Van Halen's beef with brown M&Ms

Ever sign a contract without reading the fine print? Chances are that you have. If you've tried to download something from the Internet and didn't even look at the EULA before checking the box at the bottom, you probably missed a few things.

Such is the case involving the rock band Van Halen. As David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:

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 the "no brown M&Ms" clause was simply a way to see if the people getting the staging and equipment ready were indeed reading the contract rider. Van Halen did have outta-this-world equipment that might have seriously harmed or killed people if the instructions weren't precisely followed.

And what would happen if there were brown M&Ms in a bowl backstage?

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.

And that's exactly what happened once. The media got the story wrong and blew the wrong part of the story completely out of proportion. They made it seem like the members of Van Halen were some spoiled children who kicked and screamed over petty things. Roth will tell you the real truth:

The folks in Pueblo, Colorado, at the university, took the contract rather kinda casual. They had one of these new rubberized bouncy basketball floorings in their arena. They hadn't read the contract, and weren't sure, really, about the weight of this production; this thing weighed like the business end of a 747.

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.

The staging sank through their floor. They didn't bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty thousand dollars' worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced. It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&M's and did eighty-five thousand dollars' worth of damage to the backstage area.

Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?