POISON Drummer RIKKI ROCKETT - "We Have Learnt So Much In Our Career It Amazes Me That We Are Not Putting All Of Those Things Together Into An Album"By Mitch Lafon
When
POISON released their first album back in 1986, the hip rock critics panned the band and gave them less than a year to exist. Well, twenty-five years later the band rolls on and drummer
Rikki Rockett looks back on his time in Poison with pride and looks forward with eager anticipation. Bravewords.com caught up with the affable skin man to discuss rock’s greatest guilty pleasure, Poison.
Bravewords.com: You’re on tour this summer with
MÖTLEY CRÜE. Fans have been clamoring for this double bill since 1986, but the Motley guys never seemed to take Poison seriously and often put down the band. Has that negative energy passed or will this tour truly be a battle of the bands?
Rikki Rockett: “I never had the negative energy and, honestly, I’ve always been a Mötley Crüe fan. Let me put it to you this way, recently, I read this article about motorcyclists from an outsider’s perspective and if you don’t ride a motorcycle you think all motorcycles are the same. You don’t know the difference between a Harley, Yamaha or a Triumph until you’re in it and then all of a sudden everything seems so different. So for a fan that loves ‘80s music they don’t care about… They like a
TESLA song, a Motley song, a BON JOVI song and they don’t understand the nuances between the images or this and that. Your general overall fan just likes good music. They like good songs and you can’t have just one band in your playlist. In fact, most don’t even have one genre in their playlist. Most people like everything. If, for example, you look at my wife’s playlist she’s got everything from Motley to MAROON 5 to country. You can’t live by bread alone. I think too many bands get wrapped up in this stuff. I had a beer one time with Lars Ulrich and at the same time there was a cover story in Hit Parader about METALLICA versus Poison. I said to Lars, ‘are we fighting?’ and he said, ‘not that I know of’. People get too twisted about this stuff. What’s worst is when the band starts to get twisted about it too. I don’t know where this stuff comes from. We’ve always gotten along with Motley, but we went through this little period of time where there were some differences and I do understand Motley going ‘we started earlier in rock and if the whole ‘80s thing is coming down – we need to separate ourselves away from it if we want to continue to have a career.’ I get that, but I do think that if you turn tail and run from who you are that can be devastating.”
Bravewords.com: Especially, when fans grew up loving your music and that image. Is there really a difference between Home Sweet Home and Every Rose Has It’s Thorn?
Rockett: “No, not really. A good song is a good song.
Mötley Crüe and
Poison have been through similar circumstances. The nuances are subtle from a fan’s perspective and the main thing is fans are going to love this.”
Bravewords.com: Absolutely and fans are going to get a three hour show filled with about forty top ten hits.
Rockett: “Absolutely and these tours work because fans can bank on getting a lot of bang for the buck. That’s why, for example, STYX and JOURNEY go out together. They may not be the hippest bands on the planet, but it doesn’t matter because you get great music and you know you’re going to get great music. Whereas when people see a bunch of newer bands… you might see eight of them on a bill but, at best, get six good songs. That’s why packages like ours work in this touring market. There’s not a lot of money to go around and we’ve done everything we can to keep tickets prices down.”
Bravewords.com: Do you adjust your set list at all because Mötley Crüe is coming on after you? Do you include more of the faster songs and pull out some of the ballads?
Rockett: “You know what Mitch, we haven’t sat down as a band and talked about it yet.”
Bravewords.com: What would you like to do?
Rockett: “I’d like to do everything. Obviously, we have to keep our hits in there because people want that, but I would probably open up with Let Me Go To The Show, drag some of the older stuff out and just challenge ourselves a little bit more. Motley is going to have a bigger show because they’re headlining, so I’d rather focus on our songs and what the fans really want. I’ve been reading on Facebook what the fans really want and they want something different in the set. We need to write down all the hits we need to cover, but from then on change almost everything. Do all different stuff to what we’ve been doing over the last years. Leave out all the cover songs and just do Poison songs.”
Bravewords.com: As a fan, I think that would be the best thing. If you’re going to play only (maybe) twelve songs, I don’t need to hear your cover of
THE ROMANTICS or
KISS. I’d rather hear 'Back To The Rocking Horse', 'Play Dirty' or
'Blame It On You'.
Rockett: “That’s a great idea by the way.
'Blame It On You' is really a fun song to play.”
Bravewords.com: Quite frankly, you could just play the entire first album from start to finish and you’re done.
Rockett: “I would love for us to book a couple of special shows where we just go and do the whole Look What The Cat Dragged In album. Then, in the encores, we could do a couple of the other hits from the later records, but just cover Cat from top to bottom. We could do the choreography and everything. Obviously, we can’t do everything like it was 1986 nor should we try, but we could be similarly energetic.”
Bravewords.com: Do you think this idea is something the band would consider doing at some point? Isn’t this is the 25th anniversary of Look What The Cat Dragged In?
Rockett: “You know Mitch, that’s exactly what this is and this is exactly what I’ve been trying to get the band to do. I think we should lead the tour with this or end the tour with it. In the situation that we are in with Motley, I think we need to mix up all of our songs for now, but if we did some of our own shows; I think that exactly what you and I are talking about would be great. I would love it. I would really love it. I think fans would go crazy and we could do the set-up the same way and I could build a kit… By the way the kit I built for this year’s tour is a knock-off from the original Open Up and Say Ahh kit.”
Bravewords.com: Speaking from a fan’s perspective, I think this would be a great way to celebrate the beginnings of the band. I would love to hear 'Blame It On You' (like I said before), but also 'Cry Tough' and '#1 Bad Boy'…
Rockett: “I would absolutely love it. I wish to God I could re-record those songs because I play so much different now. The core of who I am is the same, but I would put so much better of a spin on it now and throw those little things in that I just didn’t know back then. They always say that you should really go out on tour first, play all your songs and then come home and record them, but that’s not how we work in the music business. We do exactly the opposite, so you don’t always get all those choices. We were on a budget on that record. We were banging out four tracks a day.”
Bravewords.com: The whole album took only twelve days…
Rockett: “Yeah. That included pre-production and all that. We just had no time. Our main idea when we went in to do that record was not to have a technically proficient record because we just didn’t have the time for that, but what we needed to make it do is freaking ‘party’ (and that’s what we needed to do with our videos as well). We just didn’t have the budget. You don’t want to plant tomatoes in the desert. You plant a cactus in the desert. We decided to take what we knew would grow in that environment and did the best we could with it and that’s why I think that record works. That fervent feel of it is contagious. Believe me, we were not at the best place in our lives when we made that record. We had been turned down by every record company and here we were settling… well, at that time we considered it to be settling for an independent, but when I look back I’m glad we did because it put us in the driver’s seat. At the time, we didn’t have any money. We couldn’t play any gigs for a while because we were concentrating on putting together songs for the album (writing and all that stuff). We disappeared from the circuit so we couldn’t bring any money in. We were dirt poor Mitch. We didn’t have anything and we weren’t at the best place in our lives, but our music ‘partied’, we lived in that and we decided to make a record that felt like that because if it lived in us maybe it would live in other people too. It worked.”
Bravewords.com: It did work. It’s been twenty-five years since I first bought it and I’m still not fed up with it yet. I put it on the other day and listened to it from top to bottom. You simply cannot put on that album and only listen to one song. You have to play the whole album. To me, it’s still magical. If you ever play one of those albums shows – make sure you capture it on film and put it out on Blu-ray. You’ll be able to update the sound like you mentioned before, but without having to re-record the album.