Poison band member says 40th anniversary tour thwarted by Bret Michaels’ money demands

A planned Poison tour celebrating the band’s 40th anniversary isn’t happening, reportedly because frontman Bret Michaels was asking for too much money.

Talk of the tour began over the summer after guitarist C.C. DeVille wrote on social media, “Poison tour 2026. Are you ready?” But now drummer Rikki Rockett tells the New York Post’s Page Six it’s not happening because Michaels demanded to be paid six times what Rockett, DeVille and bassist Bobby Dall were getting.

“We had a great offer, I thought. But we left the table,” Rockett says. “It didn’t work.”

“Really what it came to was C.C., Bobby and I were all in, and I thought Bret was, but he wanted the lion’s share of the money, to the point where it makes it not possible to even do it,” says Rockett. “It’s like $6 to every one of our dollars. You just can’t work that way.”

“I don’t do this just for the money. I do have a love for this, absolutely,” he adds. “But at the same time, you don’t want to go out and work really hard just to make somebody else a bunch of money.”

Rockett hasn’t ruled out a tour in the future, joking that it would be “a perfect Poison folly to do a 41st anniversary tour.” He notes that while replacing Michaels is “not out of the question,” it is “the last resort.”

“I don’t want to do that. I’m not quarreling with Bret[.] … We just didn’t come to agreement,” he says. “I don’t like it, and I’ll say that, but it’s not like, ‘Let’s put up our dukes.’ I don’t think there’s a better frontman for Poison.”

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