On October 6, 2020, Eddie Van Halen left us at the age of 65. His son, Wolf Van Halen, announced it this way: “I can’t believe I have to write this, but my father (…) has lost his long and arduous battle with cancer.”. During those days there were many fans and personalities who said goodbye to him, especially on social networks and some of them told anecdotes about the character and the band that most did not know and that surprised many.
Twitter user @eladdio, published one of those incredible anecdotes that many of us will be surprised by because of its peculiarity, because the mythical band had something with the M&M’s that you can’t imagine. This user began to relate this anecdote in the following way: “Eddie Van Halen, the guitarist of the famous rock group of the 70s and 80s, Van Halen, has died. As a small tribute I will tell you an amazing story about his concerts, the M&M’s and the so-called ‘Van Halen clause’´”.
We have already been telling it in recent days: the eccentricities that rock bands ask for are unlimited. Maybe they are hobbies before going out to play in a concert. Some contracts include various technical conditions, requests from the artists or their team for the concert to take place. About this, the twitter user @Hugo_HPCAbreplying to our news about the craziest requests of rock groups before playingcommented again and detailed the famous anecdote of Van Halen and the M&Ms.
And it is that, there are pianists who only play with a certain model of a certain brand, if they come to the room and there is a similar one but it is not the one they want, they can even suspend the performance. On the other hand, there are people who order almost nothing, many order large amounts of food and drink and over time all kinds of things have been seen. The Van Halen case is no different in this respect, far from it..
There are many people who maintain that the band used to sign very detailed contracts for the assembly of the concert itself, with a long list of requirements and requests: “As they were always short on time, the city that hired them for the concert had to take care of a large part of the stage set-up”, pointed out the author of the thread on the social network. The one that caught the most attention, or one of the ones that surprised many, was the following, written in the article 126: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, under penalty of concert cancellation and full payment to Van Halen.”.
And this, why? What did they want to do that for? It was no mania, no superstition, no eccentricity. It was to see if the contractors had set up the stage correctly, and if they had read each of the points, requirements and indications that appeared and appeared in the contract. If that condition was not met, the band could cancel the concert, charging its cache in full and the costs of production. One newspaper even published a story about these M&M’s in New Mexico: “In New Mexico the group caused thousands of dollars of damage to a venue when they were served brown M&M’s.”
David Lee Roth, singer of Van Halen, explained in his autobiography in 2012 the reason for this request: We moved with nine 18-wheelers, full of equipment, through places where the standard was three trucks at most. And there were a lot of technical errors like the beams couldn’t support the weight or the floor sagging. Our rider looked like the Chinese version of the yellow pages because of the amount of equipment and human beings required to make everything go smoothly. ´In article 148 for example: There will be 15 amp voltage sockets at a distance of 20 feet, uniformly, providing 19 amps…´. That kind of things”.
Going back to the first Twitter thread we looked at, he had the following to say about candy: “If they found brown M&M’s they knew they hadn’t read the contract carefully. And then there could be critical failures in the structure (…) or in the electrical installation”.
Maybe they could have done it in a more normal way. It could also be argued that if the promoter was busy with the hundreds of technical details, he might not consider the candy too important. But, in reality, no concert is known that the band has canceled for this reason. They only canceled a couple because Eddie Van Halen dislocated his wrist.
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Why Van Halen Banned Brown M&Ms From Their Concerts: A Well Thought Out Strategy