Van Halen epitomized 80’s bands. They were loud, fast, and big. Their hair was big, their sound was big, their fans were big, and their shows were big. Really big. So big, that their contract rider spanned a dozen pages, and famously contained the “no brown M&Ms” clause. But, as David Lee Roth explains in his memoir, the prohibition on the chocolate-shaded candies wasn’t justsome impetuous, rockstar-diva demand:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets.
We’d pull up with nine 18-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.
When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.”
Those problems could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena. Ironically, that problem itself could have been prevented had the local promoters used their own checklist. But because of Van Halen’s M&M litmus test, they caught the error before any harm could be done.
There’s a reason pilots and surgeons use checklists. They’re incredibly valuable, especially when you’re under any sort of stress: it’s neigh impossible to forget something when its printed right on the thing you reference every day. I see checklists slowly gaining ground in fields that never used them before, but probably too slowly. You can devise a checklist for just about every process. Do it. Develop a system and use a checklist to adhere to that system. You’ll be glad you did.
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