Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen has explained in his memoir ‘Brothers’ that their ‘no brown M&Ms’ rule had a practical reason. He shared that the band’s carefully crafted riders were mostly for safety, making sure that venues met their equipment standards to avoid risks like fire or stage collapse.
“I know. We sound like jerks,” he wrote in the book. “Like rock star primadonnas looking to make some poor kid sit around picking through candies till he goes blind. But it wasn’t about a power trip, and it wasn’t about some strange aversion to the color brown.”
“If we see brown M&M’s, we know: we are not in the hands of professionals,” he added. “If they didn’t bother with this, what else didn’t they bother with, what other corners are being cut?”
In the 1980s, the band’s tour rider included a specific request: they wanted M&M’s, but ‘absolutely no brown ones,’ written in all caps and underlined.
David Lee Roth mentioned a similar story in his 1997 autobiography, ‘Crazy from the Heat.’ The rocker talked about the ‘many technical errors’ the band faced on tour. He noted that if he saw brown M&M’s backstage, he would have to ‘line-check the entire production.’
“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.’ 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,’” he wrote.
“So I would walk backstage, if I saw brown M&M’s 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,” Roth added in his book.
‘Brothers’ is a tribute from Alex Van Halen to his late brother and bandmate, Eddie. The memoir explores their childhood in both the Netherlands and Southern California and follows their journey to stardom with Van Halen.