The Valid Reason Why Van Halen Asked For a Bowl of M&Ms With All The Brown Ones Removed Backstage
During their 1982 tour, Van Halen made a unique request in their tour riders: a bowl of M&M's, but with all the brown ones taken out, to be provided in the dressing room at each venue. This demand was widely viewed as an extravagant whim, with many believing that the band was pushing boundaries and testing the limits of what they could request from concert organisers.
But the seemingly ludicrous request was actually a shrewd business move. (I was reminded of it while reading Ian Parker's excellent profile of New York Times food critic Pete Wells in the New Yorker; he mentions the Van Halen M&M episode in passing.)
The band's concert rider indeed had a clause saying there could be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, or the promoter would forfeit the entire show at full price.
As lead singer David Lee Roth explained in a 2012 interview, the bowl of M&Ms was an indicator of whether the concert promoter had actually read the band's complicated contract.
Diamond Dave explains more in his biography - "Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. 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, 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."
The lesson on the significance of contracts, by Van Halen, concludes here.
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