Robert H Myers

You know that rock stars have riders, documents that formalize their request for items they expect backstage when they arrive to perform a show.  For over 30 years, artists have been in an arms race to outdo each other for the most elaborate and ridiculous requests.

Slayer once asked for 50,000 bees. The Bloodhound Gang asked for a live monkey. Keeping with animals, Mariah Carey supposedly asked for 20 white kittens while Eminem got a Koi pond constructed backstage and stocked with fish.

So when did it all start? And why?

In the mid-’80s, rock concerts scaled to an entirely new level. Massive lights, pyrotechnics, lasers, fog machines. These required huge prefabricated equipment rigs, several semi-trucks, and enormous power consumption. The venues Van Halen would be playing in would require substantial upgrades for their show to be possible.

The lead singer of Van Halen, David Lee Roth, realized it was likely the promoters wouldn’t read the fine print for the requirements – a pamphlet that had turned into a phonebook. Setup and teardown times could take more than a day for a venue and why waste the time if the proper electrical and access upgrades hadn’t been done?

So Roth created his own canary-in-a-coal-mine.

The band could pull their 9 truck convoy up to a 50-year-old venue, hop out, check the bowl of M&Ms, and move on if they saw a brown one, confident the promoter hadn’t done their diligence.

Listen to Mr. “Boozly-boozly-bop” tell it himself.