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Video: The Truth Behind The Van Halen Brown M&Ms Ban
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1984

I’ve been a Van Halen fan pretty much my whole life, and one of the biggest secrets surrounding the band is the mystery of why brown-colored M&Ms were banned from their dressing rooms.

Touring artists usually have contracts with the venue where they’re performing with what’s known as a Rider – a set of requests that the venue must fulfill. The rider usually contains a list of specific drinks, food, backstage set-ups, and dressing room arrangements, and when these riders become public, there’s always items on there that just scream “Diva!” Van Halen was one of the first bands to have these rider contracts, and when their’s was made public, it was discovered that there was a demand for a bowl of M&M’s to placed in their dressing room. Not so outlandish, right? Except that they specifically stated that there should be NO brown M&M’s in the bowl.

Singer David Lee Roth talked about the brown M&M’s issue in his 1998 autobiography, Crazy from the Heat and now in a new video interview with Roth, the singer explains the method behind the madness of the “No Brown M&M’s” demands.

Check out the 5 1/2-minute video here below.

Roth explains it all very well, but basically, the clause was placed in the middle of this lengthy technical rider — which included, along with the food requests, specific instructions for equipment and such to guarantee not only that the show ran smoothly, but that it would run safely too — to test to see if the venue promoters had actually read the rider. If the band saw brown M&M’s in the dressing room, they knew the promoter hadn’t read the rider in detail and that they’d have to doublecheck equipment, lighting, and other items on the list. It would also meant the venue would forfeit their earnings for the show.

It’s really interesting stuff, so I highly recommended watching the video. Roth not only goes into details about the clause, but also addresses the rumors that came up about it back in the 1980s – and why the band just let the rumors fly.

The reunited Van Halen — which is the 2007 line-up including Roth, drummer Alex Van Halen, guitarist Eddie Van Halen and his son Wolfgang Van Halen on bass — recently released the album A Different Kind of Truth, their first studio effort with Roth since 1984.

Video

[Source: Vimeo via Neatorama]

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