Van Halen had good reason to ban brown M&Ms in their concert rider.

Spotted via Andrew Baron's tweetstream, this fascinating -- no, really! -- snopes article on why Van Halen had that line in their concert rider about ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&Ms EVER.

Punch line: the true reason behind this had to do with technology, engineering, and safety issues. But I can kind of hear David Lee Roth delivering the lines in his over-the-top screamy-voice when I read his quotes. Actually, I can hear David Lee Roth's voice when I read the rider.

Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms. The actual 1982 rider was first published online at smokinggun.com in 2008.

Video below: "Jamie's Cryin," from David Lee Roth's bluegrass cover album of VH hits, remixed by a fan in a homebrew video with (why not?) a Popeye cartoon. You can buy the record here if you are so inclined: Strummin' With The Devil: Bluegrass Tribute to Van Halen.

Update: JKD says,

Also, a recent episode of "This American Life" also had a segment on the brown M&M clause, and the general dynamics of touring and contracts, with John Flansburgh from TMBG:

• [grimc]

  @robulus

  Maybe the venues would always pay attention, but promoters and venue operators aren’t always the same person.

• [Anonymous]

  Those of you complaining about this have almost certainly never actually worked on the road in this industry.

  I worked with a band in 2003 that had a drummer with something akin to OCD (I don’t know his actual diagnosis but he was on meds and a couple times got flown out to see his shrink) – all the bands on the tour had to agree that there would be no candy of mixed colors on any riders or even present backstage as he would sort them to the point of missing the set and potentially become violent if interfered with. Onstage if the nuts on his kit were not properly aligned he would stop playing to fix them. This was a talented musician in an internationally successful band with real problems and I am sure a lot of the shit on his bands rider looked silly to people and the reasons for it were not disclosed casually. You don’t get to play ‘why is this like this’ with the rider – it is part of the contract, read it completely and do it.

• [mccrum]

  No, you always check the other stuff. Brown M&M’s are just an indicator of how closely you need to oversee absolutely everything.

  Think of it as the check engine light of the rider.

• [mccrum]

  Robulous,

  Yes, I would be totally pissed at the contractors. And yet, in my town, right now, they’re not even doing as much as that to check on all of the poured concrete for the past five years. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/nyregion/30concrete.html

  Look, the guys in charge of building the stage are with the road crew. Each “division” has at least one person to make sure the local crew doesn’t f*ck up their section. And there are enough good guys on every crew (local and road) to make sure things don’t get built wrong, fall down and kill people. Riggers who work in one space often enough can even make the call if something is probably going to be too heavy, fall and kill people.

  However. In a legal sense, that’s not their job. It is the venue’s responsibility to ensure they are following the rider and providing a stage, rigging points, load in doors, security and good local crew per contract, which would entail specific loads for points.

  If the venue says they can hold a ton on every point and they can only hold 1500 pounds, the road crew, who just woke up on a bus and walked into the space is not going to know this. The local rigger, if they know the space well enough, will be able to tell the road crew that it’s not a good idea and to check the architectural drawings. However, that guy could be on another part of the rig and not know they hung a car over there until too late. It is the venue’s responsibility, not the local crew’s, not the road crew’s.

  And yes, Roth admits in the article he caused 12000 dollars in damages, which was a total d!ck move, that I’m not disputing. But it’s a damn clever idea to have something easy to check that the local promoter/venue wasn’t paying attention. If I’m the crew chief and I see brown M&M’s, you can damn well be sure that I’ll be asking about hanging points and steel loads on the deck all day long.

  Of course, if I’m the venue, they get five M&M’s and none of them are brown, 12 Reeses cups (unwrapped and unsanitary) and 12 Dannon yogurts that are all the same crappy flavor for a guy who’s going to be this persnickety about it.

• [chugheshc2]

  I actually sorted the M&M’s for this rider, in Mobile Alabama, when I worked catering at the Municipal Auditorium in the early 80′s.
  Aw yeah, good times.

• [Aleknevicus]

  @18,

  LB, I think you need to read the article a little more closely:

  David Lee Roth: “I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” . . . you know, with the skull in one hand . . . and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”

• [Anonymous]

  Ozzie was way cooler, he just flat out wanted a brandy glass full of M&Ms or he refused to play.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wRSHXhJzsY

• [robulus]

  LB says

  Roth didn’t do $12K of damage; he even admits it in the Snopes article (which I guess you didn’t read?)

  Oooooooooh, perhaps if I bothered to even read the article, I might not come of like such a poorly informed dickhead!

