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shattered
What's the history with these guys and the green (or brown) M&M's?

I heard it was way for them to see on tour how well the local people did their jobs at a gig. There are riders for the local promoter which are a long list of things they want and dont want and they figured if the local people got the detail (of removing all the brown MMs) correct then they probably got most of the details correct.

Kind of like when you want to see if a hotel room was really cleaned check the area behind where the bathroom door swings opens... or checking to see if a car was in a flood, pull the seat belt all the way out and look for discoloration.

Of course these are rule of thumb tests... they could have removed all the brown MMs but not properly grounded the microphone or put in new seat belts.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-09-09 19:25 by HankM.

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shattered
What's the history with these guys and the green (or brown) M&M's?

[www.snopes.com]
The legendary “no brown M&Ms” contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with. As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of 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 voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

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.

Nonetheless, the media ran exaggerated and inaccurate accounts of Van Halen’s using violations of the “no brown M&Ms” clause as justification for engaging in childish, destructive behavior (such as the newspaper article quoted at the top of this page). David Lee Roth’s version of such events was decidedly different:

The folks in Pueblo, Colorado, at the university, took the contract rather kinda casual. They had one of these new rubberized bouncy basketball floorings in their arena. They hadn’t read the contract, and weren’t sure, really, about the weight of this production; this thing weighed like the business end of a 747.

I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” … you know, with the skull in one hand … and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.

The staging sank through their floor. They didn’t bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced. It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&M’s and did eighty-five thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the backstage area.

Yep, it was basically Roth's way of confirming whether or not the promoter had actually read the contract. At least that's his justification for it nowadays. A clever story, if nothing else.

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DGA35

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TKinOH
If you dig VH, get this book... No one else on the inside has written their story except for Valerie's first one, which is good in it's own way.

My biggest surprise was how Monk wasn't involved in the music... The band seemed to hole up and do their thing, and he made the machine work when it was time to get on the road.

At 15, my first show was Van Halen in '81 at Hara Arena in Dayton, and that day literally showed me that live music was my chosen form of entertainment!

Even then, it struck me how they could make their songs bigger and better than the sound on the LP... truly at their peak on stage!

Pardon me, I'd talk Stones and VH all day long...

I was 15 and my first show was Van Halen in 81 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, just days before the Oakland shows where the Unchained, Hear About It Later and So This Is Love vids were filmed (must sees on Youtube)! The holy grail for Van Halen fans is a release of this whole concert (if it exists). Loved this tour and also my favorite Alex Van Halen drum kit.

Yeah, in a lot of ways, Van Halen is one of the best examples of a band frittering away its talent and its peak years.

The fact that there is so little pro-shot and pro-recorded material from their '80s heyday is nothing short of criminal. They were one of the most spectacular live acts of all time, and very little of it is officially documented.

There's "Live: Right Here, Right Now" with Sammy from 1993, which is okay, but it's mostly all Sammy-era songs, and it's very polished. I'd much rather see some peak-DLR footage, but very little exists.

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punkfloyd
Nice comments guys! I'm glad I decided to post the excerpt from book.

Personally Van Halen started to lose me with 1984 (when I was 14!). But I still find their ongoing drama fascinating. Sammy's book from about 10 years ago is a good read too.

I suspect all the bullshit could have been avoided if they stayed away from drugs.

Drugs are bad mmmkay. Don't do drugs.

Eddie is an odd, mercurial personality even without the drugs and alcohol. He and Alex came from a strict Dutch family and their father was a musician. He seems to be the definition of a tortured genius.

A couple of thoughts:

During the summer of 1978, Some Girls and Van Halen I were THE soundtrack of the summer.

I was at the second Orlando show and it was indeed a great time. Stones and Van Halen for $15! We were starstruck by seeing Valerie stageside as the Stones played.

Thanks folks. My neighbour had low blood sugar and to raise it, I told him to eat the green M&M's and remember Van Halen. It was a messed up situation, but we did get a laugh out of it. The M&M story morphed into disaster: [www.youtube.com]

I was praying that The Stones could persuade Edward to jam with them in LA or Anaheim in 2013, since that was the tour with so many guests being brought out...

It was not to be!

And in case you're wondering, this VH freak got Taylor Swift on 3rd June, 2013 in Chicago, the only show I caught on that run!

Between seeing her and being Justified by Mr. Timberlake in Toronto in 2003, I have been "blessed" by The Stones with some of their most-loved choices for a special guest ever! And I keep comin' back for more!

Runnin' with my dick out!...

Hehe! At last I found a place to use that play on song titles.

Some here may be interested in a book called Stars of David: Rock'n'roll's Jewish Stories by Scott R. Benarde. It has a section on Roth, and you can find it here (except for one page): [books.google.com]

When describing Roth's act, the author writes: "Roth simply updated vaudeville." (p. 256)