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Michaels, Poison can still put on a good show

Katjusa Cisar  —  8/14/2008 11:23 am

The ironic stood next to the steadfastly non-ironic at Saturday night's Poison, Dokken and Sebastian Bach show at the Alliant Energy Center's Willow Island. Young guys wearing cheap "hair metal" wigs from Party City posed with KISS tongues and "Rock on!" devil horns for their friends' cameras. And then there was the dude who looked like he stepped out of 1986 in an acid-washed time warp.

Many people wore Bret Michaels' trademark bandana and cowboy hat combo -- mostly the people who were in preschool the last time Poison really meant anything.

Of course, it really wasn't about the music anyway. Poison lead singer Bret Michaels has built a phenomenon on what essentially amounts to little more than the cowboy hat, the bandana, the song "Talk Dirty to Me" and the fabulously trashy VH1 reality dating show, "Rock of Love."

More than anything, it comes down to his good-natured ability to call even the most dismally semi-cool happenings "awesome." And mean it.

For example, the Poison repertoire is so tiny that they had to fill things out with covers of banal ditties like the Romantics' "What I Like About You." This doesn't stop Bret from unabashedly calling out stuff like, "Thank you for sticking with us 22 years. Now here's 1987 comin' at you right now!"

No shame. And that's what's so appealing about him and Poison. When Bret says he's "having the most awesome time," you believe it. So bring on the five-minute drum solos! Bring on C.C. DeVille's self-indulgent, screaming guitar solos! Woo!

Opener Sebastian Bach certainly didn't have that shameless attitude. He whipped his hair through a half-hour set of sing-songy pseudo metal, starting strangely with an Aerosmith cover. He followed the hair metal instruction manual to the letter: Dropped F-bombs whenever possible, saluted the troops for "fighting for our right to rock'n'roll" and yelled out the name of the state he was in as much as possible (it's debatable whether he could have identified the city, though).

Dokken played a decent set that riled the crowd and got the devil horns rocking, but they seemed a little out of place amidst the pageantry. They would have been better suited to a smaller venue like the Annex.

After not one but two audience-pumping songs ("Welcome to the Jungle" and "Highway to Hell"), Boby Dall, Rikki Rockett and C.C. DeVille took the stage. Then Bret Michaels rose up from underneath the stage amidst fire-breathing explosions and lit into "Look What the Cat Dragged In."

Between the heavy metal show tunes and lame pop rock covers, Bret made some disarming comments about the Midwest flooding before launching into the essential power ballad "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," saying "I know you've been through a lot of storms and bad weather." He also dedicated a song to "all of our troops, our men and women -- thank you very much." About "Something to Believe In," he earnestly said, "Twenty years later, I still get chill bumps."

The set ended around 10:30 with a flurry of mega-hits.

Shortly after the show ended, a couple hundred people packed The Bean on Verona Road for the "After Show with Bret Michaels." At 30 bucks a head, the event -- which had promised the possibility of an acoustic song or two from Bret -- turned out to be a glorified meet-n-greet and a complete rip-off.

While DJ Fusion blared music of teeth-rattling volume, people of all ages anxiously awaited Bret's arrival. While everyone waited, the three hats, three bandanas and three muscle shirts that Bret wore at the show earlier in the night were auctioned off. Each item went for around $200, with all proceeds going to juvenile diabetes research. (Bret was diagnosed with diabetes at age 6.)

"No, I'm not going to pay $102 for a bandana," one guy firmly told his girlfriend, who'd just lost her $101 bid for the item.

The auctioneer held out one of the muscle shirts to a young blonde with "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" hair: "C'mon, you gotta get a whiff of this!"

She did.

Bret showed up around midnight and was gone by 1 a.m. Accompanied by bodyguards and followed by a group of very young women (apparently hired for the event by the promoter), he made his way at a glacial pace from the back entrance to the stage, where he shotgunned a Jager Bomb, said some stuff about how "awesome" everything was and then exited the stage and slowly inched his way out the back door, besieged by fans on all sides.

Once it became clear that this was all there was to the "After Show," groups of people left in a snort -- "I can't believe I paid $30 to see Bret Michaels do a shot of Jager!" complained one woman.

Well, honey, "Every rose has its thorn."

Katjusa Cisar  —  8/14/2008 11:23 am