WES HEIN The first single from Look What the Cat Dragged In was “Cry Tough.” The song went to AOR radio and it did just kind of okay and the video did not get much play on MTV. And the record stalled.
BILL HEIN I think we were at like 200,000 albums, something like that. And then Capitol became involved.
WES HEIN Enigma had a deal with Capitol Records where some of our artists were going to be distributed through Capitol’s distribution system. There were two types of artists that would go through Capitol: one hundred percent pure Enigma artists, or, as was the case with Poison, joint-venture artists. And that meant Capitol would work it along with us.
BILL HEIN Capitol was ready for us to pull the plug and go to the second album. Like, “Look, you guys sold two hundred thousand albums. You should feel good. Why don’t you guys go make another record?”
RIKKI ROCKETT We were told, “You’re going to have to start thinking about the next record unless you can get another tour. Then we could support another single.”
BILL HEIN I’m trying to think of Capitol’s head of radio promotion; the guy had a cattle prod and he would chase people out of his office with it if he didn’t like their opinion. He wasn’t necessarily a bad promotion guy; that was the culture at the time. We wanted him to go out with “Talk Dirty to Me” and get the Capitol promotions team behind it. He was like, “No, this record’s done. That’s not a single. No one’s going to play it. It’s a weird little band.”
RIKKI ROCKETT We worked really hard and got the Ratt tour. It was because of Ratt that we got to release “Talk Dirty to Me.” Robbin Crosby was a big cheerleader for us.
WES HEIN Capitol as a label did not understand Poison. This is the label that thought Heart was a cool band. But one of the biggest exceptions was Tom Whalley. He got Poison.
TOM WHALLEY (executive, Capitol Records) The band had great ideas around how they wanted to image themselves and where they wanted to put themselves in the marketplace. They were a group of idea guys, right? Their presentation, all those bright greens and pinks, the idea of making things a party and vibrant—that was all coming out of them.
BILL HEIN Hair metal, whatever you want to call it … Poison certainly get a big chunk of the credit for creating not only the genre of the music but also the business model.
RIKKI ROCKETT For “Talk Dirty to Me” we had half the budget that we’d had for the “Cry Tough” video. So we told the directors not to worry about continuity. If you watch it, we’re constantly changing clothes and guitars. It’s like, “Look, this is a video, so what. Let everybody know it’s a video. Let’s have fun with that platform. Our main thing is we want people to smile and shake their ass when they see this.” We really took advantage of what we had to work with.
BILL HEIN There was one weekend when we booked the A&M soundstage. That was a big expense for us. We did a Poison video on one day and a Stryper video the next. Big budgets for us on both of them.
RIKKI ROCKETT I only realized what we had accomplished with that video years later when I met Michael Jackson. I said, “Listen, I don’t know if you know anything about our band, but I’m the drummer for Poison. I just wanted to say hi.” He turns around and he goes, “Man, every time your video comes on, I sit down because you’re having such a good time. I don’t want to miss a second of it.”
So if some dude says, “Oh, you guys suck,” it’s like, “Who fucking cares? Michael Jackson saw the value in Poison.” How cool is that?
BILL HEIN “Talk Dirty to Me” was starting to get a genuine buzz. Our little promo team got that thing going and then Capitol came in on it and brought it home.
TOM WHALLEY The whole company rallied behind “Talk Dirty to Me” with the intention of breaking it through retail and touring and MTV and radio. And we were very successful at pop radio. At that time you could do that—you could take a song that you thought was a pop hit and just go right to Top 40 radio.
BILL HEIN The album went platinum … and then double platinum.
RIC BROWDE I remember that I was going to Doc McGhee’s wedding—he chartered one of those Circle Line boats in Manhattan. And Derek Shulman, who signed Bon Jovi and Cinderella, he said, “You know, you just broke into the charts on Poison. Congratulations.” I was like, “What?” I was flabbergasted. It was like Springtime for Hitler.
RIKKI ROCKETT We went back out and did the Ratt tour and stuff like that and when we came home, we had made a little bit of money. The first thing I ever bought myself was a red Toyota MR2. It was like a hot little two-seater semi–sports car. It definitely wasn’t a Ferrari, but it was kinda cool. I never had anything like that growing up. I had a Ford Pinto and a ’53 panel truck, you know? So that was pretty huge.
TOM WERMAN I liked Poison’s presentation and I’d heard Look What the Cat Dragged In and I thought it was a reasonably well-produced album. But I thought it was kind of one grade down from what I was doing. That it wasn’t a first-rate production.
RIC BROWDE It’s a piece of shit, that album. It sucks. Sonically, as a producer? It’s the worst record ever. And I became known as a garbage producer because of it.
TOM WERMAN I met with Poison because Tom Whalley at Capitol called me. They had wanted Paul Stanley.
RIKKI ROCKETT Paul came out to the Texxas Jam to have a meeting with us. We sat down and we got along with him. I think we were all enamored that Paul Stanley was interested in Poison, but I’m not so sure that we were convinced it was the right move. I don’t wanna say anything negative about him, but there were a few comments where I sort of felt like, I’m not sure if he’s taking us seriously enough. But when Tom Werman wanted to step in it was like, “Okay, he’s a real guy for sure. He’s making real rock records out there.” So it made a ton of sense for us.
TOM WERMAN We had a lunch meeting and I was sitting next to C.C., who asked me, “So, Mr. Werman”—which he called me in a friendly and cartoonish way—“Mr. Werman, I hear you do drugs!” C.C. DeVille asking me if I do drugs. And I said, “Well, yes, recreationally I do, but not in the studio. Work comes first.”
