the Sixties. “He would look further inside of what you were doing, and he knew where things came from. It was so moving to me that somebody knew what well you got your water from.”

Photo: Kravitz/FilmMagic
For someone who once released a double CD, Billy Corgan has had it with the album. “I was never comfortable with the album format,” Corgan tells Rolling Stone. “It always felt so forced and was obviously an economic decision made by others and not an artistic decision made by creators. It can be draining to try to record 15 songs over a six-month period.”

Smashing Pumpkins celebrate 20 years of rock in New York: photos.

True to his word, the in-progress, psychedelic-leaning Smashing Pumpkins album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, will be released one track at a time, as free downloads, starting in late October. “No strings attached, no e-mail address need be given, no fees, nothing, totally free,” he says. “A 44-song free-for-all!” Even when it will be available physically, the format will be 11 EPs with four tracks each. “I thought it would emphasize that each song is really important to me,” he says, “and also try to get myself up to the speed of a world that is absolutely devouring information.”

Corgan says he wasn’t inspired by any similar approaches, like Radiohead’s recent move to put out singles and one album online. “I want no limitations on what I can, and will do,” he says. “I think the size and shape of the traditional album is just morphing into something much more in the moment. Four songs at a time will mean I can give my heart over to the music fully without giving away my now happy life.”

Although Corgan says he already written 53 songs, he won’t say whether he’ll be recording them with the latest edition of the Pumpkin or reveal any song titles. “The first four songs are speaking a new language to me, rooted in the psychedelic music I love but still sounding quite modern and like the Pumpkins I long to hear,” he allows. He’s also hoping to have the first track available just after Halloween.

Can Corgan, who parted ways with Warner Bros. last year, afford to give music away for free? “I can’t afford it!!” he says. “But I would rather be free than rich. The [major] labels are dead ghosts walking, and they know it. They never should have left this mystic free, because I am way more of a pied piper than they could ever fathom.”

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