For Freestyle Friday, and inspired by MJ’s post, I just wanted to address the urban legend of the infamous “no brown m&ms” at a Van Halen show. Seemingly a demonstration of the wanton excess of superstardom, I simply love the fact that this stipulation in their contact actually serves a purpose.
Seeing as I’m dealing with an enormous hangover, allow me to quote DLR directly.
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, 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.
Now, I have to be clear. This by no means exonerates the ridiculous riders that musicians call for today (especially crap like Mariah Carey needing a tea set up for 8, with Poland Springs water in the teapot. Then Evian for ‘drinking’ water). But it’s pretty awesome that the example consistently held up to demonstrate this excess actually has a legal precedent.
- Willbur
Van Halen - Jump from Kleis Auke Wolthuizen on Vimeo.
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