Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

by chaostheory • 17 years ago

364 79 17 years ago

tumult3• 17 years ago

Most performing artists I meet are very professional, friendly guys. Show them respect and take it seriously, and you'll get it in return.

If you love insane/awesome riders, here's my favorite, Iggy Pop's: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/iggypop/iggypop1....

jpwagner• 17 years ago

This is quite different from the Van Halen story. No lessons to learn, but at least there's "Dead Dog Island" to give a few laughs...

tumult3• 17 years ago

If there's something to learn from it, it's that you can be professional and hilarious at the same time.

oldgregg• 17 years ago

Very professional but often very narcissistic and demanding. I had a friend who was tour managing for a major artist-- the amount of logistics he had to juggle was mind-numbing-- only to be fired a couple months ago because he forgot to order a pizza for the artist after the show. :-/

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

While this is a great anecdote I can't help but think that mayb this wasn't the real reason your friend was let go, it was more like an excuse or a last straw. Obviously I don't know anything about the circumstances but that's what Occam's Razor dictates.

calvin• 17 years ago

RTF contract, apparently. Always a good idea.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

Kansas's rider specifies that the venue is not allowed to bill any other band as "the original Kansas", which is something of a reaction against Proto-Kaw, a band composed of the original members of Kansas (since Kansas itself has faced numerous personnel changes). Something of a Theseus' ship paradox. They also require prune juice! (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/kansas/kansas1.ht...)

According to the documentary on disc 2 on their latest live DVD, Dream Theater's rider specifies that their drummer, Mike Portnoy, be supplied with a jersey from the local basketball or soccer team. He has a sizable collection.

Meat Loaf is a superstar. Don't believe me? His rider specifies (and I quote):

"Purchaser acknowledges that it is promoting a worldwide "superstar" artist and that each and every element of such promotion, production, and other arrangements shall be absolutely first-class in nature and commensurate with the stature of a "superstar" in the entertainment industry". (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/meatloaf/meatloaf...)

tyvkiuiyi2• 17 years ago

That sounds like a standard 'negotiable' clause - you can argue that pretty much anything should/shouldn't have been done for a world class superstar.

The M+M one is cleverer because it is a no-arguements, you did it or did not. You don't have lawyers arguing about the meaning of "arrangements commensurate with"

paulgb• 17 years ago

Something of a Theseus' ship paradox.

Neat, I'd never heard of that one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

pchristensen• 17 years ago

This American Life covered this as well: http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1308

(not much more on Van Halen than the Snopes page but the episode was pretty good)

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

To summarise the brown M&Ms were a "canary" to indicate if all the details of the contract had been attended too. If there were brown M&Ms then the rest of the contractual points would be examined with more stringency.

It's interesting that they used this as a careful "get out clause" or an indicator of other more serious ones.

JabavuAdams• 17 years ago

A canary is a kind of bird. The parent poster is alluding to the phrase "canary in a coal mine". Coal miners supposedly carried caged birds down the shafts as fore-warning of suffocating conditions or gases, as the small bird would be affected before the humans. The generic idea here is to use a cheap sensor to check for impending failure in a system.

absconditus• 17 years ago

Let's not bring the reddit memes to HN.

dkokelley• 17 years ago

Using the brown M&M's as a test to check if the contract was read thoroughly counts as a clever hack in my book.

tyvkiuiyi2• 17 years ago

Pure genius!

I had a lecturer (a Brit) who would insert the phrase 'Rule Britannia' into lecture notes to see if anyone ever read them.

There is also an urban myth about some entrance exam for Police/Army/Pilots etc where the instructions say read all the questions first. And the last question says, do not answer any questions just 'do some arbitrary thing' - to check wether you follow instructions properly.

hieronymusN• 17 years ago

Not an urban myth - that little joke was pulled more than once in US grammar schools in the 70/80's

dangoldin• 17 years ago

I've had that done to me on a test in elementary school. After going through a third of the test doing the most menial problems, I read the last question and realized what my problem was. At that point it was just entertaining watching everyone else struggle through with it.

vaksel• 17 years ago

Not sure if that rule britania story is applicable, what was being tested? For students to stand up and start yelling U - S- A - U - S - A - U - S - A.

