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Van Halen's Legendary M&M's Rider

Van Halen's Legendary M&M's Rider

While the underlined rider entry [Van Halen specifying “no brown M&Ms” backstage] has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance—lighting, staging, security, ticketing—may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

This isn’t particularly new, but I just heard about it on This American Life. At any rate, it’s a genius idea.