It was at halftime during the Super Bowl that I was realized I was getting a little too cynical in my middle years.

If you weren’t one of the 106 million Americans watching Sunday night, the highlight of the halftime show was a medley of hits by one of the best of the British rock groups of the 1960s, The Who. Now I was a big fan of The Who back when they were all young, young enough to sing “Hope I die before I get old…” while never suspecting that they’d still be singing when they did, indeed, get old.

I still enjoy the fact that the old guys can rock even now, even if both Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are really beginning to show what decades of rock music will do to a singing voice. Sunday night it must have been hard for them to blast right into their medley – at 65, you could rupture something singing that way, especially wearing them tight rock-star pants.

Speaking of the medley, I noticed that three of the five songs in The Who’s medley were also the popular theme songs for the CBS network’s three hit CSI series. What a coincidence, I thought. But then I learned that the network broadcasting the Super Bowl is the very party that gets to choose the music for halftime.

Gee, maybe I’m getting cynical in my middle age, but it looks to me like CBS hired this legendary rock band just so they could play the theme music to the wildly popular shows CSI, CSI Miami and CSI New York, making the halftime show a long commercial for their shows. CBS shot off a lot of fireworks and lasers, I believe, hoping that we’d overlook the fact that they’d just treated rock titans The Who as their house band.

I don’t fault the band members for doing the gig, even if they realized their medley was just a monster plug for CBS’s hit shows. A paycheck is a paycheck. It may have been part of the deal when Daltrey and Townshend cut those special versions of their songs to be used as CSI themes.

“Smile and grin at the change all around me; Pick up my guitar and play, Just like yesterday….”

On the plus side, a few million more people just realized with shock that those old guys on the stage were the source of those famous rocking guitar lines, tunes that are now the signature themes of three big hit TV shows. A generation or three of kids are realizing that some of the great rock licks were put down 40 years ago when their parents or grandparents were cool.

So I guess it’s just me being cynical to bemoan old rock stars trying to make a buck off their 40-year-old material. If folks are still buying, it’s no shame to sell it, and sell it, and sell it.

“I’d call that a bargain, the best I ever had…”