Van Halen’s Brown M&M Clause
By now, everyone has heard about Van Halen’s famous concert rider that demanded the candy bowl be free of the brown M&M’s. The story has been repeated over and over as a great example of rock stardom gone to absurd heights, and that is all I ever really thought it to be. But in this month’s Fast Company, I learned that this crazy clause existed for an entirely different reason. A pretty unexpectedly brilliant one.
Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”
In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.
Who’d have thought? David Lee Roth, operational expert.
