The Van Halen "No Brown M&Ms" Story

Did you ever hear the story about Van Halen being so outrageously demanding that their contracts required a bowl of M&Ms being present backstage-with all the brown M&Ms picked out or else the show would be canceled?

Well, get this, it's true. Yes, completely true and they even canceled a show in Colorado because of David Lee Roth found a brown M&M.

Now, granted I may be a bit biased being that back in 8th grade I won tickets to see Roth in concert--thank you, 96 WTIC FM, but I'm impressed by the M&M clause. It's pretty brilliant.

Roth explains the rationale in his memoir, Crazy From the Heat, "Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine 18 wheeler trucks, full of gear where the standard was three trucks, max...The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was 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 in the bowl,... we'd line-check the entire production.  Guaranteed you'd run into a problem." In Colorado, where they cancelled the show, the band found that the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and that the staging would have fallen through the arena.

I first heard this story a few months back on an episode of This American Life and found it fascinating, considering how infamous and misunderstood the story had become over the years. Then last week, I read about it in The Week and thought you'd find it interesting too.