Alex Van Halen Clarifies the Story Behind the Band’s Famous ‘No Brown M&M’s’ Rider: It Wasn’t a ‘Power Trip’.Linh

There was a method to the madness when it came to Van Halen’s famous request to ban brown M&M’s from their tour.

Back in the 1980s, the “Jump” rockers’ tour rider featured a very specific ask: underlined, and in all capital letters, they wrote that they wanted M&M’s, but “absolutely no brown ones.”

Though the request may seem a bit high maintenance, drummer Alex Van Halen explains in his new memoir Brothers why it actually wasn’t. He writes that the “very specific and carefully constructed” riders were mostly for safety reasons, as it was important to have proper equipment or risk things like fire or a stage collapse.

“I know. We sound like jerks,” he writes in the book. “Like rock star primadonnas looking to make some poor kid sit around picking through candies till he goes blind. But it wasn’t about a power trip, and it wasn’t about some strange aversion to the color brown.”

Alex, 71, writes that he and his late brother Eddie were often asked in interviews whether brown M&M’s tasted differently than others, and they “played it up for yuks,” saying they seriously preferred the other colors.

But really, their goal was to give themselves a way to check on how carefully the venue was paying attention.

“If we see brown M&M’s, we know: we are not in the hands of professionals,” he writes. “If they didn’t bother with this, what else didn’t they bother with, what other corners are being cut?”

The Smoking Gun previously published a copy of a 1982 Van Halen rider, which showed the M&M’s request under a section called “Munchies.” Former frontman David Lee Roth also shared a similar story in his 1997 autobiography Crazy from the Heat, lamenting the “many technical errors” that befell the band while on tour, and that he’d be forced to “line-check the entire production” if he saw brown M&M’s.

Brothers, on sale now, is a poignant love letter from Alex to his brother and bandmate Eddie, who died in 2020 at age 65.

The memoir covers their childhood growing up in both the Netherlands and Southern California, and tracks their rise to fame with Van Halen.

“This book is a fascinating story of a band — and so much more: it’s also a chronicle of family and talent and the passion to create,” the book’s editor Sara Nelson said in a statement. “It is the definitive take on Edward Van Halen’s life and death from the one who knew and loved him best.”