Longest concert rider

In 1982–83, David Lee Roth’s Van Halen (USA) embarked on a 98-date tour of North and South America armed with a list of backstage demands that has since passed into rock legend. Typewritten and 53 pages long, the band’s exhaustive rider featured hundreds of specific demands relating to dressing rooms, food, drink and miscellaneous supplies. These included five rooms with a “pleasant temperature”, herring in sour cream, a minimum of 44 assorted sandwiches, 48 “large, bath-size cloth towels”, forks with four prongs, a $100 fine for “any caterer not providing adequate condiments, utensils or ice” and the now infamous M&M’s, which came with the warning “ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES”. Failure to honour the rider was “upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”. Other highlights of the rider include the provision of a tuning room set at the same temperature as the stage (give or take five degrees), 12 assorted yogurts on ice, a large tube of K-Y Jelly and the surprisingly polite “Where feasible a hot cooked breakfast would be greatly appreciated.” As explained in David Lee Roth’s autobiography Crazy from the Heat (published in 1998), the removal of brown M&M’s was not simply a frivolous demand but provided a way of determining whether or not the technical specifications of the contract had been read thoroughly and complied with. “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.” Quote from David Lee Roth’s autobiography: “It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&M’s and did $85,000-worth of damage to the backstage area. Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumour?” Van Halen’s 1982–83 tour – the Hide Your Sheep Tour – was a vehicle to promote their fifth studio album (in five years), Diver Down (released in April 1982). The tour began in Augusta, Georgia, USA, on 14 July 1982 and wound up in Lima, Peru, on 18 February 1983. Overview: even in 1982–83, concert riders had come a long way since The Beatles demanded “a platform for Ringo Starr and his drums” for their 1965 tour of the USA. This record has been verified by The Smoking Gun (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/), who maintain an archive of 300+ concert riders covering all genres of music (see sources listed below).