  Except, of course, that the article, when actually read, by a person of some basic literacy, totally like confirms what I said!!! The stage damage was eighty grand!!!!!!

  So in your face LB!!! Ha ha ha!!!!!

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Go ahead and jump.

• [IamInnocent]

  Yeah! Sure! They put in a funny clause that’s supposed to be a test and then make a slander to make sure that no one has to read the damn contract to be aware of it… makes so much sense.

  Why can’t we enjoy the art without asking the artists to live at that level their whole life? Mozart was truly, authentically scatological in his private life and a (genius) airhead to boot: so fucking what? Those rock star were jerks, then just jump when they say so and enjoy the show. They were and still are great.

• [Anonymous]

  #58 — Sounds like a Jerry Glanville reference. No other idea, though.

• [Anonymous]

  There’s a This American Life Episode all about this. I highly recommend this to everyone:

  Ep. 386 Fine Print:
  http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1308

• [RingMod76]

  Heh, you can definitely tell the people who have some vague experience/understanding of how tour riders work versus the “$80K OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!1″ people on this thread. Entertaining reading.

  Also: I have a friend whose friend’s band opened for Loverboy when said 80′s band was doing a “reunion” tour or somesuch (at club-type venues, not terribly glamorous). I think it was only one show, but said opening band had to sign a huge tour rider that largely consisted of ways in which they were not permitted to make fun of the main act (including not being allowed to wear red leather pants).

  The music biz is AWESOME!

• [Joe in Australia]

  I understand what the point is supposed to be. But really, it’s a stupid way of ensuring that safety criteria have been followed. The guy that buys the candy will not be the same guy as the one tightening the bolts on the scaffolding. It just comes off as a mean-spirited joke and an excuse to be violent and controlling – “Look at me! I’m so important that I can have someone obsessively sort through my candy, for no reason at all!”

• [Geoff Sebesta]

  That’s brilliant. My hat is off to DLR. In the confines of his industry he was a sharp, sharp businessman.

• [Metostopholes]

  #35 Joe in Australia
  The guy that buys the candy will not be the same guy as the one tightening the bolts on the scaffolding.

  … but the guy telling both of those guys what to do is the one who’s actually reading the rider.

• [shadowfirebird]

  Okay, maybe it wouldn’t have worked. But he’s not Edward de Bono.

  And I suspect it would have worked better than some people here think. It’s not the band’s job to check the rider, so presumably the venue should have someone that does that. The M&M’s thing doesn’t test the rider — it tests that guy, the guy that should have tested the rider.

  It’s similar to an idea I’ve come across in IT — you test the QA team by putting mistakes in the code.

• [Anonymous]

  Having worked on sound and stage rigs for most of my adult life, I think it’s a grand idea if you have the kind of rig that demands attention to minute detail. As the guy on This American Life put it “if you find a brown M&M, you know to check the lines”.

  Yes, it’s bullying, yes it’s intimidatory, and it’s not the right thing for most bands, or most rigs. But for that band, with that rig, it was perfect.

  As for the $12K damage – well.

  If you’re putting on a show that demands a sturdy stage, your canary (M&Ms) tells you something’s not right, you smash up the place and THEN the stage gives out under the weight of your kit, I’d say you’ve proved your point. The stage wasn’t safe. It could have killed people.

  I’d have smashed up the dressing room, too.

• [adrian]

  @25

  I was just thinking the same thing!

  The M&Ms clause sort of reminds me of the myth/fact that map publishers used to include small insignificant dead-end streets in their maps as a way to detect plagiarism.

  Back to the riders: Where does Jerry Springer suggest one might obtain Piña colada scented theatrical smoke? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/springer/springer1.html

• [nycjason]

  My favorite strange rider request was in Sheryl Crow’s – 2 tickets had to be left at will call for Elvis.

  TSG only has a few pages of her rider, and not the page this is on, but it’s in there (or at least it was in ’03).

• [Larskydoodle]

  So…..is it true what they say about the green ones?

• [Clif Marsiglio]

  Back when I was a musician, these sorts of things were common clauses and for the same reason as noted.

  Touringwise, I was stage manager / backup pianist (in case our official player ended up strung out…the last year I played nearly 50 shows because of a heroin addiction…sadly, they used archival footage of him on the concert DVD, but my playing!!!)

