Song of the Week: Poison - Every Rose Has Its Thorn

"Every Rose Has Its Thorn" was a 1988 power ballad by Poison and one of their biggest selling hits. It was released in October 1988 as the third single from Poison's second album Open Up And Say... Ahh! and it became the band's first and only number-one hit in the U.S., reaching the top spot on Christmas Eve in 1988 for three weeks (carrying over into 1989). It was a #13 hit in the UK Top20. The song was named number 34 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s", #100 on their "100 Greatest Love Songs" and #7 on MTV and VH1 "Top 25 Power Ballads."

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According to singer Bret Michaels, the recording sessions for "Every Rose" were fraught with infighting and squabbles among band members. "It was like, I totally thought this would help us move forward, you know, push the envelope, sonically," Michaels has said, "but the others were just not into it, you know? I mean, C.C. has always been the metal rawk one in the group, and he thought I was a fucking sell-out. He hated playing "Every Rose"; the song is one of the reasons he refuses to speak to me anymore. Although I think me sleeping with his girlfriend of six years didn't help either." C.C. Deville would later retort in the Poison biography Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll ... & Sex & Drugs Some More: The Poison Story, "Well that's Bret's take, okay? And you know what, he's a cunt. That's all I have to say about that.

Musically, the song starts quietly and features two intricate guitar solos, one mellow and one fast. Among guitarists, the song is notable for epitomizing the standard G - Cadd9 progression in pop/rock. During the same period, Poison had been playing at a cowboy bar called "The Ritz" in Dallas, Texas, accounting for the song's recognizable references to cowboys in the chorus, along with the twang in Bret Michaels' vocals, which give the song a country feel not often heard in power ballads composed by glam metal bands.

The music video to "Every Rose" was similar to those filmed for other 1980s power ballads. It features Bret Michaels sitting down, playing the guitar, and singing along to the song, interspersed with black-and-white clips from concerts, and color frames of a storyline that follows the song.

And if we really look the big picture, it was songs like this one that really killed hair metal back in those days, not the grunge etc. Overdose of pop ballads, they castrated and cut the metal from hair metal, leaving just ugly wigs behind. But they did sell, they surely did.



This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Every Rose Has Its Thorn and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.