JDigital• 17 years ago

It's a serious usability fault, not a clever hack. This test paper fails to comply with the user's expectations, like a webpage that breaks the Back button.

jonny_noog2• 17 years ago

I have actually experienced this kind of test. in my case, it was coupled with telling the test participants that they only have a short amount of time to complete the test, thus making it even more likely that the test participants would start answering questions immediately rather than following instructions to the letter.

Particularly when this extra time limit trick may be used, I'm not sure what value the test really had. Supposedly, even the police and armed forces are looking for people with initiative who can think creatively and not just mindless automatons who follow orders without question. This kind of test would not seem to align with that goal.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

My dad gave a test like that to people when he was in the Marine Corps. I'm not sure when he did it or in what unit but he says it was a test of their ability to follow directions. Since my dad had a lot of commands over maintenance, support, and engineer units it makes sense.

miked• 17 years ago

When I was an undergrad, one of the sharper students wrote a paper for a teacher who was famous for not reading the homework. In the middle of the paper he wrote a page or two extolling the virtues of the "come from" statement, and why it was superior to the "goto" statement. She gave him an 'A' on the paper.

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

Great idea. Though let's not deny that there's some rock star ego involved here too.

jobeirne• 17 years ago

There's some rock star ego involved in most clever hacks.

joe_the_user2• 17 years ago

Ah...

Enlightenment! There is a method to the madness of those insane autocrats who demands ridiculous things...

The thing is, it is madness all the same...

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

Then there's the recruiter-checking equivalent of "pink box testing":

http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-testing/

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

But companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions.

When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you.

Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable.

Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...

Goladus2• 17 years ago

The M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction.

The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible.

Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.

sriramk• 17 years ago

In previous teams I worked on, I've often had to send out long emails or documents because someone got on my back over an artificial deadline. I would send it and make sure that an important link in the document was broken. If they didn't notice it, they didn't need the document/email urgently and usually get to hear a lecture from me later on arbitrary deadlines.

benmathes2• 17 years ago

The behavior behind the need for your checks is something that irks me. Because you can send one-off thoughts via email many people assume that all emails are just one-offs.

JimmyL3• 17 years ago

From observation, this is often done in job postings for startups - several that I've encountered will contain an innocuous line something like "include an Italian sonnet in your cover letter to guarantee that your application will be forwarded to the development manager", presumably as a way to make sure that applicants read the entire posting and associated administrivia.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Wow, what a great way to arbitrarily lower the quality of the applicant pool you end up with.

cdr• 17 years ago

How is screening out people who don't read the listing going to lower the quality?

bemmu• 17 years ago

When posting on RentACoder I once required that the reply has to contain a certain sentence, so I can easily ignore the plentiful form replies.

Goose90053• 17 years ago

It's a lot like putting an assert() in your code. assert(m&m != brown);

danbmil99• 17 years ago

The driving school test I just passed (with flying colors I'll have you know) had this in the middle of it:

"A frog is a term used to describe train car couplings."

Then, in the test section, right after something about how far behind another car you should stop at an intersection, would be "What is another term for a train coupling?"

I assume this was to make sure you read the test. I just cut & pasted the stuff into a text editor, so I could search for these odd duck questions when they came up.

Mz• 17 years ago

I'm reminded of the testing scene in Men in Black. When another candidate spouts a meaningless repeat of how they want "the best of the best of the best", Will Smith's character pokes fun at the idea that he doesn't even really know why they are there yet he is all jazzed. Will Smith's character is the only one who pulls the table up to his awkward, round chair to help him fill out paperwork. While everyone is going nuts killing aliens at the shooting range, Will Smith's character shoots the 8 year old girl carrying quantum physics books (or some such). And has to answer for it and explain himself. But he gets the job and everyone else gets their memory erased.

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

FTA (David Lee Roth): I went into full Shakespearean "What is this before me?" . . . you know, with the skull in one hand . . .

"What is this before me?" is from Macbeth ("dagger of the mind"). The "skull in one hand" is from Hamlet, in the "alas, poor Yorick" scene. Good scenes each, but they don't fit together.

I bet Roth knows that and just uses that sentence to see if anyone is paying attention ...

Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms

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