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PETE Evick, the guitarist in Bret Michaels’ solo band, has fired back at Poison drummer Rikki Rockett for saying the band will not tour this year because its singer wants to be paid six times more than other members.
“Perhaps there are several things that have gone on behind the scenes that make Bret just not want to play in Poison,” Evick wrote on Facebook.
“Is there any chance that any of those guys have done unforgivable things to Bret? I mean, seriously, why would Bret want to play with a guy who on multiple occasions has publicly tried to make him the enemy?”
Rockett, 64, has told a New York outlet that the band will not play a 40th anniversary tour because of Michaels pay demands. He will play Poison’s entire Look What The Cat Dragged In debut with his own project, Rockett Mafia, instead.
Evick continues: “First off, It’s ridiculous that people care or are fighting about two rich white men’s money.
“If you have ever been in a band that started from nothing and eventually had some success, like any other business you would come to find one person always ends up bringing the most to the table and one always brings the least to the table.
“Many people said things like ‘There would be no Bret without Poison. Well quite simple put, there would be no Poison without Bret. There are a couple (of) facts that people really miss: Poison tried it without Bret (during a Monsters Of Rock Cruise pre-party in 2015), No one cared.
“However Bret as a solo artist is playing and packing the same exact venues that Poison plays as a headliner, and… here is the part that’s going to get me in trouble, the part that will become the clickbait headline.
“Many people are saying CC wrote all the hits. Let me be clear, CC is great, he is amazing, he is a legend and one of my personal heroes. He wrote many hits, he is undeniably the driving musical force behind Poison, but…
“If you know anything about how the industry really works you would know that the one hit that made the real difference, the song that truly put them into pop stardom, that made them a household name was ‘Every Rose’… Guess what? Bret wrote that. Not only did Bret write it, the rest of them didn’t like it.
“For 30 years, Stewart Copeland has been trying to convince us all that Sting is an asshole. But… if you love ‘Every Breath You Take’ you have to go see Sting to hear it performed with the original voice.”
Evick’s first Facebook post on the issue was devoted to generosity he had observed in Michaels, 62, saying he would turn the tour bus around to visit fellow diabetics, hand cash to homeless people and had to be physically stopped from playing on with a burst appendix, which he was later told would have killed him 30 minutes into the show.
In a follow-up post, Evick wrote: “What did any of this have to do with Bret wanting six times the money of the other guys in Poison? Nothing at all, it had nothing to do with it at all, just serendipitous timing.”
Evick’s most recent post, on January 20, read in part (with slight corrections for spelling and grammar): “The other thing I love is the whole ‘I have to defend Bret because he’s my boss’. None of that could be more false.
“I defend my friend, I DO NOT talk shit about Poison, I offer a different perspective than most people have. I do no different than the rest of you, I speak my thoughts and opinion.
“But because I’m on his payroll, I’m crucified on an extreme level for having my friend’s back! Why not ask yourself what has kept me there for 21 years? Very few of us ‘hired guns’ stay anywhere that long.”
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