Rikki Rockett says Hollyweird is not Poison‘s best work and did not make it into his memoir.
Rikki Rockett has given a blunt assessment of the last Poison album of original material, and explained why it does not appear in his forthcoming memoir. Asked by Robert Cavuoto of “MyGlobalMind” why Hollyweird is absent from “Ghost Notes: My Life In Poison“, the drummer said he simply has no affection for it.
“I don’t love that record. I feel like we were very disjointed at that time. There’s some cool moments on that record, there’s no question. There really is. But I felt like we were a little bit disjointed… There’s some cool stuff on it, for sure. But it’s not our best work — it’s not,” he replied (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
He put it in the context of a long career: “You go to work every day for 40 years or however long, you’re gonna have a period, some piece of work that you do that it’s not the best thing you’ve done. And I think that’s… Like I said, there’s aspects of that record that are really good, there’s a few songs that I think are really good. But then there’s a lot of stuff that’s, like, ‘Eh, it’s just not my favorite.'”
Rockett said the omission was not a decision so much as an absence of anything to say.
“But I didn’t deliberately leave that out [of the book], honestly,” Rockett concluded. “For whatever reason, I just didn’t think about it in the book. There wasn’t anything interesting that I remember about that to talk about it, I guess. I don’t know.”
Hollyweird came out on 21 May 2002, the band’s sixth studio album, recorded across a year at Henson Recording Studios in Hollywood and Rock Central Studios with producer Thom Panunzio and engineer Bob Koszela. Thirteen songs in 42 minutes, built almost entirely around the business of trying to make it in Los Angeles.
It entered the Billboard 200 at 103 and reached number eight on the Top Independent Albums chart, selling a little over 11,500 copies in its first week.
Critical reaction largely matched Rockett‘s own verdict two decades on. Much of the criticism focused on the production and the mix. AllMusic went the other way entirely, calling it one of the band’s best records.
Three singles came off it, not two. “Rockstar” arrived first, in May 2001, put out online as a preview more than a year before the album: the Who cover “Squeeze Box” followed and “Shooting Star” closed the campaign in November 2002. That last one, co-written by all four members, remains the most recent original Poison song issued as a single.
There is a reason Hollyweird came out through Cyanide Music rather than a major. The band had offers, but the ones on the table required them to re-record old material as part of the deal. They declined and put it out themselves.
It was also the first full studio album with C.C. DeVille back in the band, he had rejoined around 1996, but it took six years to produce a record. The 2000 release Power To The People was a live album with five new studio tracks attached, which is why Hollyweird counts as the classic lineup’s first proper studio project since 1990’s Flesh & Blood.
Poison followed it in 2007 with Poison’d, an album of covers. There has been no new original material since.
“Ghost Notes: My Life In Poison” is published on 15 September through Rare Bird Books. Rockett wrote it with Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson, and it runs 312 pages.
Rockett co-founded Poison and the band built its reputation on the Sunset Strip during the 1980s. They have sold more than 45 million albums, released eight studio records, and placed ten singles in the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40, six of them in the top ten, with “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” reaching number one. The original lineup of Rockett, Michaels, bassist Bobby Dall and DeVille completed The Stadium Tour with Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts in 2022, three years later than planned after pandemic postponements.
He married TC Smith at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara in April 2022, and was previously married to singer and songwriter Melanie Martel, with whom he shares custody of their two children. In October 2024 he launched The Rockett Mafia, who have since played Poison‘s debut album in full at the Whisky A Go Go.
