BRET MICHAELS When you’re coming from towns like Mechanicsburg and Butler, PA, and you pull into L.A. and there’s umpteen billion people, it’s a moment of going, “Holy shit, this is fucking awesome!” And a moment of “Holy shit, I’m looking at the Strip and there’s gotta be 150,000 band guys walking around.” You’re not in competition with four other bands—you’re talking about 40,000 other bands trying to make it.
RIKKI ROCKETT Kim Fowley, who managed the Runaways, was actually the person who prompted us to come out.
MATT SMITH We met with him our first night in L.A. He was even weirder in real life than he comes off in the movie about the Runaways. He wanted us to pretty much scrap the glam thing and do a Road Warrior–type theme. Sort of like armored suits, maybe.
BRET MICHAELS Kim and a bunch of other people took us to see Hollywood Rose in Chinatown. What would eventually become Guns N’ Roses. It was a Monday or Tuesday night. To me that was awesome.
RIKKI ROCKETT We saw the genius in Kim and we listened to what he said and took a lot of what he said to heart, but then you could also see the craziness in him. That’s the stuff where we’d go, “Yeah…” Then he tried to sign us to his little label. We’re like, “Look we haven’t even tried to shop for labels yet. Why would we do that?” When we said that we weren’t willing to do that right away that’s where he started getting really weird to us. He got kind of aggressive, actually.
BOBBY DALL When we pulled into town every band wore leather and studs, they were all trying to be the rudest, toughest, most manly band they could be. And we stuck out like sore thumbs because we were wearing what we’ve been wearing ever since we put the band together.
BRET MICHAELS We stayed at the Tropicana Motel, which was like the rock ’n’ roll hangout. We played the Troubadour and the Music Machine, which I believe was with Siouxsie and the Banshees. At the Troubadour it was maybe a couple weeks after we got to L.A. We got thrown on as an opening act. You go on at six but the doors don’t open until seven. It was one of those things. You were the first of four or five bands on the bill. There were a few people there.
JEFF DUNCAN (guitarist, Odin) I saw Poison’s first-ever gig in L.A., at the Troubadour. We were there because we had a full-page ad in BAM and so we were taking all the BAM magazines and folding down the page with our ad because we had a gig coming up.
RIKKI ROCKETT It was just bizarre to me that in L.A., people would play once or twice a month maximum. Back east, we were playing every weekend, two or three nights a week, two or three sets a night. Here, people were playing one set once a month. How do you do that? Then we figured out that if we went to the outskirts, places like Covina, we could go play cover songs, make some money, and then come back to Hollywood and do what we did. Most people wouldn’t make the connection. That worked for a while. We had other jobs, too—bit parts in movies or whatever, background stuff.
MATT SMITH I only worked for, like, two days, at a telemarketing place where we’d call and try to sell office supplies. And then I was riding my skateboard to work one day and I fell off the curb and I scarred my knee up really bad and I said, “I’m not coming back.” Then, after a couple of months we met Vicky Hamilton, who became our manager.
VICKY HAMILTON I was just coming off managing Stryper, and after the whole Christian thing, a band named Poison seemed really appealing, you know? I’ve always kind of liked the girly boys.
RIKKI ROCKETT Once Vicky was in our lives, I felt like even at our worst I wasn’t going to starve to death. Before her, I didn’t know.
VICKY HAMILTON At that point in time they were not good musicians at all. They could barely play their instruments. I went home with them to Harrisburg for Christmas and they showed me these videotapes of when they were still called Paris and they were doing all these Mötley Crüe covers. I was like, “Uh, do not let anyone see these!”
GUNNAR NELSON (drummer, Strange Agent, the Nelsons; Singer, Guitarist, Nelson) They were all about attitude and about being the world’s greatest party band. I remember being at a party and listening to Bret’s demo on the porch and I thought, Oh my god, this is embarrassing. Then it turns out to be Poison. I mean …
VICKY HAMILTON They lived on North Orange Drive, in between Franklin and Hollywood Boulevard. Rikki and Bret had a room and Bobby and Matt and the roadies had a room. There was like a little card table and that was where all the dinners and all the business meetings went down, and Bobby was always the cook. It was just spaghetti. It was like a lucky day if they had garlic bread. Bobby and I wrote these proposals to get investors and they had put a hundred industry people’s names and phone numbers on the wall, and a hundred girls’ numbers. They were sure that whatever the scenario was, the answer was on that wall. Girls would call up and say, “Can I come over?” And they would say, “Ah, if you’ll clean the apartment. Or bring us a bag of groceries.”
BOBBY DALL Sure, we’d have girls buying our groceries, stuff like that. If they wanted to come hang out with the band and stay over at the house then, yeah, that’s what it took. We were hungry. We’d get money from gigs, but we used that to keep the band going. We needed to eat …
RIKKI ROCKETT I think girls in that age group, they tend to mother a little bit. I honestly wish I could go back and thank every single person that did that because, shit, we wouldn’t have made it without that help.
