‘No Brown M&Ms’ For Van Halen — For Good Reason
When Van Halen rolled into town, the band had a rider like any other band does — but Van Halen’s contained a very specific provision that has become the most famous demand in rock-rider history. In the “Munchies” section, there existed the line item “M&Ms (ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” David Lee Roth explained it in his autobiography: “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. … 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.”