The checklist
It isn’t very rock and roll is it? Checklists are up there in the train spotting school of management. The sort of activity carried out by dull earnest people who ought to put their clipboards down and get out a little more.
Tiresome and tedious.
Heavy metal
I’m not big into heavy metal. I’d rather scoop my eyeballs out with a tea spoon — a blunt teaspoon — than listen to: thrash metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal, soft rock or power ballads. I don’t even like Shania Twain, though I’m told that she is Country…
The music is hideous but the behaviour is worse. Why would anybody want to bite the head off a bat?
Its not big and its not clever
Take the story of Van Halen and the brown M&M’s. In typical self aggrandising style Van Halen had a contract rider (read wild demand). It stated that they should have fruit, coffee, and munchies available at all times. The munchies should include a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed.
Like people haven’t got better things to do with their time than fish about for brown sweets…
On one occasion in Pueblo, Colorado the lead singer of the band — David Lee Roth — found some brown M&M’s in the bowl. He kicked off, causing $85,000 worth of damage to the arena.
What is wrong with these people?
The whole story
It transpires that the story wasn’t that cut and dried. Van Halen were one of the first groups to take “mega concerts” (their term not mine) to small, second and third level concert venues. David Lee Roth tells the story in his autobiography…
We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
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.
David Lee Roth
The brown M&M’s were a visual signal that people hadn’t followed the checklist.
As for the $85,000 damage in Pueblo… Mr Roth’s antics caused roughly $5,000 damage. The staging, sound and lighting equipment that the band brought with them caused the other $80,000. It was so heavy it sank through the basketball arena’s floor.
The promotor hadn’t read the contract.
Get your checklist out
If a checklist is good enough for a rock star, it has to be good enough for you.
- Ear plugs? — Check.
- Naughty step? – Check.
If you enjoyed this post click here to receive the next
Watch David Lee Roth’s explanation
Image by mulder142
Leave a Reply