GUNNAR NELSON Mötley Crüe was trying to go after all the hot chicks, but Poison intentionally paid extra attention and were extra kind to the ugly fat chicks who actually were much more ardent fans. Those were the girls that, you just treat ’em with a little bit of respect, make them feel beautiful, and they’re loyal like you wouldn’t believe. Those girls were an army for Poison. It was the smartest marketing plan I’ve ever seen in my career, I can say that. It was genius.
VICKY HAMILTON With Poison, the first following was like the fat girls’ club. There’d be a line of fat girls across the front of the stage. And then, like, the gay boys showed up. You know, there was a Sex in the City episode about, like, the fat girls and the gay boys? That was absolutely about Poison. Then the cool girls came, and then the guys came.
TAIME DOWNE (singer, Faster Pussycat; co-owner, the Cathouse) Poison always fucking put on a good show. They’d get the bitches at the show and that was basically, like, eighty percent of what it was about back when you were fucking twenty. The other fifteen was about the brews and the other 5 was about the music. Like, “I’m just gonna play fuckin’ Ramones covers and have fuckin’ fun,” you know what I mean? You prioritize your shit when you’re young. Put the pussy and booze first.
DON ADKINS I went to see Poison at the Roxy in ’83, ’84. They had the makeup and the hair and everything. And at the Roxy they were very accepted. Every hot girl in L.A. was just, like, getting wet over them.
BOBBY DALL If you were living in Los Angeles in 1983–84 like we did and you were a guy rocker, it was all about pussy. That’s what it was.
VICKY HAMILTON I got them a couple of investors to put money into their clothes and their equipment and things and I made a deal with the Troubadour to have them play once a month. And the Troubadour paid their rent and their phone bill every month.
GINA BARSAMIAN (booking agent, the Troubadour) The Troubadour helped them a lot financially. But they had a good show. The music was very nice and they were very good at it. They were pretty boys in those days with their long hair and their makeup and everything.
RIKKI ROCKETT We had this whole idea that whatever songs we wrote we wanted them to be a soundtrack for our live show. If we were doing a show for Halloween, we would fully just focus on how to make a Halloween show. We’d create mic stands made out of broomsticks and everybody would come out with witch hats, and we’d have an intro tape of the theme song from Halloween and things like that. We were very themed out and into those things. Black streamers going out into the audience and spiders that people can rip off of them and take home. We just made it a friggin’ party; our idea was to connect the stage with the fans.
BRET MICHAELS We moved into the back of a dry cleaner’s all the way down on Washington and Palm Grove Avenue, which back then was a little suspect. Threw a mattress on the floor.
VICKY HAMILTON It was Keel’s old rehearsal spot, and it was kind of dangerous. I mean, chicks were getting raped and all kinds of stuff. It was a horrible place. I was always afraid going down there.
RON KEEL We were out of there as soon as we got a record deal. It was a shithole. When you walked in there, there were swarms, swarms of cockroaches. I mean literally you were just fightin’ them off, waving your hands in front of your face. They’re flying cockroaches. It was not only dangerous but really filthy.
RIKKI ROCKETT We were pretty much the only white guys in about a fifteen- or twenty-block radius at that time. They were putting a club in called TVC15 next door, and so we just started stealing wood, two-by-fours, paint. That’s how we built that warehouse. The warehouse was just an empty vessel, basically. Then we built all the bedrooms and all that stuff. The only thing we ever paid for were studs to go into the concrete. We were little thieves.
VICKY HAMILTON They basically tied off sheets to divide their rooms.
BRET MICHAELS We spent one Christmas in there. We got this little tree and we sat there ripping up our flyers and making them into decorations for the tree. In many ways those were my favorite days for the band because it was that all-for-one time. We felt like it was us against the world, which sounds fuckin’ corny but it’s how it was.
RON KEEL I know Poison had even some rougher issues after we left in terms of guys breaking down the door and storming the place, assaults and things.
RIKKI ROCKETT Bobby Dall, me, a guy named Russ Rents who was one of our road crew guys, and I were confronted by four other guys who had weapons and had probably ten of them behind them. I thought I was going to die that night. Then the police actually came around the corner. The timing was impeccable, and they took off, but then they started throwing stuff through our windows. We got harassed to the point where it was really hard to live there.
BRET MICHAELS You have to survive. You have to eat. You have to have shelter.
DON ADKINS I think one thing I noticed … the really good bands that rose to the top, and I’m talking, you know, Mötley Crüe and Poison and a couple of others, they all had this one thing in common where, yeah, they were living the rock-star life, getting laid, having girls do all this stuff for them, but they were all really, really focused on making it. Absolutely driven. And that’s the biggest thing I remember with Poison. They had this plan laid out. And they all wanted to take it to the next level and make it.
BRET MICHAELS We were workaholics with a dream.