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

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.

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

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.

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.”

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

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!!!!!

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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…

@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

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.

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.

… 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.