Van Halen Hit #2 and What About Those Brown M&M's?

Van Halen’s new album, A Different Kind of Truth, has hit #2 on the Billboard album chart. The first album with singer David Lee Roth since 1984’s 1984 sold 187,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week of release. The reunited Van Halen didn’t manage to topple Adele’s rule of the album chart, but it is an impressive comeback for a band that some thought would never work together again.

Van Halen will kick off a North American tour on Saturday, February 18, in Louisville, Kentucky.

More interestingly, frontman David Lee Roth has finally explained the “no brown M&Ms” tour rider stipulation that Van Halen demanded in their glory years.

Van Halen’s 1980s’ rider demands have often been described as the worst example of rock excess, the demands of divas. But, the group has always said the “M&M provision” was included to make sure that promoters had actually read the band’s lengthy rider. If brown M&M's were in the backstage bowls, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance – lighting, staging, security, ticketing – may not have been attended to by the show’s promoter.

It seems to be the fault of the Spectrum venue in Philadelphia and the sheer size of VH’s show… let DLR do the talking below.