David Lee Roth Was An Operations Expert

David Lee Roth, a little older with hair a little shorter, but still an operations expert.

Photo by kubacheck

After all this time you thought that Van Halen was such a pampered and entitled rock band to demand only brown M&Ms as part of their performance contract when those same M&Ms actually served a much larger purpose. In the March 2010 edition of Fast Company, Dan Heath and Chip Heath in the article, “Business Advice From Van Halen” further explain that the M&Ms served as a guide for the band and/or manager to determine (in very short time) if the venue read the full contract and correctly followed instructions for the show.

“In its 1980s heyday, the band (Van Halen) became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.”

Read the full article.