Live and Learn: The Insane Makes Sense In Rock and Roll

We live in a strange world when the bizarre demands and moods of Rock and Roll musicians make sense.

In the first case, it's the musician Prince, who for a while simply went by that symbol, and was referred to as, "The artist formerly known as Prince."

What we all discovered when he dropped the affect, and went back to being "Prince", was that this was one of the ways that he was attempting to wrest back control of his career from Warner-Chappell, and once the contract expired, he went back to using his name.

Then we have the case of Van Halen, who as confirmed by Snopes, required in their, "standard performance contract," that they be, "provided with a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown candies removed."

Again, when one looks at what Paul Harvey would call, "The rest of the story," it's a lot more than just a bunch of self indulgent rockers, as related by David Lee Roth in his autobiography:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. 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.

(emphasis mine)

So they had this provision to see if the proprietors of the arena actually read their contracts, because if they did not, there was a very real chance that things would go seriously wrong, and someone could get hurt or killed.

Live and learn.