"There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” – Van Halen tour rider, ca. 1981
For decades that line in Van Halen’s tour rider was the most widely quoted contractual demand in the music business, parroted by writers for years as an example of how petulant and self-involved many rock stars had become. Indeed, David Lee Roth freely admits wreaking havoc at the University of Colorado when he spied candies of the wrong shade lurking backstage: “I found some brown M&Ms … and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars worth of fun.”
Just Roth living up to his bigger-than-life reputation? Not quite. While stars’ dressing room demands often get bad press, tour riders specify considerably more than backstage refreshments, as Roth explained in his autobiography,
Crazy from the Heat: “There were many, many errors [on our early tour productions], whether it was that the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the equipment through.”
“The contract rider read like 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 sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes …’ That sort of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere was, ‘There will be no brown M&Ms …’”
“If I saw brown M&Ms in that bowl, well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you were going to run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to destroy the show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.” In Colorado, Roth noted the band’s stage rigging sank into the arena’s new floor because contract specifications weren’t met. “It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&Ms and did eighty-five thousand dollars worth of damage backstage,” noted the bemused Roth. “Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?”
Van Halen’s current rider contains no such trick candy request line items―unless their gambit now somehow employs Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, specifically item “33.8―MUNCHIES,” which specifies “Twelve..full-size, individually wrapped; no miniatures or Reese’s Pieces.” Or perhaps number “33.6―VEGETABLE FOR JUICER,” which specifies “Celery (to be trimmed not peeled).”
Yet despite Edward Van Halen’s legendary battles with the bottle―which unfortunately found the guitar legend in rehab instead of attending his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction last year―the band still has demands for backstage alcohol (and to be fair, a full case of non-alcoholic beer, too) in their tour rider:
But it’s not all about the booze―Van Halen and entourage also require copious cases of soft drinks, assorted juice boxes, plain seltzer (no salt), low-fat milk, gallons of distilled water, and another page or so of equally detailed solid food demands, prefaced with “When not specified, quantities should be sufficient for
6 people with big appetites.”
But if there’s concern about having generous supplies of alcohol around a 30-year-veteran musician fresh out of rehab, what to make of the backstage booze demands of Amy Winehouse, the hyper-tippling, multi-dysfunctional young star whose most notable hit
is “Rehab”?
Amy’s taste in alcohol is hardly as modest, yet tastefully chi-chi as Van Halen’s for one thing. The VH lads may demand Absolut or Stoli―and merely a pint for these punters, mind you―but Smirnoff is just fine with dame Winehouse. Just make sure it’s Large―and don’t even think about “revemoving” it without consulting management! And if another clue was needed as to why the young blues diva famously upchucked during a London gig last year, just run the nausea cocktail potential of Amy’s requested backstage stash of Spanish plonk/vodka/champagne/Courvoisier past the old queasy-ometer:
Yet Ms. Winehouse has her health-conscious side, too, as revealed in her contract’s penultimate line item: “VERY IMPORTANT: NAME AND CONTACT NUMBER FOR THE NEAREST FITNESS GYM TO THE VENUE.”
Presumably near a pub.
For more rider hilarity, check out the legendary rider for Iggy and the Stooges—
all 18 hysterical pages of it!