  But as stage manager, you don’t get to see the screw ups until about 2 hours before the show. When you are with a major production there is a team out ahead of you getting things setup the day before you get there. We’d get in just before the sound check, a few hours to get some rest (buses suck even with bunks to sleep on) and then I’d run through and check things out. Find out things like drum risers are being stacked on milk cartons (ummm…your venue just spent $75k just to get us there, ya think you could afford the $200 extra for decent stage rental on this???)

  Things like we did not tour with a lot of our own instruments because of the expense…grand piano and hammond organ were to be provided. If they were going to cut corners on the rider, how do we know if I was going to get some cheesy lowery organ instead of a Hammond…a baldwin as opposed to the Stein.

  Almost ALWAYS if someone would ask me if they could come up with a substitute and they’d shown that they were actually going through this all, we were cool and could come up with a compromise. But they needed to ask and I needed to think about it.

  Other things…like deposit schedules? These were our brown M&Ms…if you did not follow the deposit schedule exactly, how were we going to know if the accounting was correct. If this were not followed, we asked for the full house percentage, even if we might only get 50% of the seats…our accountant was ruthless (and probably why the singer married her…sadly, he was still married to someone else at the time!)

  All in all, its funny seeing this stuff as a normal person, but once you actually see the industry, it is the same as putting f**ked up comments in code to see if the person doing the code review is actually paying attention. To be honest, I found the life of a musician more rigorous and exacting than anything in business or IT. Almost everything had a reason…I don’t know how many times someone would get trashed in public just for the publicity (and it was never any crappy town, it was always LA / Miami / NYC where they could get the attention…the real abusers? They just wouldn’t wake up and miss rehersals and no one would hear about it…no trashing of the rooms or otherwise…no you do this to get some ink in the paper).

  Anyhoo…

• [mccrum]

  Mestopholes gets it.

  @adrian: Back to the riders: Where does Jerry Springer suggest one might obtain Piña colada scented theatrical smoke? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/springer/springer1.html

  Well, these days it’s more of a question of what flavor fog would you like? I can hook you up with strawberry, lemon, vanilla, peach, apple, mint, rum and (my new favorite) musk. I’d go with Rosco if I were you though, it’s reportedly the less hazardous in the long run.
  http://www.fogfactory.com/fluid/fluid.html

• [Absent]

  Like people have said, when first in the door, check the M&Ms. If there’s no brown ones, the important tech and safety stuff has probably also been taken care of. If there are brown ones you should immediately make time to check the important real details.

• [Anonymous]

  I thought the whole “we want X candy without Y colour” was to make sure they were holding up the contract and paying attention to detail ?

• [LB]

  >>30

  Thank you, I guess his phrase about “who am I to ruin a good rumor” confused me. Obviously, I would fail at removing the brown M&Ms. (Good thing I don’t work in show business.)

  >>32

  Oh the horror, I failed to fully comprehend an article on the Internet. I lack basic literacy, despite being able to reply to the mocking comments of others.

• [The Thompson Five]

  I heard this story on NPR last week, and was amazed. Most of my life this was a story that embodied ’70′s rock star excess, and suddenly it turned out to be a story about a bunch of smart bastards finding a clever and simple solution to a complex problem.

• [dderidex]

  Special contemporary relevance, too, given recent deaths from stage collapses at concerts.

  Those ‘little details’ are BIG IMPORTANT DETAILS and a quick, cheap way to see if someone even bothered to look at them seems rather clever.

• [TheWillow]

  @#20 Anon – When I was working at a radio show that was performance/interview I only ever got asked for beer once and that’s how I found out that they make bottles of PBR.

  … A guy in Dred Zeppelin also asked me for pot once and I couldn’t help but stare at him dumbfounded. There were at least 15 people in the room who looked like they were more likely to know how to get pot than I did, and one of them was 6.

• [Anonymous]

  I’m presuming that many people heard this on NPR’s This American Life #386 “Fine Print.” I just started it on my iPod this morning.

• [sally599]

  Its funny in this situation and yet I suspect that there are a few “brown M&Ms” in the EULAs I’ve clicked through.

• [Phikus]

  Absent@~43: “If there are brown ones you should immediately make time to check the important real details.”

  Actually, it sounds like DLR went straight from 1) Check M&Ms to 2) Trash dressing room to the tune of $12,000, and then they still did the gig anyway, whereupon the stage collapsed. So much for the canary in the coalmine.

  Petulant prima donna activity no matter how you slice it, hind-sighted excuses notwithstanding.

