Rikki Rockett says Poison deliberately avoided chasing grunge on Native Tongue, and rates it above their 1986 debut.
Rikki Rockett sat down and played Native Tongue the day before he gave this interview. It was the first time he had heard most of it in years, and his verdict was not the one the sales figures would suggest.
Poison‘s drummer told “Meltdown” of Detroit’s WRIF that the 1993 album was a deliberate refusal to follow the two obvious paths available to the band at the time.
“The thing is that during the early part of the whole grunge thing, we were so consumed with trying to kind of reinvent Poison and fill C.C.‘s shoes in some way, shape or form, and we realized we’re not gonna be able to do that, so we made a little bit of a left turn. And it’s funny ’cause I just listened to that record, Native Tongue, yesterday. And I haven’t listened to it for a while, except for one song that I do in my drum clinic. But I love the way I played on that record. I think it’s a great record. Richie was great to work with, and I’m very, very proud of that record. I feel like we went, ‘We’re not gonna try to be grunge ’cause that’s not our jam. We’re not gonna try to be what we were with C.C. We’re going to turn the page and do a new chapter, and we’re gonna do it really well.’ And I think we did all those things. Was it as successful as [1988’s] Open Up And Say… Ahh!, and stuff like that? No, it wasn’t. People had grown to understand Poison a certain way, and then there were other types of music that were, obviously out there. And so there was a lot of ingredients for why [it wasn’t as successful]. But it still quietly sold a million records in the first few months. And we were still on MTV, and we did get treated differently than some of the other acts that followed us. And it was well-received by a lot of people. A lot of critics liked it. To this day, I think a lot of people like that record. And, again, I do too. I’m sitting there listening, I go, ‘I really like what I played on that. That’s cool.’ I go back to [1986’s] Look What The Cat Dragged In, and I go, ‘Oh my God, why did I play that?’ But it’s 40 years later. What do you want?” Rockett said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
On the American certification, the record went gold rather than platinum. The RIAA logged 500,000 units on April 21, 1993, a figure that has not been revised since. It was certified platinum in Canada.
Rockett put the shortfall down to circumstances rather than the music, and singled out the first single’s video.
“Sometimes it’s just perception and timing and all that kind of stuff. But we had a great producer. Richie Zito was fantastic to work with,” Rockett added. “And I think everybody was playing, and Bret was singing — we were at our prime, I feel like. And [we made a] great video. The ‘Stand‘ video’s incredible. I look back at that and I go, ‘Wow.’ We shot it on film. It looked fricking like a movie. It was so good. But it just didn’t resonate with core Poison fans — most of them anyway. We went out, we did a tour, we did fine and all that stuff. We did Europe. Again, it was fine. It was good. But it wasn’t phenomenal.”
Native Tongue came out in February 1993 through Capitol Records and reached number 16 on the Billboard 200 and number 20 in the UK. It was the band’s fourth album and the only one recorded with Richie Kotzen, who replaced C.C. DeVille after his exit in late 1991 in the wake of the MTV Video Music Awards.
Kotzen joined as a full member rather than a hired player and was given room to write, which is a large part of why the record sounds nothing like its predecessors. Three singles were pulled from it: “Stand“, “Until You Suffer Some (Fire And Ice)” and “Body Talk“. “Stand” was written by Kotzen before he joined the band, features the Los Angeles First A.M.E. Church Choir on backing vocals and reached number 50 on the Hot 100 and number 15 on Mainstream Rock.
Richie Zito produced, with sessions split between A&M Studios in Hollywood and Rumbo Recorders in Los Angeles. His credits in the years immediately before included Cheap Trick, The Cult, White Lion and Bad English.
Kotzen was out of the band by the end of 1993, after which Blues Saraceno held the guitar seat until DeVille returned in 1999. The lineup of Bret Michaels, DeVille, Bobby Dall and Rockett has been in place since.
