Red Hot Chili Peppers Instruments Not Plugged in at Super Bowl

You'd expect more from a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band, but it looks like Red Hot Chili Peppers Flea and Josh Klinghoffer didn't even play their instruments live during the Super Bowl halftime show. Lame.

We'll play Devil's advocate here for a minute. Maybe they had some super cool new wireless rig built into their instruments for the show. Usually though, when a band uses wireless hookups, a transmitter is plugged into the instrument where the guitar cord would go. As you can see in the photo gallery above, that is not the case. Not to mention all of the previous photos of Flea playing that same bass, totally plugged in. Hopefully, they prove us wrong, because they'd lose a lot of respect if they were faking it. That's some straight up One Direction s--- right there.

It does seem as if they actually recorded the music at some point, as they threw in a little bit of 'Sweet Leaf' action toward the end of 'Give it Away.' Maybe this was something they were forced to be a party to because of the Super Bowl. Maybe they didn't want to upstage those sweet ass leggings that Anthony Kiedis had on. Maybe this never would have happened if John Frusciante was still in the band (he definitely wouldn't have stood for this). Maybe they sold out and should feel shame.

We imagine that the band will release some kind of statement as news of their faux performance spreads across the web. At bare minimum, Flea will have to address this via Twitter (he's a pretty active Tweeter). He's already been getting some pokes about this and won't be able to ignore them forever. This is perhaps the biggest Rock Fail we've ever seen. Damn it, Chili Peppers! You're better than this.