Brown M&Ms: Difference between revisions

}}The legendary rock ’n’ roll frippery: provide me with M&Ms but remove the brown ones, has bveen pitched as a story of petulant excess. But in honour of the passing of the great Edward Van Halen, and with thanks to the equally legendary [http://www.snopes.com Urban Legends] website, here is  the real rationale:

Van Halen would tour with ''nine'' eighteen-wheeler trucks of equipment. The your average bunch of rockers at the time had a rusty Commer Van with a dodgy alternator [''Can confirm. — Ed.'']. The stage rig weighed a lot, and Van Halen suffered a number of technical errors — girders collapsed, or the flooring sunk in, or the doors weren’t big enough even to get the gear in.

Thus, the contract [[rider]] [''a “[[service level agreement]]” to you and me. — Ed''] read like a phone book  [''A big book with literally hundreds of thousands of “telephone numbers” in it — Ed.''] because there was so much equipment, and so many people needed to make it function. For example: “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing.  

Just as a test, in article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was this: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

This was a test to see how seriously the promoters were taking show preparations. If they had missed this, what else had they missed? As David Lee Roth observed, “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.”