What is the connection between Van Halen and M&M’s? This band used to ask for M&M’s in their dressing room with all brown ones removed! Crazy! Well, it was actually brilliant!
Then again you may first ask who or what is Van Halen!
Now I am sure everyone has heard the song Beat it by MJ! The guitar riff in the middle which is actually the best part of the song is by Eddie Van Halen
Shortly after its release, “Beat It” was included in the National Highway Safety Commission’s anti-drunk driving campaign, “Drinking and Driving Can Kill a Friendship”.
Also the album Thriller is actually highest selling album ever! Even now the record has not been broken and it will not be broken too soon since no one buys music albums anymore! Then again you do not get such great music albums anymore!
Michael Jackson’s Thriller, estimated to have sold 70 million copies worldwide, is the best-selling album ever! Jackson also currently has the highest number of albums on the list with five, Celine Dion has four, while the Beatles, Madonna, Whitney Houston and Pink Floyd each have three!
See the amount of side track!? Now we were with Van Halen and M&M’s!
Now Eddie and his brother drummer Alex Van Halen officially launched the Van Halen band which consisted of Eddie Van Halen, his brother, lead vocalist David Lee Roth (will come to him later since he made the M&M demand!) and bassist Michael Anthony.
They had one of the most amazing success stories as far as the live shows and performances were concerned!
In fact Eddie is known for his Guitar intro called the eruption which is one of the best Guitar intro ever!
BUT! Let us not digress again! The blog is about M&M’s!
The show’s lead singer had a very specific request for the organisers when they used to arrange for the show! This whole incident has been described in The checklist Manifesto by Atul.
Now David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band!
And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse!
As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “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, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause!
So if the band member walks backstage and saw a brown M&M in that bowl then he would line-check the entire production!
There would be a high chance that there will be a technical error!
The mistakes for not following the whole protocol could be life-threatening!
In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor!
The whole Idea was to make sure that the organisers have seriously gone through the list of technical specifications given to them and they have been taken seriously since a single misfire would have been catastrophic!
And like always, the non brown M&M’s saved the day!
Of course all this goes to show that even great rock legends and planners follow a checklist! Of course sometimes life does not follow a list; it is sudden like the passing away of the talented director and actor Manoj Kumar Bharathiraja…
he will be missed…
OM SHanthi…
SHUbh Ratri…
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