Thanks to Sidney from Slogan’s Rock and Metal Extravaganza for inviting me to send in a video for this Poison-ous episode! (Logan declined to appear – not a Poison fan!) I was recently asked to participate in this list show, picking my favourite songs from each Poison studio album. Of course, I had to do something different, so I included Swallow This Live too, so that I could use one of their best singles “So Tell Me Why”. You will also get a list from Tim Durling in this video featuring Sidney and his guest Joseph Suto.
It’s pretty easy to slag Poison; I should know as I get enough troll-y comments about them. However, as you will see below, Poison have plenty of great material. You could make your own “best of” from these lists that are better than the ones you can buy at retail.
BONUS video: Some Poison-ous backstory with Sidney and some OCD…
RECORD STORE TALES #1157: The Lone Classic Hard Rocker
For almost my entire tenure at the Beat Goes On, I was pretty much the only “classic hard rocker”. By that I mean, the guy who not only liked Rush, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, but also Poison, Dokken, Motley Crue, Kiss, and the Scorpions. I started in 1994, and hard rock was definitely the black sheep of the musical family back then. The entire genre had received a hard thrashing from the new generation of bands, who had cleaned the slate and wiped the charts of the old guard. For a little while, anyway. When I began in 1994, hard rock was all but banned from store play. That’s obviously a broad statement, as I distinctly recall giving a store play copy of Tesla’s Bust A Nut a shot while working with the boss. He didn’t like it, but there was no way I was going to play Poison in the store with him around.
“Nobody’s buying that stuff,” he would say, and he wasn’t wrong.
When Trevor started later that year, he too liked a lot of hard rock bands, but he probably more into the current crop of groups. Brother Cane, and this new snotnosed group out of the UK called Oasis. He discovered all that Britpop stuff on a trip to England, and he was quick to adapt to electronic and dance beats too. While he enjoyed some Poison and Motley Crue, I don’t think he would have played them in store. I don’t think he would have called himself a hard rocker.
When I was bestowed my own store to manage in 1996, my staff gave me a nickname: Cheeser.
The reason being, I listened to “cheesey” music, such as hard rock. They wouldn’t give me credit for the jazz albums, or the Faith No More collection. They only looked at the Dokken and the Brighton Rock. I should have said, “Don’t call me Cheeser. I’m your boss.” Not that I was opposed to nicknames. Many employees had nicknames of their own, but that one really bugged me. It was unfair and it was uncool. It was one-dimensional. I remained the only classic hard rocker at the store. Oh sure, one guy liked the Black Crowes. Another guy had a soft spot for classic 70s Kiss. They were not hard rockers in that classic “cheeser” sense.
I look back on those days, and I was very different then. I was not assertive. I was eager to fit in. So, I let them call me Cheeser.
I felt like a second-class citizen due to my musical tastes. The boss seemed to think playing a Poison in the album would lose us sales. He wanted a family-friendly atmosphere, and I tended to be the rebel when he wasn’t around. I was told to remove AC/DC from the CD player once. An band that has sold about 200 million copies worldwide, incidentally, but with God as my witness, my boss hit the “stop” button one morning and took it off himself.
This is why I had low sales, I was assured. You wanted people to linger and shop. People would leave the store if the music was too heavy. I only saw it happen a couple times, but no more than I saw it happen with other genres of music such as rap and dance. It was rare you’d have a walk-out due to the music, but I will argue that hard rock did not get this reception any more than other genres. I do remember one guy giving me credit for playing Poison’s Native Tongue one afternoon.
“I’ve never heard this before in a music store!” he said, with his compliments.
I would get the occasional surprised reaction when people would ask what the cool music I played was. Motley Crue? Poison? No way! That doesn’t sound like Poison.
Our store was very generic “music store circa late 90s early 2000s” when you walked in. There would be music playing from the current charts, lots of indi bands with cool haircuts, and the requisite Motown, soul, and 60s albums. Exactly the music you expected to hear, and I suppose that was the point. If my manager reviews were poor, one of the gripes was the music I chose to play. I broke the rules, and they made note of it. I became quite despondent. I would pick five CDs in the morning, that I picked for the soul purpose of not getting in shit that day, and I hit shuffle. I’d leave them in all day. Or, I would just leave in whatever the previous shift had playing. I literally stopped caring, because those above me had sucked me dry. I had no soul left. My heart was empty. It was time to go.
By the end, my only motivation was survival. There was no enjoyment. There was no challenge. There was nothing to look forward to, except a day off. I was dead inside. I couldn’t care about music anymore. The music I played in the store towards the end…I can’t remember the bands. I seem to remember names like Death Cab For Cutie, Death From Above 1979, and Metric, but I cannot tell you if those were bands we played in the store, or bands that the staff liked. Eventually, some of their musical tastes wore off on me. I did buy a Killers CD, and I did buy one Bright Eyes. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, but I have not played either in over 15 years.
I know some of my old co-workers and staffers were surprised to hear all these revelations from me. What can I say? I was fakin’ it. I was fighting, quite frankly, to stay alive at that place. You can take that to mean whatever you like. In those days, I was not aware of the importance of mental health. The store was run with a real old school “pick yourself up by the bootstraps” methodology. I remember one day, my boss handed me a business card with the name of a counselling service on it. I didn’t ask for this, and I considered it a huge invasion of my privacy. I also considered it an invasion of my privacy when he called my parents behind my back at their home. Yet, when I wanted him to listen to me, the only person who could possible change my fate, he didn’t listen. He waited to talk. He lectured. The bullying situation at the store had reached unacceptable levels, and he was so biased towards certain people, that I had no hope. None at all.
I went from being the lone classic hard rocker, to completely alone. It was a very dark time in my life. I am sorry if my old friends do not understand why I had such anger for the people in charge. I know I am not the only person to feel alone, but what happened, happened. It was an emotional time and I wrote about it emotionally. It was a necessary expulsion of bad feelings and poison.
But not Poison. Today there’s nobody calling me Cheeser. They might shrug and wonder why I need so much Poison, but the difference is respect.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! Welcome back to WTF Search Terms, one and all! Yes, it’s another batch of 10 search terms that somehow led people to my site. Some terms are simple typos, others are more chaotic, but they all have one thing in common: They all led people here. Enjoy!
This first one is a simple typo, but I like it so much, I might have to change the spelling of my last name!
I love this vintage interview clip. If anyone in rock holds the title of “Captain A.D.D.”, it would have to be Poison’s Bret Michaels! This scattershot blurb on good press vs. bad press goes about a million miles per hour, but it’s all fun.
1993: Native Tongue was not doing well on the charts, but MuchMusic dutifully had Bret Michaels and new guitarist Richie Kotzen on hand for an interview with Erica Ehm. It’s a pretty solid 10 minutes, touching on the following topics:
Getting “serious” lyrically
Safe sex
C.C. leaving the band, Bobby breaking his hand
Reasons for being in a band, still
The “Stand” video, and the Bill Clinton inauguration
Critics
Bret writing “country music”?
Toning down the image
Richie Kotzen utters one complete sentence the whole time. This interview is remarkable not because Bret Michaels is always entertaining, but because Richie Kotzen didn’t fit in and it’s painfully obvious.
RECORD STORE TALES #922: Running Through Alberta (1990)
A long time ago, in a constitutional monarchy not far away, prices were lower. The despised goods and services tax (GST) kicked in January 1, 1991. This federal tax added a 7% levy to your average purchase. In the before-fore times, in the Canadian province known as Alberta, there was no such thing as a “sales tax”. What you saw on the sticker was what you paid. It was an exhilarating time and place to be. The GST wrecked that, but our last trek out west before the hated tax kicked in was nothing short of glorious.
School was out for summer, and I quit my part-time job packing groceries to hang out at the cottage and take a special trip to Calgary. It was time for a visit with cousin Geoff, formerly known as “Captain Destructo”. The most important things to do on any trip were two-fold:
Pack appropriate music for the journey.
Buy music on aforementioned journey.
I had just received two albums that were brand new to me from the Columbia House music club: School’s Out, by Alice Cooper, and Come An’ Get It by Whitesnake. As my newest acquisitions, they had to come along. I also brought Steve Vai’s Passion & Warfare which I was recently obsessed with. Finally, I carried enough cash from my job that I had just quit, to buy as much music as I could find. Stuff that none of the stores in Kitchener had in stock.
The clear memory of driving through the mountains with School’s Out blasting in my ears brings a smile to my face. While some moments were undeniably weird (“Gutter Cat vs. The Jets”), I couldn’t believe how catchy the album was. I still can’t. Alice Cooper records were not necessarily designed to deliver catchy songs. They were twisted, and School’s Out was like a Twizzler. Regardless, “Gutter Cat” was entertaining while being unforgettable. I couldn’t wait to share it with my best friend Bob. He loved cats! Another track that took me by surprise was “Alma Mater”, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. The fact that I’d be graduating in a year was scary. But the roaring “Public Animal #9” just made me sing along. I also dug “Blue Turk” although I had no idea how to categorize it. To me it sounded like something from an old musical from days gone by. Here I was discovering this ancient music for the first time while the Rocky Mountains zipped past me in the back seat of a minivan. I like to appreciate moments like that. I just stared out the window while Dennis Dunaway buzzed my ears with bass.
Next up was Whitesnake. I still love Come An’ Get It; it’s probably my overall favourite Whitesnake. A few songs don’t click, such as “Girl”, but lemme tell you folks — “Child of Babylon” is another one of those songs that you just have to experience while driving through the Rockies. Bob and I were slowly discovering old Whitesnake. He was the first to have Saints & Sinners, but I was the first to have Come An’ Get It. It was something of a “blind buy” for me, since I didn’t know any of the songs. By the end of the trip, I’d already love “Wine, Women An’ Song”, “Come An’ Get It”, and “Lonely Days, Lonely Nights”.
Two favourites in the making, it was already turning into a memorable vacation. I enjoyed shopping at corny gift shops. I bought some goofy round sunglasses with flip-open lenses. Alberta is dinosaur country, and so I bought a casting of a Tyrannosaurus tooth. At another gift shop I bought a totem knick-knack. I remember Geoffrey and I climbing the modest mountains around the hoodoos at Drumheller, and finding a cave near the top where we paused and caught some shade.
When we hit the Calgary Zoo, Geoff showed us how to put coins on the train tracks to be crushed into minature copper and nickle pancakes. They had a little train that took tours of the park. It ran on a regular schedule so we always knew about when we should put the coins on the track. I had heard that copper guitar picks were the best, but they were hard to find, so I crushed a couple pennies. I turned them into guitar picks once we got home. We didn’t crush anything more valuable than a dime, but sometimes you’d lose the coin if it went flying off the track. (Incidentally, you can’t derail a train with a penny, that is a myth.) We could tell the conductor knew what we were doing and was getting annoyed, so we cut it out.
When we finally hit a music store in a Calgary mall, I was elated. I was always on the lookout for singles, and here I found a few notable ones. Aerosmith’s The Other Side EP was an easy “yes”. It had a number of remixes that, while not great, were exclusives. It also had something called the “Wayne’s World Theme” live. What was this “Wayne’s World”? I knew not, but it wasn’t on the album, so I was happy enough.
Poison were hot on the charts with their brand-new album Flesh & Blood. Bob was already raving about the album, and one song he pointed out was “Valley of Lost Souls”. I found the cassette single for “Unskinny Bop” which included this song and an instrumental pretentiously called “Swamp Juice (Soul-O)”. I never particularly cared for “Unskinny Bop”, but it was the current Poison hit, and “Valley of Lost Souls” was as good as advertised. I also located Jon Bon Jovi’s solo single “Blaze of Glory”. I didn’t know it yet but this single had some slightly edited versions of the album cuts — another exclusive.
The purchase I might have been happiest with was a re-buy. Although it seems ridiculous that at age 18 I was already re-buying albums, it had begun. My cassette of Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny was shite. For all intents and purposes, it only had one channel. I owned Rocka Rolla on vinyl, but didn’t really have a good way of playing it and making it sound decent back then. I knew there was a cassette on Attic records with both albums on one tape, and I found it in Calgary. I was glad to finally have a copy of Sad Wings that I could properly listen to. I even gained new appreciation for Rocka Rolla on those mountain drives. “Caviar and Meths” sounds amazing drifting through the mountains.
Not only did we find some cool stuff we couldn’t easily locate in Ontario, but we paid no tax. Since Alberta had no provincial sales tax, everything we were buying, we were buying cheaper!
I wanted a cowboy hat. We went shopping for them, but I was having a hard time deciding and then Geoffrey told me about an Alberta saying. Something about “everybody in Alberta has an asshole and a cowboy hat.” Either that or “every asshole in Alberta has a cowboy hat.” Same difference. Either way, I was dissuaded.
Geoffrey could be exhausting and I really wanted nothing more than to lie down and listen to some new tunes, so I was granted a couple hours of privacy. We traded tapes back and forth for listening. My sister Kathryn had the new single for “Can’t Stop Falling Into Love” by Cheap Trick so I listened to that while she borrowed my Poison.
Here’s a funny detail. For the car trip with Whitesnake and Alice Cooper, I can remember being on the left side of the vehicle. For Rocka Rolla, I seem to remember sitting on the right. The view was always great. Nothing like Ontario. The air was different, and even the weather was unusual to us. People left their doors unlocked, we were told by Uncle Phil.
Auntie Lynda spoiled us and took us on all these day trips; it was fantastic. It was the last great summer holiday. I know I kept a journal of the trip, which seems to be unfortunately lost. Great trip though it was, I looked forward to coming home and seeing my friends. Showing off my new purchases and sharing my new music. The flight home was uneventful and we arrived late at night and exhausted. I didn’t sleep much that night — I had recordings of WWF wrestling matches to catch up on. The last great summer holiday was over, but never forgotten.
POISON – “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (1988 Capitol 3″ CD single)
This is a beautiful item that I’m happy to have in my collection. 3″ CD singles were uncommon, but you’ve probably seen one before. What is less common is the clamshell 3″ case that this Poison single came in. A lot of 3″ singles came in regular 5″ cases, or a cardboard sleeve. Clamshells are rare. This one, called a “Gem Pak” (patent pending) was specifically made to house a “CD3”, another outdated term. It’s made of white plastic and the artwork is in the form of a sticker which covers the front, back and spine of the case. The Gem Pak’s flaw (patent pending!) is that it does not hold the disc in securely. It wants to pop out. Take care when handling one of these that the disc doesn’t fall out when you open it.
I’m a defender of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”. I loved it as a kid. I remember some people saying it might be “too country”, which is wasn’t. It’s just an acoustic ballad but a well written one and deserving of its success, if not its notoriety. It tended to spawn a generation of soundalikes, a fuzzy swarm of late 80s acousti-balladry that ultimately only served to take bands like Poison down, while ushering in the grunge era. “Every Rose” broke down walls for Poison, but the backlash was inevitable. When Bill & Ted quoted it to get into heaven in 1991, it was already all over. I can hear all that history when I listen to this single. It’s an excellent song, and even C.C.’s solo, as inarticulate as it is, still fits like an electrically heated glove.
The B-side “Livin’ for the Minute” shows off the heavier side of Poison. Fans might forget that Poison liked to really spit one out every now and then. C.C.’s solo is bonkers on this one, but perfectly suited to the frantic tune. Bret really cuts loose too. Poison actually have some pretty cool B-sides.
These tracks are both available on the remastered Open Up and Say…Ahh!! CD, but you gotta snap this one up if you find it in the wild.
There’s a sports phrase in the parlance of the profession: a “ringer”. It means boosting your team with a player who who’s above your league, usually with accusations of dishonesty or bad sportsmanship. If you had a beer league hockey team, and your friend’s son happens to be Connor McDavid, and he substitutes for your usual center Big Jim McBob, then you have a ringer.
I was watching some live music on YouTube and wondered if there is a rock band equivalent.
Though it’s not considered cheating, did Queensryche pull a ringer when they got Todd La Torre to sing? Todd is a fine vocalist who enables Queensryche to perform the old material properly; stuff with notes so high that only a young singer can really pull it off. Journey did something similar with Arnel Pineda. They wanted to play the original songs in the original keys, not tune them down for an older singer.
Original Queensryche singer Geoff Tate’s voice has changed over the decades. That’s nature. He can be hit or miss when singing the high stuff, so he tends not to anymore. He’s able to steer around difficult notes and still play the song. La Lorre has no issues with them however, adding some of his own grit to the screams. Todd La Torre is 45 years old. Geoff Tate is closer to his old bandmates at age 61. If Queensryche were to look for another singer in his 60s, they wouldn’t be able to find one able to scream the opening to “Queen of the Reich”.