RIKKI ROCKETT C.C. was a little bit of a bad influence, okay? Because he was actually doing things like that before we really got him in the band.
RIC BROWDE Bruce was doing stuff but it wasn’t really bad in those days. He developed a cocaine problem as soon as there was some success.
C.C. DEVILLE All of a sudden, your real life exceeds your dreams, but then if you still kind of feel empty for something else, for whatever it is, well then the drugs come in.
TOM WHALLEY C.C. was probably the loosest cannon of them all. He was always overly amped as I remember. But his talent had a huge, huge impact on the songwriting.
TOM WERMAN He was loud and he was funny and he was all over the place. Very energetic. And so was his playing. He was more concerned with being as fast as Eddie Van Halen than with being creative. The solo for “Nothin’ But a Good Time” took eight hours, partially because C.C. was constantly going back and forth to the bathroom. I assumed he was freebasing or doing something that had to do with inhaling cocaine, because it took him longer than it would to just go in and snort a couple of lines. That said, he was extremely cooperative … but definitely not all there.
RIKKI ROCKETT It did take an entire day. But it’s a great solo!
TOM WERMAN Poison worked very hard. Especially Rikki Rockett. He would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the greatest drummer in the world. But he enjoyed what he did and he stayed at it.
TOM WHALLEY The band was working incredibly hard. They were writing really, really good songs. They didn’t have that kind of credibility that other bands were getting at the time in that world because of their pop sensibility, but then that’s why I brought in Werman, right? You bring in Tom Werman and now it’s more believable. It has a little more of a harder rock sensibility to it. Then you bring in managers who can really go connect at touring and deal with the promoters and all that stuff and now you’ve got that piece working. You connect at radio and you connect at MTV and you have an explosion and that’s how it all happens.
“DIZZY” DEAN DAVIDSON Britny Fox opened up for Poison on the Open Up and Say … Ahh! tour. They were bigger than all the bands. Their tour was over-the-top. They had a number one single with “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” sold-out shows, marketing out the ass … It was a happy time.
RIKKI ROCKETT Capitol had Duran Duran, who were being marketed, like, very, very, very pop, you know what I mean? And I think there was a little bit of that marketing that went into Poison, whether we liked it or not, and we’d get upset about that. We’d be like, “Nah, this is just … it’s a little pussified.”
TOM WHALLEY With Poison, I don’t know where the line begins of what is a pop band and what isn’t a pop band, but it seemed that their whole approach to the music wasn’t necessarily an aggressive approach. But at the same time you don’t get the success that Poison had without some part of the rock audience buying in. And you could see that on the touring side, which I guess was more the male side of the audience.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL I was talking to Bobby Dall at the L.A. Forum after a Mötley Crüe show and he was all anti–Guns N’ Roses. There was an article that Andy Secher ran in Hit Parader where Slash said that Poison was everything he hated about rock ’n’ roll, that they were posers. Andy said to me, “Do you want me to take this out?” And I said, “Well, did he say it?” He said, “Yes.” He had it on tape. I said, “Then let it play. It’s true.” Bobby was raging about it. What I did bad, I will admit, is that I had a big grin on my face when I talked to him. I thought this was just hysterical. I said, “Bobby, this isn’t Time magazine for Christ’s sake, it’s the Hit Parader. I don’t see how a band that sold two million records can feel so threatened by a band that hasn’t even sold two hundred thousand.” And he looked at me and he threw his beer in my face.
MITCH SCHNEIDER I went to meet Poison on the Open Up and Say … Ahh! tour because I was hired by their management as an independent publicist. Guns N’ Roses was coming up on them and the group needed to harden its image. And as I’m going on the tour bus, I see all these beautiful women leaving, and I think Bret Michaels’ opening line to me was “Oh, you can always feel free to have the ones that we don’t.” That was just Bret being a comedian. He told me about all the women he had in all the cities. We kind of joked about it and I said, “Well, I guess you have it written down in a black book?” He grinned at me, and I put out a press release that Poison had a sex computer, that in it the girls were all categorized by name, city, and type of sex acts they had done. And the line from Bret was “The only safe sex I practice is not falling out of bed.”
“DIZZY” DEAN DAVIDSON The women on that tour were … It’s like, Does Tiger Woods have an 8-iron in his golf bag? Yeah. Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick? Yeah.
LITA FORD (guitarist, the Runaways; solo artist) Poison would have their roadies pick them out of the audience and bring them backstage, so when they got offstage they would go into a room full of girls or women or whatever. Then they would take whoever they wanted out of this room. I thought it was disgusting. I don’t know what they told the girls that went backstage … They were obviously into it and excited about it, but I just thought it was like a herd of cattle. I really did not hang out with those guys.
MITCH SCHNEIDER After the release went out, [journalist] Lisa Robinson proceeded to attack the band mercilessly in the New York Post. Then the group said to me later, about a few weeks in, “You know, Mitch, whenever we’re going to radio stations now, we’re noticing that some of the people don’t even want to talk to us anymore.” And I remember saying, “Well, mission accomplished.”
TOM WHALLEY I don’t know how much impact the critics had on the band. It has to, because when you’re getting criticism like that it’s going to show up somewhere in the day-to-day of the band. But I don’t think it affected them to a large degree. I think that their belief in themselves, that belief in what they were trying to do, just created perseverance for them. Where the conviction to go accomplish something was just beyond the norm. I always had tremendous respect for that part of it.
RIC BROWDE All they need to be judged by from a historian’s point of view is, they were successful. That’s all that counts. At the end of the game it’s, “Who’s got the most toys?” They do.