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Poison: Look What the Cat Dragged into FivePoint
Even though Poison has not released any new material in more than a decade, this hair-metal stalwart headlines the Nothing but a Good Time tour, slated to end June 24.
But to tell from the crowd—middle-aged men valiantly trying to disguise their paunches (or not) while the women squeezed themselves into Spandex, push-up bras, and stiletto-heeled boots—they were aglow with memories of roaming Sunset Strip in the 1980s, the heyday of Hollywood glam-metal, with Van Halen having blazed the trail and Guns 'N Roses just around the corner. And with an opening cartoon that paid tribute to that bygone era, Poison proved that it knew its demographic to a tee—even one that looked worn-out from too many washings.
Fittingly, then, Poison drew its dozen-song set exclusively from its first three albums, all released on Enigma/Capitol: Look What the Cat Dragged In (1986), Open Up and Say . . . Ahh! (1988), and Flesh & Blood (1990), and all near-chart-toppers from that halcyon period. (The debut peaked at Number Three on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart while the next two each reached Number Two.) There were no surprises and, for fans, no disappointments—that signature Poison song arrived sooner or later. But as this was generic and derivative glam-metal when it was first released, you had to wonder if the audience was there for the band—or simply for themselves.
Give Poison this much: The band went through its dues-paying days. Trekking from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in 1983, it joined countless bands hoping to become the next Ratt, Mötley Crüe, or even Van Halen, eventually landing gigs at the Troubadour to build a local following. When original guitarist Matt Smith returned to Pennsylvania in 1985, singer Bret Michaels, bassist Bobby Dall, and drummer Rikki Rockett recruited C.C. DeVille to replace him.
By 1986, Poison had signed with Enigma Records and released Look What the Cat Dragged In, whose initial single, "Cry Tough," failed to chart—but the next three singles from the record did make the Billboard Hot 100: The raunchy rocker "Talk Dirty to Me" peaked at Number Nine while the heartbreak ballad "I Won't Forget You" went to Number 13 and "I Want Action," another unsubtle me-want-sex-now rocker, got as far as 50th place. Then, with a cover of Kiss's "Rock 'n' Roll All Nite," the band landed on the 1987 Less Than Zero film soundtrack alongside Aerosmith (a cover of "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu"), the Bangles ("Hazy Shade of Winter"), LL Cool J ("Goin' Back to Cali"), and Slayer (a cover of "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida"). Poison had arrived.
Mugging with guitarist C.C. DeVille, singer Bret Michaels praised "California" to the skies in his efforts to fire up this Golden State crowd.
Poison opened with "Look What the Cat Dragged In" before diving immediately into "I Want Action" to get the crowd fired up. Then Michaels really began to talk. Again, give Poison this much: The band appreciates its fanbase, almost to the point of solicitousness. That might not be too surprising—Poison is beginning its sixth tour without a new album to promote, so it might well be grateful that the faithful keep returning. By the mid-point of the set, I figured that my name had become simply "California" since Michaels made sure to address the crowd as such every second sentence.
Part of Michaels's rap was the allure of roaring down the open road on his motorcycle. Cue "Ride the Wind," the first of three tracks from Flesh & Blood, as black-and-white footage of biker gangs flickered on the video monitor above the drum riser (although a lack of images from The Wild One seemed to be sorely-missed cliché). Next came "Cry Tough," which made thematic sense as "life ain't no easy ride," before junior-high rumination reached full-flower with "I Won't Forget You" as the video cameras panned the crowd, looking for wistful women mooning over that first lost love, or at least the first guy who managed to get her to yield to his "I Want Action" demand.
Then came the solos—no hair-metal concert is complete without them, right? Wielding his white Flying Vee like a machine gun, C.C. DeVille showed that he'd studied Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and its piercing arpeggios—without offering any improvements of his own. Similarly, Rikki Rockett's drum solo, an umpteenth variation of John Bonham's "Moby Dick" (itself cribbed from Ginger Baker's "Toad"—but there I go Woodstocking again), made me long for Tommy Lee's levitating drum kit before bassist Bobhy Dall wandered onto the runway to show us he knew how to play . . . "The Pink Panther Theme." Who knew he was a Henry Mancini fan? Dall, by the way, seemed an odd sight in his flannel shirt and jeans, as if he made a wrong turn while looking to fill in at the Mudhoney concert.
