1. Comment on the decision to use brown M&Ms as a safety check for the band’s performances. Does this seem a good way to verify quality to you? Why or why not?

2. Suppose you were just promoted to assistant manager at a local restaurant and, as part of your duties, you are asked to improve basic food preparation and service delivery quality. Based on this case, how might you develop a quality test at the restaurant to verify that all necessary food preparation and safety procedures were being followed?

Few rock bands have had the longevity and impact Van Halen has enjoyed over its career. As one of the premier bands in the world, the group has the luxury of commanding high fees and generous perks. The band’s requests were described in the detailed riders in its performance contracts. A rider is a list of expectations, requirements, and outright demands that artists attach to the contracts they sign with concert promoters, who arrange for them to perform. Chauffeured transportation, luxurious accommodations, and lavish backstage buffets are often listed in the riders.

At the height of its popularity, Van Halen took the terms in its riders to extremes. For example, the band demanded that a bowl of M&M candies be provided but that all the brown M&Ms be removed. The presence of a single brown M&M was grounds for Van Halen to cancel a scheduled appearance.

Was this simply an example of artistic arrogance taken to the extreme? In fact, the “no brown M&Ms” contract clause served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way to determine if the technical specifications of the 468 contract had been thoroughly read and complied with. As David Lee Roth, the band’s former lead singer, relates in his autobiography:

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. . . . 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 aspects 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 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&Ms 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’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

The band believed that if arena personnel were careful enough to remove brown M&Ms from the bowl, they had probably done everything else to ensure that the production would be fully supported and safe for all concerned. The presence of brown M&Ms was a visible signal to the band that the quality control was lacking.

Skeptics may view the brown M&Ms test as an unreasonable way to determine whether quality controls were being maintained. Nevertheless, David Lee Roth offered some evidence to suggest that it actually was a pretty good quality check:

The folks in Pueblo, Colorado, at the university, took the contract rather kinda casual. They had one of these new rubberized bouncy basketball flooring in their arena. They hadn’t read the contract, and weren’t sure, really, about the weight of this production; this thing weighed like the business end of a 747.

I came backstage. I found some brown M&Ms, I went into full Shakespearean, “What is this before me?” … and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun. The staging sank through their floor. They didn’t bother to look at the weight 469 requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced.