A copy of Van Halen's 1982 tour rider still survives. In the snack list, under "Munchies," is one line: "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

For years the press told it as the perfect diva story, rich rock stars making some runner pick the brown M&M candy out of a bowl. David Lee Roth's version, from his memoir Crazy from the Heat, is better.

Van Halen was hauling one of the biggest shows in rock history into arenas that had never handled anything like it before. "We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max," Roth wrote. The contract ran page after page of technical specs, like "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes ..." In the middle of it sat Article 126: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

The candy was a tripwire. When Roth walked backstage and saw "a brown M&M in that bowl ... well, he line-checked the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract." A missed spec, he wrote, could "threaten to destroy the whole show. Something like literally life-threatening."

On March 30, 1980, at the university arena in Pueblo, Colorado, nobody had bothered to check the weight requirements. The stage sank through a brand-new rubberized basketball floor and did about $80,000 in damage, by Roth's count. He had also found brown M&Ms backstage that night and trashed the dressing room, "twelve thousand dollars' worth of fun." The press reported it as $85,000 of damage over candy. Roth's take: "Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?"

Now you’re probably thinking, where am I going with all this? Every homeowner who reads your estimate runs the same test on you. They can't judge your rigging, your climber, or whether your insurance is real. That work is invisible to them, the way amperage specs were invisible to a promoter. So they check what they can see: the voicemail greeting, the spelling on the estimate, whether the crew showed up at 9:00am when the office said 9:00am, whether anyone answered the phone during lunch break. Each one stands in for the question they actually care about, which is whether your crew is going to drop a limb on their roof.

It isn't fair. A typo on an estimate says nothing about how you rig a removal. They check it anyway, because it's the only bowl they can see.

Sweep your own bowl before a homeowner does.

The longer you run a company, the less you notice what a first-time lead notices in thirty seconds. Get someone from the outside to do the looking, then hand the fixes to the office.

Action Steps:

The Smoking Gun has the 1982 rider scanned, brown M&M line and all, and this Conversable Economist post reprints Roth's full account from his book. Start with the rider. It's the real document behind the legend and worth the afternoon read when you have time.

Roth spent decades being remembered as a diva for running one of the smartest checks in the show business.

Your crews already work by the same rule. Nobody climbs on a rope they haven't inspected, and nobody trusts a rigging point because the last guy said it was fine. Homeowners can't inspect your ropes, so they inspect your bowl. Keep it clean.

If you sweep your bowl this week, reply and tell me the worst one you found. I'll help you figure out where to start.

Here's to a clean bowl!

- Jacob Hastings

The Backcut