Riders on the storm

Prompted by a comment on this post on Blogcritics, pertaining to an outrageous rumor of a requirement by Tom Cruise in his contract rider that expressly forbids eye contact from his interview, I did a little research on the contractual oddity known as the "rider."

The rider is simply a statement of requirements, in the case of a performer. Like the above example attributed to Tom Cruise, many of them are simply rumors. There are others, however, such as that attributed to Christina Aguilera recently. Her gigantic rider is confirmed to contain requirements like "Soy cheese and Oreos . . . Flintstones chewables and votive candles." (Read on - the Smoking Gun has more, as usual.) It's easy to attribute stuff like this to prima donna performers because none of it makes any sense to us "normal" people. However, these ridiculous requirements started out as a useful tool.

You may recall the rumor that Van Halen required that nowhere in their backstage area was there to be seen a brown M&M - or the band would call off the show with the venue forfeiting all money to the band. This seems completely ludicrous, doesn't it? Surprisingly, it's not. I went to legendary de-bunkers, Snopes.com for the scoop:

As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:

. . . Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. 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."

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Article Author: Tom Johnson

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