August 25, 2021

Take out the brown M&Ms

m-ms-2617064_1920
Reading Time: < 1 minute

It’s well-known that many celebrities have some strange demands when they’re traveling, but a story that has gone around for years is that Van Halen always requested a bowl of M&Ms in their room, with all of the brown ones removed. What a strange request!

Except it wasn’t. They had a specific and creative reason for this request.

Van Halen brought some serious hardware to their shows, the biggest production ever at the time, and it was a crazy setup. Their contract rider was massive, but it was essential that promoters read every line of it to make sure the building could handle the power, size and weight of everything they were bringing in. Some promoters merely skimmed the document, which caused many problems over the years.

Included in the rider was the clause to remove the brown M&Ms. If Van Halen arrived at a venue and saw brown M&Ms in the back, that was a sign that the promoter hadn’t carefully read the rider, and they had potential safety concerns in the setup.

Requesting M&Ms with the brown ones removed seemed very silly and petty, but it turned out to a brilliant way to determine what they were walking into.

Here’s David Lee Roth explaining it in an interview years ago:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

The JFK conspiracy theory is comforting

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ve long struggled to understand why some people cling so tightly to conspiracy theories around things like 9/11 or the COVID vaccine, but I recently…

Read More

Edit before you record

Reading Time: < 1 minuteIf you’ve listened to any episodes of my Stacking Knowledge podcast, you probably noticed that they’re quite raw as I intentionally do very little editing…

Read More

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Reading Time: 2 minutesI recently finished listening to the podcast series “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (thanks to encouragement from my friend Tim), and it was amazing….

Read More