During a conversation on the Nothing Shocking podcast, Poison drummer Rikki Rockett was asked whether he ever felt pigeonholed into a particular sound when the band became successful.

He said:

“Definitely. Listen, we get judged on what we looked like and sounded like on an album that happened 32 years ago [1986’s ‘Look What The Cat Dragged In’]. How does everybody else like to be judged on what they did and looked like 35 years ago?

“Now, I’m proud of what we did — don’t get me wrong — but even by [1988’s] ‘Open Up And Say… Ahh!’, which was the next record, our look and our sound had evolved. And by [1990’s] ‘Flesh & Blood’, our look had evolved and our sound had evolved. And on and on.

Poison - Native Tongue (1993) - The Rock Review

“So it myopically gets overlooked, all those things. And people go, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That hair band’ — that kind of thing. And usually when people say those things, it’s usually because they wanna say something bad.

“But I always tell new artists, ‘Be very careful about what you put out there at the very beginning, because people are gonna judge you forever, what you did that very first record.’”

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Rikki also commented on the band’s sound and influences by saying:

“I think all rock is based in the blues, for one thing. And with us, glitter rock of the ’70s was only a part of what influenced this band. That was more or less what… We took pieces of what that looked like, because that was more exciting to look at than just jeans and a t-shirt at the time.

 

“And then sound-wise, man, we pooled from everywhere. I mentioned Foghat [earlier in the interview], but we pooled from Lynyrd Skynyrd, we pooled from Kiss, Van Halen — everything. And even punk rock bands. I mean, C.C. [DeVille, guitar] grew up in Brooklyn; there was a huge punk rock and new wave movement in that city. So that influence comes out on the guitar.

“You definitely hear it in songs like ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ and stuff like that. And Bobby [Dall, bass] was such a [Led] Zeppelin fan. Our influences definitely are clear all over the songs that we wrote, but sometimes the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater.”