Hoping to pull the crowd back into the show, Michaels rolled out Poison's supremely incongruous rendition of the 1972 Loggins and Messina hit "Your Mama Don't Dance." This bouncy fluff, which Poison took to Number Ten in 1989, features the same plainspoken sentiment that marked the next two songs, albeit a pair that exhibited the band's seriousness—"Fallen Angel" and "Something to Believe In."
Whether Michaels knew that FivePoint was built on an old Marine Corps airbase, he did dedicate the latter song to "all the men and women in the military"— adding that his father was a veteran—before he took pains to note that he wasn't making any kind of political statement; he only wanted to honor the men and women who protect our freedoms.
If that sounds like recruiting propaganda, it should come as no surprise that then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney personally thanked the band for contributing 20,000 copies of Flesh & Blood to US forces during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. On the other hand, political science is probably not a hot topic at a Poison concert, not the place to point out, as German general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz did back in 1832, that "war is merely the continuation of politics by other means" and thus any acknowledgement of the military is inherently political—but, hey, let's just rock, dude.
Open up and say . . . Poison. This Eighties glam-metal band is out to have "Nothin' but a Good Time" during its 2018 concert tour.
And rock the band did, following up "Something to Believe In" with . . . "Unskinny Bop"? Leaving aside the spoils of war, this winking rocker seems, thematically at least, cut from the same cloth as AC/DC's "Whole Lotta Rosie," although the band seems mystified by where the term "unskinny bop" came from . . . Never mind, as the band's next move had Michaels, like Cheap Trick's Robin Zander before him, strapping on the acoustic for the chart-topping ballad "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Again the cameras panned slowly across the misty-eyed roses swaying slowly to memories of their own thorny heartbreaks before the mood shifted abruptly, with Michaels exhorting "California" to have "Nothin' but a Good Time"—this tour's very slogan—as the band closed its set.
Well, there was an awkward interval when it wasn't clear whether the house lights were going to come up or whether the band would return for an encore, but a tattoo from Rockett's drums alerted us to the last hurrah of "Talk Dirty to Me" before Michaels urged us confusingly to "all join the party" and, stranger still, to dig the song coming up on the house PA system, AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long." Then the lights came up, and it was time to leave FivePoint.
Currently, Not in Hall of Fame has Poison ranked at 204 among artists not yet in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although I have given up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for reasons that I elaborated at length last year, I do have to wonder: Is Poison the Grand Funk Railroad of Eighties hair-metal? Critically reviled, but hugely popular and commercially successful, with a fanbase that is still fairly rabid? Well, perhaps not all are so rabid now—many of the near-capacity crowd had begun filing out about two thirds through Poison's ninety-minute set—but that could just be the Southern California phenomenon of bailing early on any event. (Fittingly enough, Poison released a version of Grand Funk's "We're an American Band" in 2006.)
Poison is thoroughly mediocre. The band does not rise above average. Its songs have no depth beyond their titles, which need no interpretation to uncover the shallow sentiment contained within. But that is what many people seem to need—simple reinforcement of common feelings and beliefs. Or, heavy metal's version of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Metal of any kind is underrepresented in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But among hair-metal bands, Mötley Crüe (ranked at 70 on this site) and even Ratt (criminally underrated on this site with a ranking at 500—haven't you heard "Lovin' You's a Dirty Job" or "I Want a Woman"?) are much better choices than Poison.
But what do I know? I nixed the idea of Cheap Trick getting into the Rock Hall in 2016. They got elected that year. And for years I kept writing that Deep Purple was not Hall-worthy. Voters finally thought otherwise. After seeing Cheap Trick, even long past its heyday, I don't have a problem with the band making the Rock Hall. Then again, I've abandoned the idea of the "small Hall" that used to drive my evaluations—that is simply futile given the continually evolving, always expansive, and ever inclusive nature of the music. Now the problem is throughput—how to get as many acts into the Hall as quickly as possible. Which then leads to the question of whether the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has any meaning other than as an ever-growing, scattershot repository of Western rock and pop legacy, but that's for another time.
Still, come September, I'll have a chance to reflect on this anew when I go to see Deep Purple at FivePoint along with Judas Priest (ranked at 10 on this site, and nominated for the first time in 2018). Watch this space for an update—in the meantime, you can find out what I thought of Deep Purple the last time I saw the band.
But in any case, I expect that for a $20 ticket, the price will have been worth it. And that's nothing but a good time.
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