“Rock of Ages” songs: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” “Nothin’ But a Good Time,” “Talk Dirty to Me”
Bret Michaels, singer: “The Sunset Strip was its own world, and it was surreal. It was like a carnival in the street. There were rockers everywhere, and beautiful women. The streets were almost shut down because people were getting out of their cars and partying on the Strip. I watched it happen.
“I think Poison made such a big scene because, after our concerts, we had this big party that stayed right in the same room we were playing. It was pretty smart, because we loved doing what we were doing — but it wasn’t easy. We were really struggling to get by. I would go up onstage, and whatever money we had left to eat, I thought, I’m going to buy a bunch of beer and stick it out on the stage, and hand it out to people. We made it a ‘nothing but a good time’ atmosphere.
“ ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn,’ in the movie, is the emotional turning point of the film, which was great to see. But as the guy that wrote this song, it was a really amazing moment for me. I wrote this song in Dallas, Texas, at a laundromat, waiting for my clothes to dry, on tour. I had played a country-western bar that I talked Poison into playing — a cowboy bar, a honky-tonk in Dallas, and I’m not sure they were thrilled about it, but I loved it.
“I was waiting for my clothes to dry, and made a call on the pay phone, and it was, let’s put it this way, a very heartbreaking moment for me. The rose was that I was out there making music. The thorn was my personal life took a complete crap. So — roses and thorns, you know what I mean?”
“Rock of Ages” songs: “Any Way You Want It,” “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”
Jonathan Cain, keyboards: “My first show on the Strip was the New York Dolls, featuring David Johansen all in drag at the Whiskey a Go Go. My brother and I looked at each other and went, ‘What. The. Hell.’ Everybody was wearing glitter, that was the big thing.
“ ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ’ really is from my days there [on the Strip]. I lived in Laurel Canyon from ’72 to the ’80s, and I watched that circus every night. I used to go to the Rainbow Room, I used to see Van Halen at Gazzari’s, I saw Aerosmith play the Starwood. I remember those crazy days of the ‘Hey, baby’ record guys. When the WB in Warner Brothers stood for ‘Where’s the blow?’
“And I got to see the real seedy underbelly of the music business ’cause I played softball with a lot of these guys on Sunday afternoon. I was a struggling artist, I got dropped from Warner, so I sold stereos and just survived, and that’s when my father called me and said, ‘Don’t stop believing,’ and I wrote it down somewhere. I [later] found what I had written and said, ‘This is a song!’
“It’s all about the Strip, and those ‘streetlight people.’ Rolling Stone wrote this really snide review of our album and wrote, ‘Who are the streetlight people, anyway?’ And I’m sitting there going, ‘Well, it’s that crazy circus on Friday night, that’s who they are. Wandering up and down Sunset Boulevard for God knows what.’ They were all there on a dream. They all believed something good was going to happen if they came to Hollywood — they’d get discovered, something would happen, they’d find love, fame, fortune, get laid, I don’t know.
“When Steve [Perry] and I wrote the lyrics, it was like, ‘Let’s get these two kids from far away meeting in Hollywood,’ and ‘the singer in a smoky room’ — that might be me and
Steve playing clubs.
“When I saw ‘Rock of Ages,’ it hit me like a brick. I said, ‘S - - t! That’s what ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ’ is!’ ‘Rock of Ages’ doesn’t really get enough credit for unearthing the idea of Journey on Broadway. This show was the first one to take our song and do something meaningful with it.”
“Rock of Ages” songs: “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Rock of Ages,” “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak”
Joe Elliott, singer: “Back in those days, you were allowed to cruise the Strip with your [convertible’s top] down and chicks in the back screaming with the big hair. It was funny. When you’re in your early 20s and you’re English, all this stuff is a bit of a freak show.
“The first time I was ever in the Rainbow Room, we’d just done ‘American Bandstand,’ which was hilarious because that show’s normally more Gladys Knight and Neil Diamond stuff. We saw Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple, and then we were all back to the Sunset Marquis to carry the party on.
“We never really felt comfortable with that [affects an American accent] ‘Hey, man. Ya wanna come outside and smoke pot?’ thing. Culturally, we were milder. The only thing that we had in common with the Rainbow was that we liked rock ’n’ roll.
“As far as big hair goes, there’s one tragic photo session we did, bored out of our brains in the studio, where we let the hairdresser go a bit crazy with the hairspray, but generally speaking we’re all sweat and hair plastered onto the side of our face. Def Leppard was always an athletic band. We weren’t standing there poncing and posing. We were moving about, trying to entertain the crowd.
“There was a moment in the ’80s when you can understand why people put us into the same bag as, say, Guns N’ Roses, but in actual fact, we haven’t got that much in common. They were a lot harder-edged than us. They were sleazebags and loved it. We were the furthest thing from what the film’s all about, culturally. But musically, we were the ones that everybody was copyin’.”