darkfrog24:

schizoauthoress:

Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract.  And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.

So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.

I heard about this on Freakonomics Radio.  Turns out the bit about no brown M&Ms is HUGE, in BIG font, bold, underlined and quotated like they’re on the Group W Bench.

The band was all, “We have fifty-pound lights hanging over our heads and fire being shot out of cannons.  We had to know whether they read our safety regs so we didn’t flamebroil any roadies.”