How Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Became the Last Niche Act to Play the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Ninety seconds before Scotty Morris went onstage at the Super Bowl halftime show, he had a series of flashbacks. He was a kid in Southern California, standing in front of the mirror with an imaginary microphone, singing along to Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti; he was a middle school band member who insisted on playing his own arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke”; he was a teenager in a DIY punk-rock group; then he was a young man who, in a complete lark, decided to start up a swing revival band in the midst of the ’90s grunge era, because that was the music he’d grown up with, and that was the music he still loved—even if no one his age understood it yet.

And then he snapped back to the present moment—Pro Player Stadium, Miami, Florida, where as the lead singer of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, he was opening for Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan in the biggest show of his career—and he wondered: What the hell was he doing here?

The whole thing never felt real to Morris—not then, and not now, 20 years after the fact. A couple of months after that 1999 Super Bowl, between the Broncos and Falcons, The Matrix would hit theaters, and Morris just presumed he’d taken the red pill and been transported into a surreal alternate universe. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy had a cult following that grew out of their residency at Los Angeles hipster joint the Brown Derby, and they’d had a successful record in the wake of their appearance in the 1996 movie Swingers. But they weren’t even the most popular of the swing-revival bands—none of their albums ever rose higher than no. 47 on the Billboard charts. They did not have a massive MTV hit like the Brian Setzer Orchestra or the Squirrel Nut Zippers—they were arguably not even the biggest swing band with the word “Daddy” in the name. They were just a bunch of dudes who liked to dress up in suits, play retro music, and have a good time.

“I remember right before we went on, I started laughing to myself,” Morris says. “That was a surreal experience. The whole thing went from zero to 60 so fast.”

The cue came, and there they were, in front of 75,000 people at Super Bowl XXXIII with another 125 million watching across the country. The majority of one of Morris’s signature songs, “Go Daddy-O,” had been pre-recorded for the performance, but he still had to remember to play the song’s guitar riffs. The flashbulbs were blinding. Don’t let the moment overwhelm you, he told himself, but really, could he help it? Then Morris hit the opening notes, and all of a sudden, in the midst of one of the most retroactively mind-boggling trends in modern popular music, he and his band found themselves playing at what was fast becoming the most colossal entertainment platform in American culture. In the process, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy became the last truly niche band ever to play a Super Bowl. Two decades later, they’re so much of a historical afterthought that FiveThirtyEight didn’t bother to include them in their ranking of the star power of the past 25 halftime shows.

So how the hell did this happen? How did Big Bad Voodoo Daddy slip through the cracks of the Super Bowl marketing machine? The answer can only begin with the acknowledgment that the 1990s were a very strange time, and so was the Super Bowl halftime show—particularly as, over the course of that decade, it evolved from an Up With People’d afterthought into something that resonated with the game’s massive viewing audience.

In 1992, Fox aired counterprogramming during halftime of the Super Bowl—an In Living Color special that siphoned more than 20 million viewers away from Gloria Estefan and the thinly veiled Olympics promotion Winter Magic airing on CBS. So the next year, the NFL decided to get serious. Michael Jackson set a new template for the show in 1993, and throughout the remainder of the decade, the league experimented with ideas built around that Jacksonian model: Find a few big artists, engineer a loose theme, and wedge it all together into something that often made little collective sense. Super Bowl XXIX (in 1995) centered on an Indiana Jones theme, with performances by Patti LaBelle, Tony Bennett, Teddy Pendergrass, and Miami Sound Machine; Super Bowl XXXI (in 1997) starred the Blues Brothers, ZZ Top, and James Brown.

“The Super Bowl honchos realized they needed to do something with that time slot, but they were still figuring it out,” says Rolling Stone columnist and pop-cultural savant Rob Sheffield. “So in the late ’90s, you get all those weird halftime shows. Like Phil Collins singing the theme from Disney’s Tarzan” at Super Bowl XXXIV, in January 2000.

Back then, the shows were produced by higher-ups at Radio City Music Hall. Former NFL executive Jim Steeg says that in 1999, they were thinking of doing the show at Radio City—at least until one of the league’s primary contacts there wound up leaving his job. Gloria Estefan and her husband, Emilio, took over planning for the show, as the game was being played in Estefan’s hometown of Miami, and they decided to make the theme “A Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing.” The soul part was an attempt to incorporate Stevie Wonder into the performance (Steeg recalls Wonder agreeing with one stipulation: He wanted to enter while driving a car). The swing part came because, in the wake of Swingers’ surprise success as an independent film, an aesthetic and musical revival had grown into a cultural phenomenon.

Morris and his band weren’t even writer Jon Favreau’s first choice to appear in the film, but because Royal Crown Revue had signed to a major label, and because Favreau had befriended the members of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy during their Wednesday-night residency in L.A.’s burgeoning Los Feliz neighborhood, they got the call. Soon after the movie’s release, the band’s audiences grew from a few hundred to a few thousand. The whole time, Morris kept thinking to himself, “Just ride this wave while it lasts.”

“I stayed as grounded as I possibly could,” he says. “Instead of thinking, like, ‘We’re Led Zeppelin and we’re going to conquer the world,’ my honest opinion was like, ‘All right, we’re Chubby Checker right now and this is the Twist.’ And if we’re smart, we can probably hang out and get a bigger, better crowd than we had going.”