Go back in time further, to the early 1990s. One band that absolutely hired a ringer was Poison when they acquired Richie Kotzen to replace C.C. Deville.
Without being too unkind, C.C. and Richie are not playing the same sport when it comes to guitar. C.C. is a WWF wrestler, hammering you over the head with loud sloppy moves and tricks. Richie is like a light boxer with heart, a fast contender with a feel for it.
When Poison picked up Kotzen, they plucked someone from the upper echelons to replace somebody who was basically still in the garage. While it failed to win fans in the “get serious 90s”, it did give them an album that they never would have been able to create otherwise. Eventually they were forced to bring C.C. back, but they can never perform material from the Kotzen album. They’d sound ridiculous.
It could be argued that Kiss hired ringers with almost every replacement member in their band, from Eric Carr to Vinnie Vincent to Eric Singer and Bruce Kulick. All of these guys are, on a technical level at least, lightyears better players than the original members. But on the other hand, none of those replacements could capture the sheer vibe of the original band either.
Think about it. When a veteran band loses an original member, do they ever replace them with a peer? Very rarely. Deep Purple replaced Jon Lord (age 61 at retirement) with Don Airey (54 at hiring). But Black Sabbath replaced Bill Ward (age 71 today) with Tommy Clufetos (40 today). No matter what Bill claims, Clufetos is simply in better physical condition. He’s a ringer.
What is your take on this subject? Are these guys ringers, or just regular hired guns? Is there really a difference?
What is a “CHR edit”? It’s a special single edit of a song specifically intended for “contemporary hit radio”. In other words, Top 40. So, when “Stand” by Poison was selected to be the first single from 1993’s brand new Native Tongue album, it had to be trimmed for length. Getting Poison on the radio was going to prove to be an impossible task, so why make it harder by giving them a 5:16 long track that they definitely wouldn’t touch? “Stand” was shortened to 4:21, with much of Richie Kotzen’s delightfully idiosyncratic guitar licks getting the axe, along with some of the choir.
The cassette you see here contains two edited versions of “Stand”: the 4:21 “CHR edit” and another at 4:30 simply called “edit”. The differences are in the guitar solo which starts to deviate at the 2:28 mark. It’s in interesting curiosity, a peak inside the minutia of thinking that goes into marketing a song. “Hey, this format needs another nine seconds of song, leave in some guitar solo.” Is that how it worked?
The tape has both edit versions on both sides…twice. 2x2x2=8 times total, that you will hear “Stand” by Poison, if you play it all the way through. Call the CIA and let ’em know I have this cassette; they can use it with their enhanced interrogation techniques. I’ll sell.
On that note I can all but guarantee this cassette has never been played through, ever. It was sent to the Record Store about a year and a half before I started working there. The owner hated Poison. Hated — with a passion. There is no way he played this tape in store, ever. I rescued it from a giant, forgotten stack of promos that were stuffed into a bin. All garbage. “Don’t take any of those,” said the owner. Eventually all that junk was slated to be thrown out when the only location that sold tapes changed formats at the end of 1996.
This tape is valuable for one thing: it reveals the true North American release date for Native Tongue. Currently (August 2019), Wikipedia claims Native Tongue was released on February 8, 1993. That’s impossible because the 8th was a Monday. New releases came out on Tuesdays. This promo cassette clearly states on the back that the forthcoming album Native Tongue was retailing on February 16 — a Tuesday. You’re welcome, internet.
I have a surprising amount of Poison interviews on my VHS tapes. They must have been an extremely media friendly band. From the Native Tongue period alone, I have three separate interviews on my tapes. The first was the best Bret Michaels interview I’ve seen, on Kitchener’s Metal Mike show in 1993. The next will be a sit down with Bret and Richie Kotzen in the MuchMusic studios. This one, however, is a rare live interview with drummer Rikki Rockett.
There are awkward moments, like when he lies about the album selling “really good”. Hear all about the “party cage” and other tour goings-on. He also talks about growing up in a musical family, which is probably the most illuminating part.
mikeladano.com 