As someone who travels to speak 2-3 times per month, I have a simple memorandum-of-understanding that I ask my hosts to sign.  It covers things like travel and reimbursements.

When I was a youth pastor, I also booked a couple Christian bands per year to play at our church for big events.  Their riders were a bit more exhaustive, asking for items such as flowers and warm, lemon water in the green room.  Unfortunately for them, the “green room” at our church was the bookkeeper’s conference room.  (I wrote about my unhappy experiences with Christian bands in my chapter of Stories of Emergence.)

In both of these cases, there’s lots of jokes between speaker/band and host about M&Ms in the dressing room, based on the legendary Van Halen rider that demanded no brown M&Ms, meaning the hosts had to sort out the brown ones.

Well now, years later, comes word that this was not an example of rock ‘n’ roll hedonism, but a savvy business move:

The M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had
actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the
backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of
a performance–lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been
botched by an inattentive promoter.

That David Lee Roth is not as dumb as he looks!

HT: Jordan Cooper