So we’ve all heard the story about Van Halen on tour refusing to get on stage because there were brown M&Ms in their green room, after they specifically requested that the brown ones be pulled out of the M&Ms bowl! At least once, the band followed through with their threat, cancelling a show in Colorado when David Lee Roth found the brown M&Ms in his dressing room. It seems to be such ubiquitous knowledge that almost every time I hear anything regarding a band’s tour rider* you hear some joke prima-donna statement about “I want blue fruit roll-ups only” or “I need three tooth-picks, one perfectly square ice cube, and a two rubber bands or I’m not going on stage“. While many of these comments mock real life self inflated needs of rock stars, they are not a proper reference to the M&Ms story, which in fact had legitimate reason rooted in production value and safety.
I learned recently from Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifestio that at the time Van Halen was pulling this little M&Ms stunt, big arena productions were really still in their infancy, and while most tours would pull up to the arena’s docks with 3 semi-trucks, Van Halen’s tour was pulling nine 18-wheelers with them! Properly setting up the amount of equipment in these trucks was a logistical nightmare at that time, and there were many safety concerns regarding the amount of stress their heavy stage setup would invoke on the ceiling structure and arena floor. Gawande goes on to explain:
And there were many, many technical errors —whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. 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, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena
So you see Van Halen wasn’t trying to be the biggest pain in the ass they could, but rather save their fans lives! Next time you request some odd-ball line item to you’re band’s rider, consider one that may help your fans enjoy the show.
Preston Smits
*A rider is a set of requests or demands a performing act requests of the venue and equipment providers in order that the performers have all accommodations necessary to perform their act.
