Why Van Halen Demanded One M&M Color Be Removed From Candy Bowls

Except for one brief period in 2023 when M&Ms trolled us with Maya Rudolph, everyone knows the company markets its product with cute spokescandies that have distinctive characters. These range from chill Blue to anxious Orange to sassy fan favorite Purple and Girl Boss Brown. Decades ago, however, the candies had different meanings. Perhaps the most infamous were green M&Ms, which were rumored to be an aphrodisiac in the '70s. (Spoiler: They're not, though Tucker Carlson probably bought into it since he got pretty salty when M&M's made Green less of a sexy stereotype.) Second in notoriety, however, were the brown ones M&Ms, as every high school kid knew, they'd been banned from the dressing room by glam rock band, Van Halen.

While it sounds like the stuff of urban legend, it's true that the band requested M&Ms backstage at every venue, but stipulated that they'd refuse to perform if a single brown candy found its way into the bowl. Why such an outrageous ask? According to frontman, David Lee Roth, the M&M request stood as a test to make sure that the promoter had read every last word of the contract. Supposedly, this was meant to ensure that safety procedures would be properly adhered to when it came to setting up the stage, lighting, and electricals for the show. According to Roth, unasked-for candies were a sign that the venue might not be paying close enough attention, so they'd cancel the concert.

For all of David Lee Roth's virtue signaling (reports state Van Halen trashed venues after discovering brown M&Ms backstage), his story about safety concerns doesn't completely hold up. The band's "no brown M&Ms" clause was newsworthy from the get-go and seemed to be mostly a way for rockstars to garner attention, rather than cover genuine safety concerns. On top of this, why would the people involved with setting up the stage read the catering rider or vice-versa? As an example of a far-less demanding band test, Kansas' contract stipulated that they wanted tutti frutti ice cream after a show. However, they actually just wanted someone to mention it to them to show the contract had been read. Van Halen could easily have asked for someone to simply say the words "No brown M&Ms" instead of requiring workers to sift through a bag of candy and remove every single brown one.

We can't know for sure more than 40 years after the fact, but it seems like the brown M&MS thing really was all about Van Halen acting like entitled divas. After all, the rest of their nine-page catering rider asked for other specific items like lime Gatorade, Country Time lemonade, room temperature Blue Nun wine, herring in sour cream, a fruit platter, a pound of Tupelo honey (huh, so that's a thing, not just a song?), and a tube of K-Y jelly (ick).