The Truth About Van Halen and Those Brown M&Ms (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Truth About Van Halen and Those Brown M&Ms (2012)

npr.org

23 pointsevo_915 comments

Funny thing about this is that lessor rock stars and performers used this as a license to act like jackasses without having the context as to why the brown M&M thing was important. My friends are a reasonably famous touring DJ/production act on Anjunabeats and they occasionally stick some rider-stuff in that appears a bit nonsensical. If the promoter doesn’t have a yellow, 6ft, 16 gauge extension cord placed on the left side of the mixer and taped with a strip of red electrical (not gaffer) tape, there is a good likelihood that the monitoring system, mixer and everything else is likely half-assed connected. They won’t trash anything, but that’s a signal that they need to more carefully verify their connections. For a massive stadium show, David Lee Roth is completely correct: a failure to follow the plan precisely could lead to actual tragedy.

TL;DR; Van Halen was one of the first "arena rock" bands. Their operation was industrial scale with equipment carried on multiple semis and such.

They still had to deal with the heterogeneous set of arenas that existed around the country and to do so, they laid their requirements very carefully in a contract - important things like how much weight the stage had to be able to take. But how to tell immediately whether someone had read the contract in detail when they arrived as a given venue? Ah, put a random but visible requirement right in the middle of the contract.

I do this when I get my car serviced. Take 5 lbs out of the left front tire, maybe intentionally not fill the washer fluid, etc. So far, it's about 50% that the item was not found or fixed.

I had always understood it as a check of confidence. If the smallest, trivial item was taken care of; you can be fairly certain that everything else was completed as you'd expect.

Needs 2012 in the title

The truth is apparently that it is true. No new information here.

The new information is why they did this.

Except it isn't new information to a lot of people.

I heard about the "why" for this years ago (of course, the article is from 2012). Pretty sure I'd heard the reason considerably earlier that.

Everyone who has heard this story already knew that though. It has always been part of the story. Hell it's the reason the story is told at all!

I see how such tests can filter out people who blindly agree to everything (and then don't deliver). On the other hand I think this is a bit underhanded? disingenuous? to have fake requirements in the contract just to test the other party.

Trust but verify. People have died at festivals and concerts because the venues didn't follow the event organizers' instructions.

> Trust but verify

That phrase just distills down to 'verify'.

Or more generously 'verify and extrapolate' but it still lacks trust.

Wrong, when paranoia replaces trust, no agreement gets struck, and business halts.

If I don't trust you, I don't even speak to you. I don't buy a sandwich from you, I don't buy a car from you, I don't fly planes over your territory without mach 3 interceptor escorts armed to the teeth.

If I trust you, but double check you, I buy the sandwich, but I don't leave the counter without opening up the bag, unwrapping the paper and checking for onions. I buy the car, but have a third party mechanic inspect it. I fly the plane through the territory, but also observe from orbital satellites, just in case.

They aren’t fake requirements. They are trivial requirements that are relatively simple with which to comply and the penalties are so stiff that not complying means that they didn’t carefully read the thing. On the other hand, the performers that demand a specific bottle of water hand bottled from a hidden Indonesian spring and blessed by a shaman — that’s venturing into jackass-pop diva territory. M&Ms are everywhere in America, so it’s an easy requirement that canaries adherence to the rest of the contract details.

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