You know how it is. You’ve been stuck in a bus on the road for 4 weeks. You pull into a town in the middle of nowhere ready to rock the fucking faces off 10,000 fans. The last thing you want to be doing is recycling the same socks you wore yesterday. So, you put it on your rider. “Clean socks, 90 McNuggets, 12 bottles of Heineken and a pack of Camel Lights.”
Van Halen had a reputation for making some pretty funny rider requests. One of these was “no brown M&Ms” which was famously parodied in Wayne’s World. It turns out there was a pretty good reason for that rider request. From the article on Snopes:
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . .” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . .well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
I’m guessing the same sort of reasoning is behind Busta’s rider. “1 box of Lifestyles or Rough Rider condoms (ribbed).”
