VICKY HAMILTON Poison had a demo deal with Atlantic and Atlantic passed. The demo was okay but Poison is all about the show. If the executives did not see the show they didn’t really get it, you know what I mean?
RIC BROWDE (producer, Poison, Faster Pussycat) They produced this demo that was truly hideous. It was just leaden … terrible. They wanted to sound like Kiss. I think the only song on there that made it to the first album was “#1 Bad Boy.”
VICKY HAMILTON Bret got disheartened and he was like, “Well, then, we should take whatever deal we can get.”
WES HEIN Vicky Hamilton was involved with Mötley Crüe when they were with us at Greenworld, and we had dealt with her with Stryper. And one day after we became Enigma she comes down and says, “I’ve got somebody bigger than Mötley Crüe. It’s Poison.” She was so passionate and she had a very good track record so I went and saw them at either the Troubadour or the Whisky, and they were great. I mean, the energy, the fun, the party atmosphere. And then the audience, which was just, you know, beautiful girls throwing themselves at them, and guys who were there because the girls were there, and everybody moving and everybody having fun, right? It wasn’t a mosh pit, it wasn’t fighting. It was people just, like, partying.
BILL HEIN I think what sold it was that the show was good—it was real showmanship. And we looked around at the audience … I was so used to going to metal shows where it was all dudes, right? You go to a Poison show and it was, “Wow, there’s lots of girls here! And they’re dressed up. This is a big night out!” That to me was the thing that clicked. And it didn’t hurt that, you know, they could write hooky songs.
WES HEIN So we made an offer. And they wanted to be signed, but they also felt like, “We’re going to be platinum.” There was no question in their minds how big they were going to be. This was not ego. This was, in their opinion, matter-of-fact.
BILL HEIN I think we signed Poison for $25,000, which for us was a pretty big check to write. I know the first Stryper album, which was seven songs so it was kind of in between an EP and a full album, the recording budget was three grand.
BRET MICHAELS Who wouldn’t want to get signed to a massive record deal? But here’s the beautiful thing. We got signed for just enough money to make our record, right? But we got to keep our superstar royalty and we got to keep our publishing. That turned out to be amazingly great. It’s like getting to own your house.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN (owner, Guitars R Us; manager, Poison) In 1985 I was running Guitars R Us on Sunset Boulevard. Poison came on my radar through Vicky Hamilton—she wanted out because she thought at that time Poison was losing their following. They used to sell out the Troubadour, now they were doing less people. So I bought her out for $4,000. Bret came to me and said, “It’s over for us, man. We gotta figure how to do something different. We’re not even selling out the Troubadour.” And I go, “Look, it’s just starting for you. We’re not gonna play the Troubadour. We’re gonna go to a place called the Country Club, which holds a thousand people, and we’re gonna sell it out. I don’t care what it takes.”
RIC BROWDE I went down to a club in Reseda, California, a place called the Country Club, and I saw Poison play. And they sucked. They sucked horribly. But … the club held, I believe, something like 1,100 people. And I would say of the 1,100 people at the gig, 1,050 were girls. Who were screaming. And I was going, “Fuck. If anybody pulls this many girls, the guys are gonna follow.”
KATHERINE TURMAN I kind of felt like you couldn’t help but love Poison. The energy at the live shows was so contagious and I’d never seen anything like it, but of course I was, you know, eighteen or something. I went to see them a lot, and I had one friend, like an older accountant guy who looked like Bob Dylan, who hated them, but he always went ’cause he was like, “That’s where I can see all the cute young girls.”
MICHAEL SWEET Stryper did a show with Poison at the Country Club. That’s the night Bret jumped off the stage and he broke his ribs and they took him to the hospital.
ROBERT SWEET I remember praying for him. “God, let this guy be okay.”
HOWIE HUBBERMAN I would put $12,000 into a show that we’d get a $2,500 paycheck from, just to make sure it sold out the first couple times. And then it got wings of its own and, you know, it was on automatic pilot. We did twelve sold-out shows at the Country Club. We never turned back. Then they were in the studio with Ric Browde.
RIC BROWDE The funny thing is, musically I never was really that much into this type of music. But I had worked on a bunch of Ted Nugent albums so I was typecast as “You do heavy rock ’n’ roll.” The irony is the music that I’d listen to at home was all R&B and gospel—Marion Williams and Clara Ward and things like that.
But I knew Bruce, who you might know as C.C. And I think it was Bruce who approached me and said, “Hey, would you do this?”
HOWIE HUBBERMAN Ric Browde did as much polishing as he could in the studio and I think he did a stellar job.
RIC BROWDE We recorded Look What the Cat Dragged In at a studio on Melrose called Music Grinder. Stevie Nicks was in her worst drug period during this time—and why that is relevant is Stevie Nicks had booked out the Music Grinder. She had it on a lockout basis. But she was so fucked up on drugs that she never showed up. So I made a deal with the guy who ran Music Grinder that we would pay him $500 a day in cash under the condition that if Stevie Nicks ever got off her ass and showed up we had to get out of there. Of course, she never showed up.
