"Life Loves a Tragedy": Reports of Poison Calling Off Tour Disappoint Fans
Widespread Innumeracy in Reporting Even More Disappointing
The announcement that Poison has called off their “fortieth anniversary tour” this summer due to financial disagreements has disappointed fans, including this one.
The reporting, which has not only graced the screens of expected sources like Rolling Stone and Metal Sludge but has also made the New York Post and Fox News, has perhaps disappointed me even more.
On Sunday, drummer Rikki Rockett announced that Poison would not be touring this year because lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist Bret Michaels had asked for too much of the touring revenue. Rockett was quoted as saying Michaels asked for what amounted to around six dollars for every dollar he and their bandmates C.C. DeVille (guitar) and Bobby Dall (bass guitar) would be paid on the tour. Michaels reportedly plans to tour with his solo band instead. Fox News reported Rockett’s commenting on the financial issue: “I don’t do this just for the money. I do have a love for this, absolutely. But at the same time, you don’t want to go out and work really hard just to make somebody else a bunch of money.” Rockett sounded sanguine, even magnanimous, stating that he was not mad at Michaels and emphasizing that he was grateful for what they achieved together and the prosperity it brought. “Every member of this band has given me so much privilege in life. It’s like hating your parents,.”
Formed in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania in 1983 (as Paris) by Michaels, Dall, Rockett, and Matt Smith, the band moved to Los Angeles in 1984 around the time they changed their name to Poison. Smith was not confident of the band’s prospects, and his son was about to be born in Pennsylvania, so he went home. The band recruited Brooklyn native DeVille and made a series of successful albums starting with Look What the Cat Dragged In (Enigma Records 1986), which would be the reason for any fortieth anniversary celebration this year. The band is perhaps best known for #1 hit “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” from their second album, Open Up and Say … Ahh! (Enigma/Capitol, 1988), but they had many other hits. Not the most adept musically, they worked hard with what minimal natural ability they had (DeVille was the most gifted) and became impressive songwriters. Poison wrote songs that could be hook-intensive pop hard rock songs to more introspective, deeper album tracks like “Life Goes On”, “Life Loves a Tragedy”, “Theatre of The Soul”, and “Strange”. Of particular interest to me is the album Crack a Smile. Recorded in 1994, the band fought with Capitol Records for well over a year; the label refused to release it and asked for a greatest hits album instead. The compilation was successful but ruined the band’s career far more than Nineties grunge did. While grunge was not entirely unrelated to Poison’s mid-career travails, the band, which had largely abandoned its “glam rock” roots before then, was surviving the changing times before their record label turned them into a legacy act. (Unfortunately, Capitol Records essentially did the same thing to The Beach Boys.) Capitol finally quietly released Crack a Smile in 2000. The band continued to tour successfully but essentially stopped recording new songs after 2002. I published a review of 2000’s Crack a Smile … and More! in The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s student-run newspaper, in 2000. I can’t find it but will publish it here if I do. I may publish other writing related to Crack a Smile, which I consider an egregiously underrated album that the culture of 1995 desperately needed.
The band were flamboyant and visual, with and without the cosmetics and hairspray they wisely abandoned by the end of 1988. They also evinced energy and enthusiasm with a do-it-yourself ethos. One of the more perspicacious critics of the time described them as a cross between KISS and the Sex Pistols. Their politics, such as it was, and their patriotism were unusual among rock bands. They thanked “The American Free Enterprise System” on their albums and received a letter of gratitude from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney for donating twenty thousand copies of Flesh & Blood (Enigma/Capitol 1990) to the US military during Operation Desert Storm.
I eventually saw the band live four times: twice in 1999 (in Holmdel, New Jersey and Camden, New Jersey); once in 2004 (opening for KISS in Holmdel, New Jersey); and once in 2022, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I didn’t bother with them during my years in California due to the static nature of what had become a nostalgia show, but after the unforgivable horrors of the 2020s, I needed a more benevolent, liberty-loving band, and I found them again. I was hoping to see them this year but can accept that Michaels would prefer to play his Poison songs in his solo band. What I find unacceptable and surprising even to me is the near-universal innumeracy in the reports I’m reading, including at the New York Post and Fox News.
Rockett is widely quoted as saying that Michaels asked for six dollars for every dollar the other bandmates would get paid. Virtually every article I have read in the days since asserts that Michaels is asking for “600% more” than the earnings of the other band members. As of last night, I have not seen any corrections.
Six dollars is five hundred percent more than one dollar, not six hundred percent more. How many editors have mindlessly regurgitated an incorrect solution to an easy mathematical problem?
Frank Zappa once said that rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read. What even Zappa might not have seen coming is that eventually all journalism would consist of people who can’t write or do basic mathematics. The decline in journalism is not unrelated to the decline in music (and music record labels) over the decades.
Michaels plans on touring this year with his solo band, which includes Cinderella bassist Eric Brittingham. (Cinderella, also from Pennsylvania, were one of the last bands, along with The Hooters, to emerge from the Philadelphia music scene.) Rockett has announced that his band The Rockett Mafia will tour in Poison’s absence, performing Look What the Cat Dragged In in its entirety. If that eventuates, some of the album’s obscure tracks, such as “Want Some Need Some”, will be performed live for the first time (as far as I know) since 1987. It would be welcome, as Poison’s and Bret Michaels’s setlists all contain about the same fifteen warhorses that have been overplayed for decades. Michaels has solo albums and solo singles, but his concerts, including one I attended at a small casino ballroom in Bensalem, Pennsylvania in 2022, are almost entirely Poison staples. Poison opened for Def Leppard and Motley Crue on The Stadium Tour later that year. I declined to see The Stadium Tour but did see Poison headline Musikfest 2022 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on August 7 of that year in between Stadium Tour dates. They looked and sounded good, and I’ve rarely seen more enthusiastic musicians, but the only surprise was their cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band”. The most recent, and most obscure, song in the set was “Ride the Wind” (from Flesh & Blood), a #38 hit on the “Billboard Hot 100” in 1991. So, perhaps a Poison tour this year would be redundant. At least Rockett and company will be playing a few rarities.
The band is still relatively young (compared to KISS, anyway) and are in remarkable shape for their ages. Hopefully, they will reconcile and deliver at least one more introspective musical musing and at least one more rousing, life-affirming hard rock celebration to a world that could use them more than ever.
Directed by Marty Callner, the 1988 music video for “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” is a brilliant visual integration of the song’s themes, with cinema verité footage of some of Poison’s 1988 road tribulations. Michaels wrote the lyrics when he called his girlfriend at home from a payphone on the road while doing laundry and heard a man’s voice in the background. He went into the laundromat and turned heartbreak into song and success.