Guitarist and vocalist Richie Kotzen recently talked to Radio Forrest where he looked back on his time with Poison.
The guitarist was asked if he ever met the guys in the band after he left the band, he replied:
“We ran into each other shortly after all that. And actually, the bass player [Bobby Dall] and I sat down one night at the Rainbow [in West Hollywood] and had a chat. That was maybe five years after, so the stuff was still relatively fresh. But the funny thing is I ran into Bret Michaels backstage at, I think it was a Rock Fantasy camp, and we hugged. ‘Hey, I love you, bro. Great to see you.’ We had a great talk. C.C. [DeVille, guitar], I ran into him.
”We were on tour with The Winery Dogs in 2019. The irony there is my tour manager for my solo tours and for TWD, that tour manager is C.C. DeVille‘s day-to-day guy on the road. So that’s totally ironic; we’re connected there. But the craziest part of it is that my wife Julia, she’s a bass player, and she did a show with Rikki Rockett playing the drums. And I actually overheard… Rikki was in the dressing room as I was coming down the hall, and I heard my name mentioned. Someone must have been asking him something. And I heard Rikki say, ‘I don’t give a f*ck. I haven’t seen the guy in 20 years. I don’t care.’ And then I ran into him, and I said hello, and I shook his hand.
“I was a kid when I was in that band. It was a great experience, but imagine you just turned 21 and now you’re in a band that already sold 20 million albums. Everything was just like being in a f**king movie. And I think in the end of it, I still think we made a kick-a** record; I think we made a fantastic record. And if you think about what was going on with those bands back then, we were the only band that MTV actually gave a shot. That song ‘Stand’, when it came out,
”I used to sit in my room and leave the TV on. They played that video every 20 minutes, that video was on. And that was a great feeling back then. So we had a shot with that record, and it ended up [being] a gold record. I don’t know if it eventually went platinum, but I definitely got a gold record out of it. A lot of those bands didn’t even get their videos played on MTV [at that point], so we had a good shot with it. It was a great record.
“I was already signed to Interscope, and in my mind, I was just thinking, ‘When am I gonna make my solo record?’ So it was a weird situation for me coming in. I think we made a great record. People grow up and get over sh*t, and I think we all got over sh*t and moved on.”
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