BRET MICHAELS Ric had a different vision of what those songs were going to become and what he wanted to do with our music.
WES HEIN There were some strains in the studio. I think a producer feels like their role is to produce the album, right? In their opinion that’s why they were hired. To come in and go, “You guys have never collectively done a record. I need to give you a sound. I need to bring that out.” And when it works, of course it’s great. But I think it was because they were so unique, and I think very sort of headstrong in many ways … There was a lot of friction.
RIC BROWDE Bret wanted to be Kiss and I thought they needed to be a lightweight bubblegum group. They didn’t have the talent to be anything else. And Bret, you know, is to be commended because up to Poison I think the ability to carry a note and sing in tune had been a barrier to entry. Bret opened up that field wide open.
RIKKI ROCKETT Ric wanted “Talk Dirty to Me” to be four-on-the-floor. If you can imagine that. It would have sounded like “White Wedding” or something. It could have worked that way, I guess. It just wouldn’t have worked for me.
RIC BROWDE I mean, Rikki, who is the nicest member of the band, couldn’t play.
RIKKI ROCKETT As tensions rose by the end of the record, that’s where we were about to record the vocals. Ric and Bret, they just weren’t going to have it with each other. Of course, we were going to back Bret up and we did. I don’t think we even talked to Ric after that.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN Actually they kicked Ric Browde out of the studio and Ric sued. Rightfully so. Because he had a right to be a part of the mix. But Enigma gave me strict instructions.
BRET MICHAELS And then we finished the entire record by ourselves with our engineer, Jim Faraci. So that’s a gentle way of putting it.
RIC BROWDE The album ultimately cost $23,000. And a little bit over to get Michael Wagener, my friend, to mix the album with me.
MICHAEL WAGENER When they asked me to mix the Poison album, I was offered a choice between being paid $5,000 up front or taking one point on the record. I listened to the rough mixes and I just didn’t hear what people wound up liking about this band. So I took the $5,000.
RIC BROWDE It was the worst deal he ever made. He’ll tell you!
MICHAEL WAGENER Every time I see the guys now, they still make fun of me about that decision.
RIKKI ROCKETT I think Look What the Cat Dragged In sounds inspired. We were on fire. Even if we played some of the songs maybe too fast or some of it sounded adolescent at times. I think that added to the tension and the fun of that record. It should have been sounding adolescent and it did. It should have happened that way. I didn’t want a prog-rock album by that point in my life. I wanted it to sound like we were playing a live show almost, you know what I mean?
BRET MICHAELS That was probably the most glam we ever got.
WES HEIN Without a doubt when the album cover came in, I remember the people in the art department kind of going, “Oh my god!” I think somebody made a comment that C.C. looked like Joan Rivers.
RIKKI ROCKETT Part of what it was, was that back at that time C.C. had an acne problem. Obviously he grew out of it, but at that time he did. I remember the Hein brothers going, “Don’t worry about it, we’ve got an airbrush guy. We can make anything look good.” It’s like, “Well, that’s good because I have bags under my eyes and Bret has this and Bobby has this…”
BRET MICHAELS I one thousand percent will never deny that the cover of Look What the Cat Dragged In is a great record cover, but I wasn’t that excited about it at the time. I’m glad that I got overridden. I give Rikki much more credit for that.
BILL HEIN I loved the cover. We were a little independent label with a fraction of the funding of the labels we were competing against. At that point we were starting to have some pretty successful acts. We had Berlin. Stryper were starting to do well. Smithereens. So we were starting to compete with the majors at a certain level. But we still had to fight for recognition. We couldn’t spend the dollars that Elektra or Geffen or Arista could. It was good to get people’s attention.
RIKKI ROCKETT When you’re on an Enigma budget, you don’t necessarily have the top-rung airbrush guy. I think he may have done the wizard on my Dodge van, which I love by the way. So we’re like, “Whoa, that’s pretty heavily airbrushed, it almost looks animated, like anime.” They’re like, “Look, we just can’t shell out the money to redo this. We can’t do it.” “Okay, well you know what? Let’s go with this.” We just went with it, like, “Fuck it.” It shocked people.
“WILD” MICK BROWN I remember somebody brought the Poison Look What the Cat Dragged In album cover in and me and Michael Wagener and [Dokken bassist] Jeff Pilson and I think George, we were howling. We had never seen anything like it. It was just the funniest fucking thing. Like, “Look at this band!” And then we heard the music and we were like, “What the hell?” I thought, No way that band’s ever gonna be popular. And now it’s how many, twenty million records later? Jesus.
BRET MICHAELS The critics looked at Poison, from the day that we put out our first record, praying that we would be done. The problem that you have is this: Do I go to their house, do I smash their face in, do I beat them over the head with a bat? Which is inevitably what I’d really like to do.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I was meeting with the band at my studio about doing a photo shoot with them and we all got along great. It was like me and Van Halen, me and Mötley, me and whoever. As he’s leaving, Bobby hands me the first album and I go, “Hey dude, who are these fucking hot-looking chicks on this album cover?” And Bobby’s like, “That’s us, you idiot.” And I’m like, “That’s you guys?” I go, “Damn. I thought it was fucking four hot-looking chicks.”
