Like a lot of people who spent their adolescence during the 80′s, I had a phase where I listened to Glam Rock. It was a hard force to ignore, with its glitzy clothes, big, poofy product-laden hair, spectacle stage shows, and music that my parents absolutely hated. What wasn’t there to love about it? Besides enjoying the music, I was also a fan of the crazy antics that many of the bands got into off stage. One of the craziest stories I vaguely remembered was one about Van Halen trashing a dressing room for having a bowl of M&Ms without the brown ones removed.
Now, I didn’t quite believe it, because it seemed so far fetched, but recently I stumbled upon an article about it on snopes.com. Not only is the story true, but there is a really interesting explanation as to why it happened. From the article:
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . .” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
Basically, they added that crazy provision to their performance rider as a method to determine if the people running the venue actually read through the the whole thing. If they bothered to take the brown M&Ms out of the bowl, they probably did all of the other technical things as well. I am impressed by the cleverness of the whole thing.