I think snopes.com is one of the better achievements of the Internet1. One thing the Internet is really good at is providing an exhaustive reference on a particular subject that might be considered either too on the fringe, or too big for print. (Another example of this is the amazing IMDB. All I want now is an online equivalent of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. Is there such a thing? English charts only, please...)
Anyway, one story from Snopes that I quite like is the story of Van Halen and the Brown M&Ms. The story was that Van Halen's rider contained a clause that required a bowl of M&Ms to be supplied backstage, but with the brown ones removed. If they found any brown M&Ms, they could terminate the contract with the venue without penalty, and not perform.
It's true. Snopes quotes the following passage from David Lee Roth's 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.
1 Although their use of embedded MIDI on some pages... It burns, my precious! It burns!