C.C. DEVILLE (guitarist, Screamin’ Mimi’s, Poison) That whole androgynous thing was very cool, but you had to poke fun at yourself a little bit, because you didn’t want to come off too strong. Because if you’re growing up in Montana and you have a tractor, I’m not too sure that they’re gonna get it. But if you show a lot of boobs in the video—you make sure that you show a lot of girls in the video, so that the guys that are chewing tobacco don’t feel alienated.
RIKKI ROCKETT We got in so many fights I can’t even begin to tell you. People didn’t know whether to fuck us or fight us.
BILL HEIN If anybody saw the girls, their fans, how pretty their female fans were and how much in love, in lust their female fans were, they would set aside any notion of them looking girly.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN They would play a show where at the beginning of the show Bret had one girlfriend, Rikki had another. At the end of the show it was like a trading places situation.
NEIL ZLOZOWER Oh my god, did we have fun, me and the Poison guys. Back in ’86, that was just like … I mean, that was all pre-AIDS and everything like that. It was just a big fuck fest.
KATHERINE TURMAN I interviewed Bret around the release of Look What the Cat Dragged In, and he hit on me at the end. He said, like, “Hey, you know, how about you come on the road? Just you and me a couple of nights, no one will know.” And then I just said, you know, “Okay bye.” I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, or if it would have happened if I’d actually said yes!
HOWIE HUBBERMAN I was on the road for eight months with Poison just before and after the album came out. It was a crucial eight months. We went everywhere in the continental United States. We were playing the Bootleggers in Arizona, the Stone in San Francisco, the Cow Palace in Daly City. You know, shithole-to-decent places.
RIKKI ROCKETT Some of those early tours in the Winnebago were tough. We opened for Quiet Riot in clubs, and at that time, Kevin DuBrow and their tour manager were not the easiest people to work with. We had so many restrictions on us. A lot of the audiences were there to see Quiet Riot, they didn’t give a damn who the opening act was. We had to prove ourselves night after night after night and we started to get used to that. We started to embrace that competitiveness.
FRANKIE BANALI They were like the new band and they were supporting us on the QR III tour. I felt really, really sorry for those guys because their rider was almost nothing. I mean literally there was no food or anything for them and we had so much. Every single day when the guys in Quiet Riot weren’t looking, I’d get a big plastic bag and fill it up with drinks and food and stuff and drag it over to their dressing room.
RIKKI ROCKETT I have to say that Frankie Banali was the one that made it more than bearable for me.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN I think they got in a huge fight one day with Quiet Riot. And at that point, within two months it was a flip-flop and Quiet Riot would be happy to open up for Poison—if Poison would let them open up for them. And they wouldn’t, because Bret got into it with Kevin DuBrow.
FRANKIE BANALI Things fell apart when they found out their record had passed some sales milestone and they decided to destroy the bathroom in that particular dressing room. And of course, Quiet Riot being the headliner, we were the ones that got charged back for the damage.
RIKKI ROCKETT We all go through things. There was some jealousy. They were on their way down, we were on our way up.
FRANKIE BANALI The next show we did—it might’ve been Minneapolis, but it was definitely somewhere where it was cold and snowing—as they walked offstage, our tour manager said, “Okay, fellas, the dressing room is this way.” He opened up the door and he threw them out into the snow. And that caused some really, really bad vibes.
RIKKI ROCKETT We played one headlining show in Scottsdale, Arizona, where in the club it basically blew up. They told us we couldn’t use our Silly String because it got on the mixing console. We’re like, “We won’t spray it on the console, we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen.” Then they were like, “You can’t have your confetti, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.” Well, we decided to do it all. Of course, you tell Bret not to do something and he’s right there on the console spraying it on the motherfucker. I think Bobby blew a confetti cannon right at the fucking sound guy.
HOWIE HUBBERMAN Both of the owners of the club got crazy drunk. They got so drunk they started a fight with the band. Also, Bret had to relieve himself on the side of the stage and he kinda did so very nonchalantly. And they got in a fight.
RIKKI ROCKETT They shut us down. The crowd rioted. It turned into a Gunsmoke episode where we were pounding the hell out of the whole bar. It was just a free-for-all. I remember Robbie Crane, who’s now with Black Star Riders, bass teched for Bobby then, and he and I had our backs to each other just fending people off. Like, “You take this guy, I’ll take that guy.”
HOWIE HUBBERMAN Robbie actually beat up the bouncer. The police came, they took me aside, they said, “Look, these guys want to keep the backline for the damage that was done here.” And I said, “Look at these guys from Poison. They’re trying to tell you that these guys from Poison beat up the bouncers? You gotta be kidding me! Let us get our gear and go on to the next city.” And the cops looked at us and said, “You guys get the hell outta here.”