Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Van Halen and Brown M&Ms

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

For years a story had circulated that the rock and roll group Van Halen had a contract that required that a bowl of M&Ms be left backstage wherever they performed, with all the brown M&Ms removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would use it as an excuse to trash the room. Is this just an urban legend, or was there something behind the story? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, a story has circulated that the rock and roll group Van Halen had a contract that required that a bowl of M&Ms be left backstage whenever they performed, with all the brown M&Ms removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would use it as an excuse to trash the room and potentially cancel the concert. Is this just an urban legend, or was there something behind the story? Find out the surprising truth on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Fluent in three months. Have you ever wanted to learn a foreign language and do so quickly? My friend Benny Lewis, over at Fluent in Three Months, might be able to help. Benny has spent over a decade language learning around the world. His techniques have helped tens of thousands of people learn the languages they want to learn quickly through both his online courses and his language hacking guides.

I've personally met Benny in many places all over the globe and have seen his language skills and action. He doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk when it comes to language learning. And I'm sure he'll be able to help you too. To sign up for his free Speak in a Week email course, just go to Fluentin'3 Months.com or click on the link in the show notes. There are all sorts of urban legends that are passed around, and the majority of them have no basis in reality. For example, Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a double and that they hinted at this fact on the cover of the Abbey Road album. Or that Phil Collins wrote the song in the air tonight about watching a man drown to death. Or that Tupac Shakur faked his own death.

or that Richard Gere, well, never mind that one. The point is that stories often float around which usually have no basis in reality. The story about Van Halen was that the band had a rider in all of their contracts that required a bowl of M&Ms was to be left backstage and that all the brown ones be removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, then the entire concert could be forfeited and the band might trash the room. It sounds like something ridiculous that a demanding celebrity's, might make up because they think too highly of themselves and they think they can get away with murder. Well, in this case, the legend was actually true. Van Halen did have such a clause in their contracts, and the bowl of M&Ms was one of the very first things they checked when they arrived at a new venue.

The reason for Brown M&Ms wasn't to be difficult. It was a check to make sure that the venues actually read the contract. When Van Halen was touring in the 1980s, they had one of the most complicated sets of technical requirements for a concert, and correspondingly one of the largest contracts in concert history. The stage for the tour was extremely heavy, and the lighting system was one of the largest and most power-hungry systems ever used by a touring concert. Van Halen was one of the first acts to take large productions into smaller tertiary markets. Many of the venues they would perform in were not used to the requirements for such a large production, and some simply couldn't handle the requirements. The Brown M&M's requirements,

was nothing more than a check to make sure that the venue actually read the contract. If they found Brown M&Ms, they knew they would have to do a line check on all the electrical and physical infrastructure. They would also use finding Brown M&Ms as an opportunity to trash their dressing rooms. David Lee Roth told the story of this in his autobiography about a time the band was going to perform in Pueblo, Colorado at a university. They had just installed a new rubberized floor and hadn't read the contract carefully. Sure enough, there were Brown M&MN in the backstage area, and they knew something was probably wrong. And they were right. The weight of the stage was far more than what the rubberized floor could support, and the entire structure sunk six

inches into the floor, doing over a half million dollars in damage, which could have been avoided if they had actually read the contract. The band trashed their dressing room in response. The media confused the two stories and reported that the band did over a half million dollars in damage to their backstage dressing room. The band let the story persist because they wanted future venues to know that they took the contract seriously, even the Brown Eminem's part. In the process of researching this subject, I was taken down two very different paths, the first of which was the case of celebrity contract riders.

These are the odd requests that celebrities make when they do appearances. Most of these are just them being difficult and demanding, and not technical contract checks as Van Halen did. Some of them are really odd. For example, David Hasselhoff requires a full-size cutout backstage of David Hasselhoff. When doing a series of concerts at the O2 Arena in London, Prince once asked for a five-bedroom luxury home to be built for him. Joe Jonas requires that not one, not two, but 12 puppies be there for him when he arrives in a city. Mariah Carey requires someone to be available whose job it is to throw away her used gun.

Justin Timberlake requires an entire hotel floor to himself and for someone to disinfect the doorknobs every two hours. Christina Aguilera asked for soy cheese and Flintstone chewable vitamins be available backstage. Jack White wants guacamole in his room, but he is so fussy about it that he has the entire guacamole recipe included in the contract. The absolute best rider, however, has to be the foo fighters. The foo fighters have a 15-page rider of all the things necessary. for them and their crew. They don't hold back providing expository about the reasoning behind all their points. For example, one of their requests is as follows, and I quote, Vegetarians. Yep, the Crusades didn't rid the world of them, so we have to pretend to care. Seriously,

a baked potato is not an acceptable dinner. I will go Jeffrey Dahmer on the staff and anyone in range if I see one more baked potato bar set up in a dank meeting room in the rectum of a basketball gym. Unquote. or this way of requesting condiments. Quote, condiments. Since we're probably getting overbilled for lunch or dinner, how about having the condiment fairy drop off a giggle of new unopened condiments to enhance your radical cuisine? We don't want the last few millimeters of sauce that Alice Cooper left in a mustard bottle.

Unquote. I highly recommend going and reading the full foo fighter's rider. It's highly entertaining. The second path this story took me down was the history of M&Ms. In 1941, when M&Ms were first released, they came in five colors. Red, yellow, green, brown, and purple. Most people have no clue that the original M&Ms had a purple. In 1949, the purple ones were removed and replaced with tan.

In 1976, the red M&Ms were removed and replaced with orange due to a cancer scare from the red food dye. In 1986, a group called the Society for the Restoration and Preservation of Red M&Ms fought to get the red Emanms fought to get the red Eminem's back, and they were successful. In 1995, 10 M&Ms were replaced with blue, which gives us the colors we have today. Brown M&Ms used to be the most common color. The Eminem website reported back in 1997 the breakdown of colors, and browns were 30%, which was the highest percentage. They stopped publishing the data, but one statistician in 2017 decided to do his own analysis of M&N colors and found that brown now only represents 13% of colors, which is the lowest percentage. So that means if Van Halen should decide to get the band back together and decides to go on tour

with the same contract rider they did back in the 1980s, it's going to be almost 66% easier for venues to meet their demands to remove all the brown M&Ms. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show. show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show get discovered in the sea of other podcasts that are out there.