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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to see the rehabilitation of the famous Van Halen rider. Until it was finally discovered in 2011[0], the phrase "no brown M&M's" was interpreted as an example of crazy demands from entitled rock stars.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmok...

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It's unclear to me what is the truth. David Lee Roth's quotes here do little to indicate it was a professional way to ensure rider compliance, given he trashes the green room, and does the show anyway destroying the arena floor. If a venue failed the M&M test then the band did what exactly?

His autobiography has more information, but they also did a full line check when the rider was not obeyed. I would imagine they were able to check everything but the floor's stats.

As to trashing the room, they were rockers in the 80's. He does mention he thought it was a funny story that he trashed the green room and did $85k in damage when it was mostly the floor damage. "Why let a good story go to waste?" was the quote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck

Trashing the green room makes it something to write home about, so future hosts would be more careful about reading over the instructions

Maybe not in the van Halen example, but such behaviour bears the risk of forcing the supplier to optimize for the "brown M&M" and ignore the rest. Especially if you don't check for all the other stuff as well.

That's why you save the truth about the brown M&Ms for your autobiography.

That’s a useful addition. I was thinking it is kind of pointless to have this indicator that only tells you that something might be wrong when it is too late. The article does not address this aspect if I’m not mistaken.

There were different people involved.

The idea probably came from a brilliant tour manager, but like everything in the music business, the talent gets the credit.

I was active in guitar forums on the late 90s, early 2000s, and the brown M&M thing and its purpose was known then.

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