Report: Brown M&Ms Were Barometer For Van Halen

Steve Jones

At first glance it appears to be a crowning symbol of obnoxious rock star excess, yet, according to Brand Manager Steve Jones writing for Entrepreneur,  a closer look reveals a deeper story about how a band used a tiny candy to alert them to major problems.

The 1970s saw the rise of Van Halen. Like every band, when Van Halen was hired to play a show, they provided the promoter with a contract “rider” that outlined specific things the promoter would be responsible for. Standard riders include sound and lighting requirements, instructions for the set up of the backstage area, security needs and nutritional requests for the band and crew. These details can be as critical as the precise weight of the speakers or as trivial as the specific brand of toilet paper that the band demands in their backstage washroom. It’s all in the rider.

Buried amongst dozens of points in Van Halen’s rider was an odd stipulation that there were to be no brown M&M's candies in the backstage area. If any brown M&M’s were found backstage, the band could cancel the entire concert at the full expense of the promoter. That meant that because of a single candy, a promoter could lose millions.

For decades this stood as a humiliating act of self-indulgence, a rock band forcing someone to search through candy, removing every last brown one, for no apparent reason. Yet when lead singer David Lee Roth finally divulged the real reason for the bizarre clause, an entirely different picture was painted, one that serves as a valuable lesson for business.

To ensure the promoter had read every single word in the contract, the band created the “no brown M&M's” clause. It was a canary in a coalmine to indicate that the promoter may have not paid attention to other more important parts of the rider, and that there could be other bigger problems at hand.

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