For those who don’t know, a rider is a list of requests from an artist’s management, or the artists themselves, to the event production company for a show they will be performing. When you hear an artist demanding certain ridiculous things like taking all the brown M&Ms out of a bag of M&Ms or some other outlandish thing, those requests went on a rider. As it turns out, these requests actually used to have a very serious and important purpose, and still do in some cases. Most of the time now however, a rider is just a way for the artists to see what they can get away with and try to top one another with outrageous requests.
Our friends at Thump actually did a cool little video in which they asked a series of artists what the craziest thing they have ever asked for on a rider was. The most requested by artists was something as simple as clean clothes. You have to understand that for a lot of artists, touring life doesn’t often get you the opportunity to be able to do your laundry. So something as simple as a pair of fresh underwear is a highly coveted item. The Glitch Mob had a funny request of getting a masseuse for their shows. Unfortunately there was only one show where that request was actually fulfilled, and they described a woman who came in a bumble bee outfit and gave them all amazing massages before their show.
But why do artists make these requests, and where do the outrageous ones come from? Believe it or not, the outrageous requests are linked to pyrotechnics and stage construction. During the late 1970s and 1980s when metal and “hair” bands ruled the land, their live performances had a lot of on-stage pyrotechnics going off during their sets. These pyrotechnics had a very high level of orchestration and were often the design of the bands management/label that would be sent to the production companies who were putting on the show.
Van Halen, for instance, would tour with nine 18-wheeler trucks packed with equipment. The rider was used as a way to check and see how detailed the production crew was in setting up the stages. If they couldn’t get something as simple as removing all brown M&Ms out of a 12 oz bowl, how detailed were they when it came to setting up the pyrotechnics that would go off just a few feet away from a band member, or how well did they construct the stage?
In one such incident, Metallica’s front man James Hetfield was on stage when a magnesium flash went off at the wrong time and badly burned him. (It is not known if there was a rider that wasn’t fully filled out or addressed before the show. This is just to explain how real the risks were.) So the ostentatious requests were actually, say it with us now, a harm reduction measure.
Shows nowadays with a lot of production value use mostly cryotechnics and other visual stimuli to wow the crowds, and have any pyrotechnics off the stage. So the necessity to have these sort of booby-traps in the riders are almost non-existent. However, the culture of weird rider requests has persisted throughout the industry. But that’s not to say that they don’t exist. We just thought you might want to know this information the next time you hear of an artist making a seemingly ridiculous request. It might be there just to make sure they don’t die.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve read about an artist requesting on their rider?
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