|
| Music - News - Friday, July 20, 2001
|
Glam guys or bust boys: Pick
your Poison
By Regis Behe
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
For Poison, the
musical road hasn't always been smooth. However, the
band is back on tour and scheduled to play Sunday at the
P-G Pavilion. (HK Management Inc. photo)
| Poison |
|
With Warrant, Quiet Riot and E'nuff Z'nuff.
6 p.m. Sunday.
$11 to $35.
P-G Pavilion, Burgettstown.
(412) 323-1919.
|
| The
band's story is the fulfillment of the American dream.
OK, so it's the rock 'n' roll version, complete with
sex and drugs and other forms of excess. But in the mid-1980s,
a ragtag collection of musicians, originally from Harrisburg,
became one of the most popular bands in the world.
Yeah, Poison was huge, even if critics dismissed the
band as heavy metal comic book caricatures. But three
multiplatinum albums - "Look What the Cat Dragged In," "Open
Up and Say ... Ahh" and "Flesh & Blood" - meant a lot of
people were listening.
Then the band fell apart,
disappeared from the charts, vanished. Certainly, it must have
been because of the conspiring forces of brutal reviews and
the tendency of the public to dismiss bands that top the
charts after brief runs.
But drummer Rikki Rocket
disagrees with that theory. Poison itself, he says, was the
venom that caused the band's demise.
"The only thing
that contributed to it was drug abuse, and that really was it
in a nutshell," says Rocket, who plays Sunday with Poison at
the Post-Gazette Pavillion in a show with Warrant, Quiet Riot
and E'nuff Z'nuff.
Rocket's candid admission is, if
nothing else, admirable considering society's penchant for
pointing fingers. But Rocket takes it one step further: He
even takes the blame for the band's less-than-stellar reviews.
"Once we moved to L.A., we were always hell-bent on
being modest about ourselves," he says. "We wanted the fat
rock shows, we wanted the pageantry and all that stuff. But we
were always the first guys to say, `You know what, there's
better drummers out there.' We have a really good combination
going on, and it's about the music for us, but people would
take those comments and run with it. Instead of saying
`They're modest,' they said, `They admit they suck.'"
Truth be told, Poison probably was never given credit
for writing catchy, basic rock tunes. Maybe Poison didn't have
the depth of U2 or the hip quotient of R.E.M., but the band's
songs did have a certain amount of playful charm. Even if no
one knew what to call it.
"Every couple of years, it
was called another term, whether it was glam or hair metal or
pop metal," he says. "We're a rock 'n' roll band, but if you
want to call it glam, it's fine with me."
Not that
Poison needed any affirmation for what it was doing other than
its record sales. If people were buying albums, they must have
been listening. So what if, as Rocket says, if it wasn't heart
surgery, or even great music.
"When somebody comes up
to me and says, `Because of you, I picked up drumsticks, and
now I'm a drummer. And thank you for the inspiration. And it
got me through some hard times when if I didn't have my music,
I don't know what I would have done,' that kind of stuff is
really what my contribution as an artist is," he says. "Or
sometimes it's not even that. Sometimes it's just that they
had `Nothin' But a Good Time' to listen to to make them get
out of bed and go to work. I get those kind of comments, and
that kind of feedback, and there isn't a critic who can take
me down from that."
Regis Behe can be reached at (412) 320-7990 or rbehe@tribweb.com.
|
