Sweet F.A.
@Beau Skunky
The way the story goes: American rock band Van Halen had a contract rider that specified that they wanted a bowl of M&Ms in their dressing room backstage, but with all the brown M&M’s removed. At one show, they found a brown M&M in the bowl and went on a destructive rampage that cost over $80,000 worth of damage.
What really happened: Van Halen did have the contract rider, but there was another motivation behind it. Van Halen had very heavy and expensive equipment and staging for their shows, so everything at their concerts had to be done to exact precision to avoid technical errors. The brown M&Ms were a test to make sure everything was being followed to their specifications; if there wasn’t a bowl backstage or they did find brown M&Ms in it, they would have to go back and line-check the entire production. As lead singer David Lee Roth put it:
Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
At one show at Pueblo, Colorado, David Lee Roth went backstage and found the bowl with brown M&Ms in it. Sure enough, technical specifications had not been followed, and the staging sank through the arena floor because the venue staff hadn’t bothered to look at the weight requirements. The whole thing had to be replaced–and imagine how bad it would have been if the band was on it when it sank. After this, David Lee Roth did destroy the dressing room, causing maybe a few thousand dollars of damage, but the staging problems were what cost $80K.
Unfortunately, because the media likes to twist things around, the story was changed around to portray Van Halen in the wrong, and nowadays the M&M thing is commonly spun as celebrities being divas and freaking out about anything.