RIKKI ROCKETT (drummer, Paris, Poison) I met Bret through a guy that I grew up playing with. He played bass and I played drums. His name was Dave. He was a short-order cook at a place called the Amity House in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Bret had just gotten a job there busing tables. He goes, “Look, I don’t know what this guy sounds like, but he’s got his own PA.” I said, “We’ll figure out how to make him sound good if he doesn’t!”
BRET MICHAELS (singer, Paris, Poison) They didn’t necessarily want me because I was cool, they didn’t want me because I could sing; they wanted me because I owned my own PA system.
RIKKI ROCKETT He came down with his PA, it was the middle of winter, and he was trying to unload his dad’s Lincoln in clogs. I’m like, “This guy’s fucking dedicated. I’m in.” I liked him right away because I just knew that we both had the same kind of drive and dreams. Even though we had slightly different musical likes, it didn’t matter.
BOBBY DALL (bassist, paris, poison) The reason I would never join a band before was that I wanted total commitment. These guys are great people and great players and the package was great, but I think it was the commitment, the willingness to do whatever it takes to make it that sold me. That was something very important to us, because we don’t come from rich families.
RIKKI ROCKETT If somebody said to Bobby Dall, “If you slit your wrists and come within an inch of dying, you will get a record deal,” he’d be like, “Okay, where’s the knives?”
MATT SMITH (guitarist, Paris, Poison) The three other guys put something in the classified ads in the newspaper and I happened to call. They were looking for a guitar player. It said something like “Guitarist wanted for theatrical band, has to be willing to move to L.A.”
BOBBY DALL We’ve always worn makeup, we’ve always looked real flash, since we put the band together. It’s not like there was a glam scene and we said, “Let’s go glam!” and jumped on the bandwagon.
RIKKI ROCKETT Yeah, we would get shit. We got into a lot of fights over it and that kind of stuff.
MATT SMITH It was mostly covers at first, but the first thing we did at the first rehearsal was try to write songs.
RIKKI ROCKETT Even though we grew up on Kiss and Alice Cooper and bands like that, by the time we were at the age where we could go out and play, the punk rock/new wave template was what we had to take from, because that’s what was happening. So we lied a lot of times. We’d say that we’d do Greg Kihn Band and Tommy Tutone and all this kind of stuff and then we’d come out and do Judas Priest’s “Screaming for Vengeance.” We’d also do hard rock versions of songs like “Get Ready” by the Temptations, because we realized that a lot of those classic songs were very pivotal to the bar owners who were of that age. They started to really like us for that and we developed a good relationship with the few bars that we did play, like the Pine Grove Inn in Pine Grove, PA.
BRET MICHAELS The motto was “Shake your hiney at the Piney.” We would play five sets and have to dress in the bathroom. The “dressing room” was a stall.
MATT SMITH Aerosmith, Kiss, we’d even do some current stuff like Mötley Crüe. Let me think … a lot of Kiss.
MITCH SCHNEIDER (publicist) I was hanging out with Poison on their bus once and I asked Bobby Dall, “What band inspired you?” And he looked up and he said, “Foghat.” I was horrified but didn’t express it.
BRET MICHAELS Somewhere, there’s a Polaroid image of me out behind a U-Haul truck with me on the ground nailing together stands for the PA to go on because the bar’s roof leaked.
RIKKI ROCKETT The only time we’d get a chance to play a lot of our own stuff was with Kix. We opened for them numerous times back there in the early days—especially in Maryland, because Maryland’s drinking age was eighteen at the time and Pennsylvania was twenty-one, and we were nineteen and twenty.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE When they used to open for us, as Paris, they were horrible. We would be backstage and listen to them and go, “Man, these guys are terrible.” But they’d be getting over because we’d be doing all-ages shows, like up around Scranton, PA, and the little girls would just be going insane! It would be like the Beatles, the way the girls were reacting to Bret Michaels. But we’d sit back there and we wouldn’t be seeing them, we’d just be hearing them from behind the stage, and we’d be going, “God, these guys, they can’t even play! What’s going on here?”
RIKKI ROCKETT We could only play so many places because we were so young, so we started to rent out VFW halls and skating rinks and bring in our own bleachers. We promoted our own stuff. We sold our own tickets, the whole nine yards. We hired a company called Fly by Night Sound. They were soup to nuts. They’d bring lighting and they’d bring sound and just pull up in a truck and it looked like it was ours. We felt cool. Because back then I didn’t dream about having a Porsche, I dreamed about having a big PA system and a big lighting system.
BRET MICHAELS It was New York or Los Angeles, and L.A.’s warm and the chicks were better looking.
BOBBY DALL We sold everything we owned and went to L.A.—sold our cars, sold our stereos, our records. I sold my record collection!… “They tore him from his Aerosmith albums, weeping!”
BRET MICHAELS We had a kind of naive belief in ourselves and in what we wanted the band to be: a combination of the glam look and the party sound. We thought music kind of sucked. It had no energy. We did have the energy and we just wanted to be rock stars, man.
RIKKI ROCKETT We were young guys. I was twenty-two when we moved out here to Los Angeles. Bobby, who is the youngest, was nineteen.
BRET MICHAELS The day we left was my younger sister’s birthday, March 2, 1983. We had an old ambulance van, a Chevette, and a green pickup truck. Nothing but gear and a dream. We had CB radio as communication. And I’m a diabetic so I’m taking four or five injections a day.
MATT SMITH We had this river rescue van that Rikki’s dad had. That’s how we got the equipment out, and it broke down as soon as we crossed into California. We had to rent a tow bar and hook it to Bobby’s car for the rest of the way. Then we trashed it.
BRIAN “DAMAGE” FORSYTHE When they went out west, I remember our singer, Steve, saying, “If these guys get signed, I’m gonna quit the business and start making pizza.”