Concert Chronicles - Poison (w Warrant) 1990-09-25 Ames, IA

Several people who knew me back in the day were surprised that I had planned on going to see Poison.  I was known more for liking heavier metal - Megadeth, Danzig, Iron Maiden, Anthrax, Metallica, etc... But I always had a rather eclectic taste in music, I just promoted the heavy metal image more at the time. Much poppier than what I often listened to but fun and light were a nice palate cleanser sometimes.  I also think the first few albums were half great (although the album cover of Open Up was terrible..and the others weren't great either).  Talk Dirty To Me, Nothin' but a Good Time, Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Ride the Wind, and Something to Believe In...they all make for an amazing greatest hits album.  I figured this would be a fun concert and hopefully a lot of attractive girls to look at (obviously I would be too scared to actually talk to them, but I could look).

The opening band of Warrant was a detractor for me...I just couldn't enjoy them at the time.  They eventually brought me around somewhat later with Uncle Tom's Cabin, but at this time they were all Down Boys and synchronized dancing on their knees.  It didn't help that I worked summers with a girl who was CRAZY about Warrant and I had to listen to her gab about them all day for weeks and weeks.  I think she would have killed any band.  Just shut up, Rachel!

A week or so before the show, my friend Steve had overheard some girls at the mall talking about how they had to find the perfect matching outfits for the Poison concert.  So this became our inside joke for years of concerts - "Oh, we have to go get matching outfits."

We watched a few songs of Warrant's set (and saw enough of synchronized kee dancing) that we skipped out to walk around the hallway of the arena and people watch for a bit.  Being a large hexagon, the coliseum has a continuous hallway encircling the arena.  We thought it was funny to stop people and ask them for directions because we had earlier met two really beautiful women that had told us to "meet us at the end of the hallway during Warrant" and we had been walking forever!  Most people didn't get the joke and would point one way or the other...so we would go that way and look for more people to ask.  We then witnessed a fan vomit huge amounts of clear liquid across the breadth of one section of the polished tile hallway.  I feel horrible about this now...We SHOULD have gotten staff to clean it up or at least warned people, but we were young assholes.  We stood there and watched people outside of the vomit zone and watched people walk, slip, and fall into the puke.  Over and over and over again.  Assholes - definitely.

Poison put on a good show.  I sang along needing nothing but a good time.  The audience's lighters swaying in the dark on Something to Believe In was really impressive (the first time that I had seen such a large coordinated display).  One thing that surprised me was the Brett Michaels' dancing was SO jerky looking...maybe I had watched too many Guns N' Roses videos and footage right before like concert but Brett's sideways shuffle seemed downright spastic in person. CC also came off and totally insane or totally coked up.  I hadn't planned on it, but I ended up buying a t-shirt of the skull in the purple tophat because the colors were brilliant and eye-catching (the picture that I found on the internet does not do it justice).

On the way home from the concert it started raining - hard and it was very dark.  The downpour where it is like a constant waterfall hitting your car and it is very difficult to see and hear.  I should have pulled over, but I was young and stupid and kept driving.  Luckily, I did slow down some and I got a little bit of an eerie feeling as we were approaching a railroad crossing that didn't have lights or crossbars or anything really warning about it.  I couldn't see a train - just blackness - but I figured I would stop, just in case.  As we sat there for a few seconds, the rain suddenly lightened considerably and we realized that a train had been crossing the road the entire time - dark grey and black cars just speeding past in the near pitch black of heavy rain and midnight darkness.  The train was probably three from our bumper and we had no idea.  Thinking how close we came to slamming into the side of an invisible train still turns my stomach into a knot.

Another side story to this show - I bought tickets to this show for me and my friend Steve, but I also won a pair last minute from the local radio station (thanks again KDWZ or was this Star 102.5 this time?, I forget).  I couldn't find anyone else to go with me on short notice...so I slipped the extras into the school locker of a girl that I had a crush on from afar.  No note or anything since she had a boyfriend (and I was chicken) but I thought maybe I would be able to "randomly" run into her at the show and maybe we could talk about the show at school the following week.  I didn't see her at the show, so I am not sure that if she even used the tickets or gave them away (they were free to me, so I didn't really care).