Over the next couple of years, Morris and his band basically lived on the road. Their 1998 self-titled album went gold (it would eventually go platinum). They were interviewed on network morning shows as one of the architects of a peculiar phenomenon that even the participants themselves didn’t seem to fully grasp. The late ’90s was a time of grand experimentation in music. It was a moment, Sheffield says, when “the music audience was so voracious, so eager to trade 20-dollar bills for CDs, that they would try out any genre.” Swing music was an extension of the ska phenomenon, and the costumes and the dancing made it feel like its own immersive hipster universe. But once those songs started hitting the charts and commanding MTV and alternative-radio airplay, it was only a matter of time before it became corporatized, the stuff of Gap commercials.

“Yeah, that part was a bummer,” Morris says. “I’d spent like 10 years with my buddies collecting vintage suits all over the country. For them to turn it into this clowny, zoot suit feather-in-your-hat kind of thing, I thought it was bullshit. But you know what, man? You live and die by the sword.”

So it went for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, who lucked into the biggest gig of their career in much the same way they’d lucked into Swingers. During the NFL’s search for a swing act, Steeg says, he first reached out to Brian Setzer, the former Stray Cats singer who had a massive hit with a cover of Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” But Setzer insisted on getting paid. Steeg told him that no one got paid for the Super Bowl halftime show (they still don’t)—that it’s done for the exposure. “They could not see the value,” Steeg says. “[Setzer] became impossible to deal with.”

A Radio City executive later told Morris that he saw Big Bad Voodoo Daddy play The Tonight Show and thought, “We have to get these guys.” A short time after, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was playing the House of Blues in New Orleans when the band’s manager at the time told Morris they’d been offered a spot in the Super Bowl halftime show. It took weeks before Morris believed his manager was telling the truth, and while they took the gig and began preparing for it, Morris remained skeptical until the moment they actually arrived in Miami. “He was a pretty good talker,” Morris says of their manager, with whom they later had a falling-out. “That was his charm. My thinking was, ‘I have no idea why that makes any sense.’ But up to this point, nothing made sense, anyway.”

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The band parlayed the notoriety of getting booked for the halftime show into multiple gigs, including one on the helipad at Richard Nixon’s former mansion, which was used to film the movie Scarface. They played at ESPN parties and briefly became the house band for the ESPYs; a few weeks before the game, they’d also played the Orange Bowl halftime show, becoming the only band to perform at both in the same year (that fact made them the eventual answer to a Jeopardy! clue, Morris tells me). After recording tracks for their halftime performance, Morris told Stevie Wonder, “I wish you could see how big my smile is right now.”

“Your smile’s so big,” Wonder joked, “even Stevie Wonder can see it.”

People at parties would ask Morris how he wound up booking this gig, and he told them he literally had no idea. When a reporter at a Super Bowl–week press conference asked him when he knew he was actually going to play the game, he said, only half-joking, that he knew right then, because up to that point, he’d never believed it was going to happen.

For at least that week, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was ubiquitous. They sat in a box with k.d. lang and the members of Kiss during the Super Bowl, and played at the victory party for the Denver Broncos, who’d won the game 34-19. But then, just as Morris expected, the whole thing collapsed. In the wake of the Super Bowl, the swing revival hit a wall. Alternative radio stopped playing their songs. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s next album, released in 1999, “became a bloodbath,” Morris says. The millennium turned, and we were left wondering whether that whole swing music thing was actually some sort of collective delusion.

“In a way,” Sheffield says, “this halftime show did for the ’90s what Altamont did for the ’60s.”

Thereafter, the halftime show continued its growth into the ultimate arena gig, reserved for bands with mass followings. In 1999, Steeg says, the NFL could engage major acts like the Rolling Stones or the Who or Bruce Springsteen in conversations, but they couldn’t close the deal. That changed radically over the next couple of years. MTV took over the production in 2001 and booked Aerosmith, ’NSync, Britney Spears, Nelly, and Mary J. Blige; U2 played a solo gig in 2002 (which Sheffield ranked, in 2016, as the best halftime performance ever), and opened the show up to solo gigs by A-list talent.

“I don’t think it could happen for a band like us again,” Morris says. “I had a good time seeing what it looked like at that level. But I wouldn’t want to try and maintain that.”

Yet on a far smaller (and more fitting) scale, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is still around. The band celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, and have maintained their original lineup. These days, they’re back to playing historic theaters and gigs with a few hundred people, some of whom lived through the swing revival and now bring their kids to the shows.

It’s been long enough now that Morris isn’t even sure that he can trust his memory with the details. Toward the end of our conversation, he tells me about playing both the Orange Bowl and the Super Bowl halftime shows under a full moon. Which means, if Morris recalls it correctly, that Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl under a blue moon.

“I just remember looking up at the moon and going, ‘Oh shit, that thing is full again,’” Morris says, and before I fact-check it (it appears he’s correct), I tell him that the memory probably matters more than the reality, anyway.

“On a blue moon, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl,” he says. “It’s like, only us could possibly have that kind of crazy thing happen.”