8 Celebrities Who Admitted to the Wild Things on Their Riders

Find out what these stars say they have on their riders…

While Joe Jonas was on the road with his band, DNCE, he made a hilarious revelation about his tour rider. He admitted that he requested 12 puppies at every show they’ve played — and while he completely didn’t expect anyone to follow through, sometimes they actually showed up to find dogs in their green room. 

“I’ve had 12 puppies on the rider for a while…Every once in a while, a city will show up with 12 puppies,” Joe said during an appearance on Nova 96.9 in Australia. 

Jennifer Lawrence had a very specific trailer request while she was working on her film Mother! Since the movie was pretty intense, Jennifer said she needed things to be lighthearted when she wrapped for the day — so she requested an area where she could watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians. 

“I’ve said it before, but I got to such a low point in this film, and going into such a dark place that I eventually had to bring the Kardashians in,” Jennifer explained on The Tonight Show. “Not in person, obviously! I had to do this one scene, and I hadn’t gone that dark before, I had never done something that horrifying. I started getting scared a couple days before so I was like, 

‘I need a tent to keep away from all the extras’ because I didn’t know what I would do.”

Pharrell Williams has one random item on his tour rider that his team always includes because of the musician’s obsession with astronomer Carl Sagan. When they first started requesting a picture of Carl in every dressing room, Pharell says it was initially a joke — but it eventually became a reminder of how lucky he is to be living his dreams. 

“I’ve always been obsessed with Carl Sagan. I watched Cosmos as a child, and I was always blown away and enamored by his mind and the way he thought. And [my staff] thought it was a funny joke to put it on my rider, so his picture’s always there,” he shared on Jimmy Kimmel Live. 

He continued, “But you know what? It’s actually a good thing. Because every time I look at that picture, I realize how lucky we all are to be on this planet and be able to do what we love to do every day. Seeing Carl’s face reminds me of it. It’s a cool thing.”

In the ’80s when Weird Al was on the road, his rider included a stipulation that every promoter had to provide a garish Hawaiian shirt. Eventually, Al had to stop asking because he ended up accumulating so many. With over 200 shirts, he says his wife finally asked if they could donate some to charity. 

“I remembered on one of my early tours, I thought it would be funny to provide a rider where I asked for a Hawaiian shirt for every show. I ended up with over 200. I still have a lot of them. But my wife went through my wardrobe after we got married and she made me donate a lot to Salvation Army,” he told GQ. 

Grimes has shared that she loves reading other people’s tour riders so back in 2013, she decided to post her own on Tumblr. As for her most wild request, the musician says she asked for the presence of a cute animal to hang out with before the show. 

“If possible, one cute bulldog, French bulldog, pug or pomeranian (or other cute animal, such as a chinchilla or a pekingese to visit and hang out but who gets to leave before too much loud noise is heard so that he or she does not hurt their ears. It is important that if said animal visits, they have a safe home to return to,” Grimes wrote at the time. 

Her rider also requested that all other items like food be presented in an eco-friendly manner. That meant local, organic food and no plastic silverware or containers. She also specifically requested no candy as to not create waste.

Kanye West’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian once shared one of the more wild items from Kanye’s tour rider. While backstage at Kanye’s Saint Pablo Tour, Kim shared a photo of side-by-side slushie machines — one filled with Hennessy and Coca-Cola and another with Grey Goose and lemonade.

“Pablo rider is LIT,” Kim captioned a Snapchat story.  

Van Halen may have had one of the most iconic tour riders of all time. Their request for a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown candies removed has gone down in history. According to lead singer David Lee Roth, the reason for the ultra-specific request was so that the band could tell if the venue actually read their technical rider. 

“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. 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,” he wrote in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat.

He continued, ​​“So just as a little test…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.’ So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, line-check the entire production. 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.”

When Jack White was touring with The White Stripes in 2015, his tour rider was leaked — and he ended up facing a lot of backlash. As for the most absurd requests on the rider, it specifically stated that there could be absolutely no bananas, noting that they “seriously don’t want to see bananas anywhere in the building.” The rider also requested guacamole that was made with a specific recipe and served at 5 p.m. The rest of the rider was filled with requests for an enormous amount of food. 

Jack, who was labeled a diva with insane requirements, ended up writing an open letter about the backlash he faced.

“First off, this is none of your business, but I have no specific demands in my dressing room. I know I could ask for lots of things but I actually don’t ask for ANYTHING. I take with me what I need, and that ain’t much. Anything on the rider is for the band and the crew. This ‘guacamole recipe’ is my hilarious tour manager’s inside joke with the local promoters, it’s his recipe, not mine. It’s just something to break up the boredom, seeing who can make it best,” Jack wrote in an extended response.

He later added, “I know it’s a fun thing for people to try to turn me into a jerk and a diva, but in this case it’s pretty ridiculous and has almost nothing to do with me. My relationship with the fans at that show and how we got to a new place together through music remains intact and i’d love to do it again with them.”