having your own amp wouldn't have solved the bad sound in the halftime show. all the tracks were pre-recorded and the soundman didn't have a good balance between the tracks and the bep's mics. blaring a big bass amp in those situations would be unnoticeable on the tv at best and disastrous for the mix at worst.
you have to trust the soundguy. i know a lot of soundguys make it impossible to trust them, but you still have to trust them to some extent, and you have to learn the difference between what's in your best interests or what's going to screw the pooch. and the truth is blaring a bass amp when the sound is bad is almost always going to be detrimental.
True enough.
The only thing that guarantees a worse mix than a soundman that doesn't know what he's doing who can at least hear what he's mixing is a bass player on stage that can't hear what FOH mix sounds like, but he's trying to fix that mix from stage anyway by blaring his bass amp. How could he possibly know what it sounds like out front? He can't hear it.. Lou Ferrigno, the bass player/wanna be soundman thinks he's Beethoven and doesn't have to hear what it sounds like out front in order to mix his bass properly from the stage...

Recipe for disaster.
Trying to fill the room from stage dooms the monitors, which cripples the vocalists to sing. If you have PA support, bass amp on stage is just a monitor. Just enough volume for you and the drummer to hear. Not for PA support.
I just had the opposite problem at a recent gig. Soundman hears bass in the mains (which coincidentally have subwoofers cranked way too loud instead of shooting for a flat system response) and thinks he can manage the monitor mix on stage by matching the monitor sends to the main sliders.
Funny how I can't hear any bass at all in the monitors that don't have subs as a result even standing right in front of them (small stage, only running an ADA MB-1 preamp for my stage rig, 0 watts...). Everyone else, keys, guitar, vocals are blasting..
Which is fine, he can't hear the monitor mix to tell its wrong. But when someone tells him on break and he doesn't believe it... won't even entertain the possibility that he's got it wrong

I literally didn't hear a single note I played until I went from 6 to 10 on the MB-1 volume and could hear myself in the mains if I leaned out off the stage away from the monitors, until he turned me back down. Was hoping that would be a hint and he'd just turn the mains down, leave the monitors. Even if he did, there still wasn't any bass in the monitors. Probably just turned the attenuator down to bring both main and monitor back down.
After 20 min of the break wasted arguing with the guy, I had to MacGuyver a wired IEM out of an Altoids box and some patch cables and my mp3 player earbuds so I could stop playing by braille and hear myself. Had enough bleed through the earbuds to hear everyone else in the monitors, and enough bass in the buds to hear myself.
Randy