Rough Riders
“Bananas, bananas, and more bananas!”
When a band goes on tour, they have what is called a rider backstage. On this rider are items that they have requested. It can be anything from beer, cigarettes, candy, beer, napalm, beer, cigarette flavored beer, beer soaked cigarettes, or kittens. Some examples of items include:
*Clarence Clemmons, of E Street Band fame, requests a whole roasted chicken be delivered to his dressing room mid-concert
*Christina Aguilera wants soy cheese, oreos, dried cranberries, and Flintsones chewable vitamins (doesn’t she know that they taste better when you sneak them from the medicine cabinet, when your parents are in the other room?)
*Limp Bizkit’s backstage lights must be dimmable. or else.
*Jennifer Lopez wants a white room, white towels, white couch, white tables, white tablecloths, white drapes, white candies, whitelion
(for even more examples of rider insanity, click here)
So all of this begs the question: what would we, the staff of Random Ramblings, demand to be in our backstage rider? While the possibilities are endless, we have narrowed it down to the following:
*one 8 foot tall die cast metal statue of Optimus Prime in robot form-no plastic!
*a Jenga game with pieces made out of steak (cause Jenga makes us hungry)
*2 small chimpanzees
*1 miniature wrestling ring, complete with turnbuckles/ropes, for aforementioned chimpanzees to wrestle in (minature steel cage is acceptable too)
*access to a chocolate river, like the one featured in the Dairy Queen commercials of old. Ice cream mountaintops are optional. (apparently there is some realistic consideration going into this idea. Glad to see others are thinking of it too).
*one stegasaurus
*60 inch TV showing a continuous slideshow of monkeys dressed up in human clothes
*1 pair of parachute pants
*3 leaf blowers
*1 clown (please do a background check)
*The racing guys from Better Off Dead as MC’s for the backstage party
We trust these demands will be met when we make it big. Feel free to leave us comments on what you would have on your rider.
July 20, 2008 at 3:58 pm
when modern skirts played in amsterdam with r.e.m., the speakers on stage were covered with plastic toy dinosaurs peter buck collects and strews across venues. don’t know if that’s a rider or a quirk. do know that when you’re rich and famous, you can do anything. they also have video of thom yorke walking around backstage looking and dressed like a homeless person. when you’re rich and famous, you can also do that . . .