Christianity Today, drawn from Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto (Metropolitan Books, 2009)
Many of us have heard about some of the outlandish demands made by music celebrities in their contracts with concert promoters. One of the most notorious came from the rock band Van Halen. Each contract insisted that "a bowl of M&M's be provided backstage, but with every single brown M&M removed." If the band arrived and saw that the bowl had any brown M&Ms in it, they were free to cancel the concert and receive full payment. Who knew a bunch of hard-rockers could be such divas?
But wait.
There was actually a good reason behind the clause. The absence of those M&Ms was a matter of life or death. In his book The Checklist Manifesto, author Atul Gawande, quoting from lead singer David Lee Roth's memoir, shares the story behind the M&Ms:
Roth explained [that] … "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--whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a … Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function." So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be Article 126, the no-brown-M&Ms clause. "When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl," [Roth] wrote, "well, we'd line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem." The mistakes could be life-threatening … In Colorado, the band found that the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and that the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.
It's funny how Van Halen's ridiculous-at-first-glance contract demand manages to illustrate well Luke 16:10: "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much."
