The Wild True Story Behind Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

Lamar announced he’d be performing at the Super Bowl on September 8. Then he had until Thanksgiving to come up with a concept for the show. By the time everyone agreed on the plan and Eastland could start building stages—“cutting metal” as he calls it—it was early December. When we spoke in mid-January, he was loading the last of the 25 trucks his crew would drive from Southern California to New Orleans. (Luckily, none of All Access’ facilities were affected by the Los Angeles area wildfires, but some of the rehearsals did get postponed.)

There was one other restriction: the stadium entrances. Unlike some arenas, the Superdome has only one main tunnel that organizers could use to bring everything onto the field for Sunday’s show—and it dumps out right into a field goalpost. Eastland had less than 10 feet of clearance to get everything through. “It’s a field that’s not our favorite, because it’s that one tunnel that we all come flying through with 3,000 people,” Eastland says. “There’s the goalpost right there, dead center.”

So, about that GNX. While Eastland is “good at finding stuff like that,” Shelley Rodgers says it was still a challenge. Ever since Lamar released GNX, the 1980s two-door Buicks have seen a surge in popularity. Car aficionados have long held the GNX in high regard, and Eastland presumed no one who has maintained one of the cars for nearly four decades would want to sell it to someone planning to tear it apart.

Even those willing to sell presented peculiar problems. Before he located the one All Access eventually bought, Eastland’s car guy found himself in a pickle when a potential seller said their name wasn’t on the title because the owner was dead.

“I don’t know if it was stolen or not, but that’s the kind of nonsense that we can run into,” Eastland says, recounting the story. “I think at the end of the day, it could have been a lot harder.”

Once he got the car from a used car lot in Riverside, he still had to gut it—something even he admits was “sacrilegious.” But, Eastland argues, the people who appreciate Lamar’s music and his passion for the GNX were “going to need to see the car and not a cheap imposter” during Sunday’s halftime show.

Still, I have to ask, could the car be put back together again? Sadly, no. It could go on tour with Lamar, Eastland says, but its days as a street-legal vehicle are over. Eastland says he’s lucky he bought the GNX before its appearance in the halftime show drives up its value on the used market even more. “I got to believe that the price for these things is going to go way up for a while.”

Lamar, and the GNX, now go down in history.