Earning Trust

Stories of outrageous and indulgent demands surround celebrities,  and many are actually true. Some of the most amazing (e.g. bottles of the priciest spring water to wash dogs) swirl around musical artists and their contracts with concert promoters. A notorious story came from the wildly popular band Van Halen. Each concert promoter had to sign a contract,  specifying  a bowl of M&M's be provided backstage for the band, with every single brown M and M removed. If the band arrived for a concert and there was even one brown candy there, they were alowed by contract to cancel the gig and receive full payment. Diva behavior, right?

In the words of the commercial ads, BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE.

There actually was a method in the madness. To the band, the absence or presence of the brown M&M's was a matter of life or death. Atul Gawande in his book, The Checklist Manifesto,quotes lead singer David Lee Roth's memoir:

"...Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine 18 wheelers, full of gear, where the standrad 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 drive the gear through. The contract read like a... Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings needed to make it function." So, just as a little test, buried somewhere in the rider, would be Article 126, the no-brown-M&M clause. "When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, we'd line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem." The mistakes could be fatal. In one Colorado concert, the band discovered the promoters had failed to read even the weight requirements, and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.

Hmmm. There may be more to what you and I consider a ridiculous demand more often than one might think. In this case, it sounds as if Van Halen was actually on page with Jesus: "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much." Luke 16:10