Here’s a fun fact: M&M’s were first concocted in Newark, New Jersey in 1941 for soldiers as a candy that wouldn’t melt in your hands. (I’d like to know whether they meant the chocolate or the coating or if the recipe has changed since then, because my hand is a rainbow of colors after I snack on them, but I digress…) Among the original five colors was brown, the shade we will focus on today. The spotlight was unexpectedly thrust upon brown M&M’s in the 1980s thanks to rock band Van Halen including an infamous ban on them in their tour rider. Pour quoi? Did Eddie Van Halen think they tasted bad? Did frontman David Lee Roth have a traumatic childhood association? Were the rockers just messing with us? Well, drummer Alex Van Halen explains all in his memoir, Brothers, that just came out this week. And the answer is… Safety? You see, demanding that all brown M&M’s be removed was the only way to ensure their serious safety requirements were being met by the venue. It all makes sense now!
There was a method to the madness when it came to Van Halen’s famous request to ban brown M&M’s from their tour.
Back in the 1980s, the “Jump” rockers’ tour rider featured a very specific ask: underlined, and in all capital letters, they wrote that they wanted M&M’s, but “absolutely no brown ones.”
Though the request may seem a bit high maintenance, drummer Alex Van Halen explains in his new memoir Brothers why it actually wasn’t. He writes that the “very specific and carefully constructed” riders were mostly for safety reasons, as it was important to have proper equipment or risk things like fire or a stage collapse.
“I know. We sound like jerks,” he writes 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.”
Alex, 71, writes that he and his late brother Eddie were often asked in interview whether brown M&M’s tasted differently than others, and they “played it up for yuks,” saying they seriously preferred the other colors.
But really, their goal was to give themselves a way to check on how carefully the venue was paying attention.
“If we see brown M&M’s, we know: we are not in the hands of professionals,” he writes. “If they didn’t bother with this, what else didn’t they bother with, what other corners are being cut?”
The Smoking Gun previously published a copy of a 1982 Van Halen rider, which showed the M&M’s request under a section called “Munchies.” Former frontman David Lee Roth also shared a similar story in his 1997 autobiography Crazy from the Heat, lamenting the “many technical errors” that befell the band while on tour, and that he’d be forced to “line-check the entire production” if he saw brown M&M’s.
You know what? I’m going with them on this. Is it a bonkers method for checking equipment pre-show? Absolutely. And is it really logical to conclude that if a venue cuts corners on M&M’s, they’ve definitely done the same for something that actually matters to the music and performance? Maybe not. Still, I bet more people would pay closer attention to workplace safety precautions if candy were somehow involved! And you have to applaud the novelty, the creativity. Many artists have “primadonna” stipulations in their tour riders, ranging from the eccentric to the outrageous to the downright perplexing. But they’re usually self-serving, unlike in this case where the band was willing to risk being viewed as divas in the name of quality control! Bravo boys!
So no, I won’t be making fun of Van Halen for their undeniably wackadoodle approach to ensuring a good show. What I want to know is twofold: why brown, and, perhaps most crucial of all, what happened to all the brown M&M’s that were successfully removed by professional production staff? Color is emotional/visceral to begin with, and I’ve found that M&M colors in particular can elicit very heated responses. Or at least they have in my mother’s life. Tan was her favorite M&M color. Of course, we don’t have tan M&M’s now, because in 1995 they held a public vote wherein blue won to be the replacement. My mother has never forgiven M&M’s for this. I asked her why, and her response was, “Tan was sophisticated. Blue was just stupid.” But wait, there’s more! When I was a toddler my mother had to stand her ground against the other parents in my playgroup — they’d all decided to dress us tykes up as M&M’s for Halloween, and my mother fashioned me as a hot pink M&M. And adults actually objected because it wasn’t a “real” M&M color. Don’t worry, they didn’t stop us.
Photos credit: Vince Flores / Avalon, DPA/Cover Images, Getty