• [I have no mouth and I must scream]

  An M&M version on a canary in the coalmine

• [W. James Au]

  Wow, Snopes quotes David Lee saying “tertiary, third-level markets”. What the fuck does David Lee Roth sound like when he says “tertiary, third-level markets”? And does Xeni hear him saying that clause in her dreams?

• [Anonymous]

  Thorazine Tablets used to look exactly like brown m&ms. You would not want to take one or two of these by accident.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  I really wish that David Lee Roth had aged better. He was the only reason that I had a television in the 80s.

• [grimc]

  @6

  What the fuck does David Lee Roth sound like when he says “tertiary, third-level markets”?

  I dunno, but is there any doubt it was the coolest way that “tertiary, third-level markets” has ever been or will be said?

• [mccrum]

  Dred Zep always seemed like the type of band to be more discerning and just bring their own.

• [Anonymous]

  Doesn’t tertiary MEAN third-level?

• [Anonymous]

  Speaking if celebrity riders, I did these animations about them for the Smoking Gun a while ago….they include Marilyn Manson, Rolling Stones, Pavarotti, and JLo.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGINaZ1oQ1o&feature=channel_page

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZV7uW_C7Ic&feature=channel_page

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgyX9BE1GKc&feature=channel_page

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbk_bhrHXEU&feature=channel_page

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGv5S5CQUBA&feature=channel_page

• [vonnegutlives]

  Only because I’m a detail-obsessed nerd, but This American Life is from PRI, not NPR.

• [Anonymous]

  more david lee roth goodness:

  His Autobiography /Crazy From the Heat/:
  http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Heat-David-Lee-Roth/dp/0091874807/

  Van Halen backstage at US Festival ’83:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbGTP7afGI

  More on Steve Wozniak’s US Festival:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Festival

  David Lee Roth’s famous “I’ll f*** your girlfriend” quote (from the US Festival performance):
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbdMvOwf22M

  A truly inspired soundboard:
  http://thetyser.com/

• [Anonymous]

  I can definitely verify this story. Hung out with the woman who ran the road show for the 88 monsters of rock tour, and in 1990, she told me this story about Van Halen. Very smart of them.

• [senorglory]

  So does this mean that if there are no brown M&Ms in the bowl, then no need to check the other stuff?

  Brown M&Ms = check all the other stuff.
  No Brown M&Ms = check all the other stuff.

  Baloney.

• [Brainspore]

  Was this back during the period when they had two shades of brown M&Ms after the original red dye formula was found to be carcinogenic? Because if so that would mean losing like 40% of your candy right there.

• [Brother Provisional]

  Hmmm. It must be behind-the-scenes-of-rock day on the internet. My buddy forwarded me an link this morning to a very tongue in cheek concert rider sent out by Iggy Pop’s roady.
  http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1004061iggypop1.html
  Its a very interesting mishmash of sophomoric malarkey and hard nosed shop talk.
  It seems like very tough job to try to put together sophisticated A/V displays in the midst of the cavalcade of ridiculousness and excess that is rock and roll.

• [George Curious]

  I saw Van Halen in those years, on the Women And Children First tour (third album, around 82).

  Still the best rock concert I’ve ever seen. By far.

• [mccrum]

  It doesn’t sound like the stage collapsed, it sounds like they loaded out their stage and the spongy floor of the space was damaged by the weight of the stage, which the venue had assumed would be fine because they didn’t read the rider.

• [jaytkay]

  Ridiculous. Nonsense. Bullshit.

  If you want to prevent injuries, maiming and death, you don’t test compliance after construction with a question about M&Ms. You get the work done right beforehand.

  However, if you want to seed a frivolous lawsuit to cheat your suppliers, you put in an M&M clause.

• [Anonymous]

  In the spring of 1997 I volunteered for a major music festival in New Orleans adding clauses like this to musicians’ contracts. It was astonishing how detailed they were about food and drink and other needs. At first I thought they were being incredibly selfish. However, I came to realize that if the musicians weren’t specific and added their needs to a contract, promoters could easily ignore or downgrade them. After all, who wants flat, warm soda and baloney on white sandwiches before or after a performance?

• [mccrum]

  Jaytkay, it’s not VH cheating the compliance, it’s their way of testing the venue itself. Venues are notorious for doing what it takes to get a band there and telling them exactly what they want to hear on the phone and then not providing what was promised. Written riders, sent out to be signed are supposed to ensure even simple things like “will our gear fit in the load in door” are answered correctly and accurately.

