Poison: A Question Of Success

Poison: A Question Of Success

Beth Grant

"Are we stars?" Poison’s Rikki Rockett repeats the question asked him, trying to figure out the answer. “We don’t know yet! We haven’t really had time to think about it. We’ve been so busy! We’re still doing everything like we were at the beginning when we weren’t even close to gold.”

If a double platinum album and having a face that’s instantly recognizable to every teen in America constitutes stardom, then Rikki, Bret Michaels, C.C. DeVille and Bobby Dali, better known as Poison, have reached that plateau, whether they realize it or not.

“I don’t really feel like a star,” reveals Bobby, suspecting that an ingenue should feel different from the normal human being. “I’m pleased by our success and everything, but I’d still be nervous as hell to meet Mick Jagger.”

Defining stardom is rather difficult and varies according to the individual. Nikki Sixx was convinced he had made it when he got his first club date, even though his group, London, was the opening act. Edward Van Halen’s primary interest is playing his guitar. If 20,000 people happen to be watching him play, then, that’s the way it goes.

If you’re talking of stardom in relative terms, then the members of Poison have always been stars. Even when the band played clubs in their hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with a guitarist named Matt Smith, they were packing them in—and filling all 300 seats.

Wanting bigger things, Poison hightailed it to Los Angeles in May, 1984, and recruited C.C. DeVille. They smeared on a little more makeup and dressed a little more showy and started playing the local clubs. Word got out about how much fun a Poison concert is and within a few months of their arrival, Poison was selling out 1,000-seaters in Los Angeles.

Their popularity impressed a local independent record company and they agreed to release the record Look What The Cat Dragged In. With the help of the video “Talk Dirty To Me,” which brought their raucous, kissy-faced, sequined rock ’n’ roll into everybody’s home, the album started to sell and Poison was given the prestigious honor of opening up for Ratt on their American tour. Then they skyrocketed.

Now, they’ve been fruitful by anybody’s standards, yet they’re still the same funloving bunch of rock ’n’ roll addicts they’ve always been—which is why people love them.

The reason Poison and their moussedup hair and tawdry, powdered faces have endeared themselves to pubescents everywhere is that they don’t consider themselves to be rock gods. Instead, they take the attitude that they’re just like you and me. They sing about things you and I can relate to, like getting dumped by someone you like or coming home too late and being grounded.

“We don’t sing at our audience, we sing with them,” Bret cites as a key to Poison. “I get the audience involved. Like during the set I bring out a pair of binoculars and I’ll look at the very back row and I’ll point out people I can see and I’ll say, ‘You with the yellow tie on. . . how’re you liking the show?’ Or I’ll dedicate a song to ‘everyone who’s in the bathroom taking a dump while I’m up here wasting my energy.’ People love it. You’ve just got to. have a bit of humor and a bit of seriousness and mix the two together. . .and you’ve got to have fun.”

The humor part comes very naturally to this lethal quartet. As you can tell by their songs and their videos, they’re hyper-energized clowns, always looking for some kind of excitement and some way to make themselves and everybody else laugh. That’s just the way they are. Bret talks a mile a minute, he’s always chuckling and always smiling, and two minutes after you meet him you feel like he’s your best friend. C.C., who took up guitar because he thought it was a great way to become the center of attention, laughs at his own jokes. Rikki, who’s kind of insecure, has learned to deal with it by turning himself into the brunt of his humor. Bobby is a little more serious than everybody and has thus become the band’s stabilizing factor.

“Believe me, every morning I look in the mirror and get a good laugh out of it,” jokes Bret with a huge grin. “We feel totally secure about Poison, but each member of Poison feels a little bit insecure about themselves. Because of that we work harder. When I’m insecure about something, I work doubly hard to make things go right. I have to reach up to touch bottom sometimes. So that way if I reach twice as hard, I’ll go twice as high.”

For the four rock ’n’ roll newcomers who make up Poison, stardom is little more than an elusive realm you enter into when you become very successful. But then again, Poison have always flourished on one level or another, so maybe by this point in time it’s just become part of their fun-loving personalities.