24 Famous Quotes You Don’t Actually Know the Meaning Of
No matter what your metalhead dad may claim, the tight-pants-ed men of Van Halen weren’t insufferable divas hellbent on banishing brown-hued chocolates from their dressing rooms. Contrary to popular belief — and the scathing interpretation of the “no brown M&M’s” expression — the band’s penchant for colorful candy came from a pretty pragmatic place: Assuring their onstage safety.
“Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max,” lead singer David Lee Roth recalled of the group’s early years. “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.”
As such, Lee Roth and the band’s tour crew decided to test venue staffers, hiding a clause insisting on “no brown M&Ms” within “the technical aspect of the rider.” “If I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, line-check the entire production,” Lee Roth continued. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.”
But Van Halen isn’t alone in being grossly misinterpreted. From the oxymoronic meaning of picking oneself up by the bootstraps to the truth of “The Road Not Taken,” here are a few famous quotes you don’t actually know the meaning of.