  If they do not read the rider and do a relatively simple thing of removing brown M&M’s (please note, the rider does not say how many M&M’s, the venue can comply with six red M&M’s), this is a sign that they probably didn’t read the part about ensuring the fire suppression system works via particle suspension instead of the simpler smoke sensors. I had a fire alarm go off as a result of a fogger during the end of a *children’s show* with the venue organizers going through the house telling everyone to stay in their seats. I was all for getting everyone out and being on the safe side but the venue nixed this. Thankfully nothing was on fire, but they had lied to me when I walked through the door and things could have ended up like Great White if it had been a different show.

  Your anger should be directed to the venues, who are supplying the space. It is the suppliers who are cheating the visiting artists by not providing what was promised, not the other way around.

• [Zan]

  @#12 Brainspore:

  Was this back during the period when they had two shades of brown M&Ms after the original red dye formula was found to be carcinogenic? Because if so that would mean losing like 40% of your candy right there.

  This is wrong in so many ways. (1) The Tan M&M’s replaced the original Violet M&Ms in the ’40s, coexisting with Red until Red was removed in the ’70s, (2) Tan and Brown coexisted until 1995 when Blue replaced Tan after a national vote, and (3) the carcinogenic FD&C Red #2 was never used in M&M’s, but the red candies were replaced with orange from 1976 to 1987 because most consumers couldn’t tell the difference between FD&C Red #2 and the safer FD&C Red #40 that M&M’s used

• [robulus]

  Nah, I’m with Jaytkay.

  If you found out the construction company building the huge suspension bridge in your city was keeping tabs on its contractors by including clauses like this, you’d freaking flip.

  The venues are paying enough attention to make sure there’s a bowl of M&Ms in the dressing room, so they read it. They just thought the requirement to remove all the brown one’s was ridiculous, and that they could go get fucked.

  That seems reasonable.

  Roth acknowledges he did 12 grand damage upon finding brown M&Ms.

  That seems unreasonable.

• [LB]

  >>17

  Roth didn’t do $12K of damage; he even admits it in the Snopes article (which I guess you didn’t read?). The damage was caused by the equipment being too heavy for the stage it was set up on.

• [Mr_Voodoo]

  Okay, wait. Does “Twelve (12) Reese’s peanut butter cups” mean twelve (12) individual cups? Or twelve (12) individual packages of two (2) cups each, resulting in twenty-four (24) cups overall?

  Or do they really want twelve (12) individually wrapped peanut butter cups, as might come in a Halloween Fun Pack, suitable for treating each Halloween visitor to one (1) wrapped Reese’s peanut butter cup?

  Guys, quit building the stage, get over here, and help me figure out the “Munchies Rider.” Thank you.

• [Anonymous]

  I fulfilled contract riders for visiting musicians when I was in college – they did ask for some pretty specific things, which we fulfilled, to the best of our abilities. Many of them wanted vegan treats and fancy organic juices, which weren’t as easy to find back in the days when Whole Foods wasn’t so prevalent.

  Our only problem was – no booze. At all. Legally we could have gotten in a lot of trouble with the school if we provided any. But the director wanted to stay in good with the promoters, so he was always trying to find a way to get me to sneak it in.

• [ahankinson]

  I’m with Mccrum on this one.

  The rider doesn’t say *why* there are no brown M&M’s – only that there can’t be any. If they think it’s a stupid requirement and a member of the band becomes ill from an allergic reaction (hey, it could happen!) then the concert organizers are in big trouble.

  Removing the brown M&M’s shows, at the very least, they read the requirements, understood them, and followed them. You wouldn’t want your airline pilot to skip the checklist because he thought “checking the fuel gauges” was a pointless step; you also wouldn’t want a 20-tonne stage collapsing on you and your friends when you’re partying.

• [ProgHead777]

  @#1

  Haha! I see what you did there.

• [Brainspore]

  @ Zan #16:

  OK, fine: Was this back during the period between the 1940s and 1995 when there were two shades of brown? Because if so that would mean losing like 40% of your candy right there.

• [akaaudio]

  I am am ex-roadie for Deep Purple. Davids comments are 1000% on…He is very right. If they weren’t paying attention to detail they weren’t paying attention at all….

• [jeffbell]

  Also on the list is herring in sour cream. They must be for the Dutch members of the band.

  I have to wonder who needs the Schlitz and the large tube of KY.

• [arlopickens]

  Didn’t Ira Glass just tell me about this last week?

• [Anonymous]

  I guess this works well enough if you’re using the same guy as an electrician or stage worker that does your catering.