Bret Michaels says C.C. DeVille was not his first choice to be Poison's lead guitarist
Poison had a lot of success in the late 80's with the personnel they had, but Bret Michaels had another guitar player in mind
Poison was one of the most successful bands of the late-80’s, starting with their 1986 debut album Look What The Cat Dragged In. In a recent interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, lead singer Bret Michaels talked about how low expectations for the record yielded a sweet deal for the band.
“[They] said, ‘Look, you'd have to be your own label, distributed through us and we're going to do this deal together with Enigma Records,’”
And the beauty that happened to us is they gave us a great, then-unbelievable superstar royalty rate," Michaels noted, "because they only thought we were going to sell 10 or 12,000 records, so there was not that much money to divide up.”
He (Michaels) noted that that "the thought in my brain was, ‘Hell, no, I'm going for platinum!’ But the other side of it was we kept our publishing [rights]. ... And anyone who knows the amount now – what, 40, 50 million records, digital downloads, DVDs, all that stuff? It's turned out to be an amazing day.”
Look What The Cat Dragged In went on to sell more than four million records.
As Poison tried to make their way, original guitarist Matt Smith went back home to Pennsylvania to be with his pregnant girlfriend. That led to guitar player auditions, which eventually led to C.C. DeVille. But one of the other auditionees grabbed Michaels’ attention, to the point of an argument with drummer Rikki Rockett and bass player Bobby Dall.
“I got where Slash was coming from. But Bobby and Rikki saw it with C.C. It was one of our first arguments in the band,” the frontman said. “Because Slash fucking killed it. C.C. came in and barely learned our songs. He started playing his own stuff. He was like, ‘I’ve got these other songs! You gotta hear ‘em!’ We immediately butted heads.”
Slash, who of course eventually joined Guns N’ Roses, auditioned to be Poison’s guitar player. He turned down the gig because he wasn’t into “that whole glam thing”, which seems obvious in hindsight.
His relationship with Michaels wasn’t always great, as lead singer-lead guitarist dynamics often have turmoil, but DeVille was a great match for Poison’s look and sound. Slash being Poison’s guitar player is a fun “what if?” to consider though.
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