Poison – I Want Action

Twelve days, $23,000, and money borrowed from their parents: the album behind this single made Poison famous — and its label rich.

The numbers tell the story better than any legend could: twelve days and $23,000. That was the entire recording budget for Look What the Cat Dragged In, the debut album that carried “I Want Action” — and part of that $23,000 came out of the band members’ own pockets and their families’ savings. Bret Michaels later called the record a glorified demo. The glorified demo sold four million copies.

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Poison earned their shot the hard way. Formed in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania in 1983 and originally called Paris, the band — Bret Michaels, bassist Bobby Dall, and drummer Rikki Rockett, with guitarist Matt Smith — moved to Los Angeles in March 1984 with no money and no connections. Smith, about to become a father, went home to Pennsylvania; his replacement, a fast-fingered New Yorker named C.C. DeVille, completed the lineup that mattered. For two years they worked Sunset Strip clubs and handed out flyers by the thousands. Every major label passed. It was the independent Enigma Records that finally signed them in 1986, for roughly $30,000 — a fraction of what similar bands were commanding.

Producer Ric Browde cut the album with them at Music Grinder Studios in Los Angeles at that dead sprint, and Enigma released it on May 23, 1986, with modest expectations and one planned single, “Cry Tough.” That single did little. The album could have died there, the way hundreds of Strip-band debuts did. Instead, something slower and stranger happened: the record simply refused to go away.

The Slow Fuse and the Fast Payoff

MTV lit the fuse. As “Talk Dirty to Me” went into heavy rotation and climbed to the Top 10, the album started moving in numbers nobody at a label Enigma’s size had seen before. “I Want Action” followed as the third single in 1987 and reached No. 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a modest chart peak for a song that did outsized work, keeping the band on television all through the album’s long climb and distilling the entire Poison proposition into three minutes of grinning, unapologetic appetite. The ballad “I Won’t Forget You” made it three charting hits from an album that was supposed to have one. On May 23, 1987 — exactly one year after release — Look What the Cat Dragged In peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.

The video for “I Want Action”, directed by John Jopson, put the band’s made-up, teased-and-sprayed image front and center — the same image that had caused some retailers to object to the album’s cover, with its heavily feminized portraits of all four members. The controversy cost them some rack space and bought them something better: notoriety. By the end of the decade the album was certified triple Platinum, the biggest seller in Enigma’s history, and the tours it earned — with Ratt, Cinderella, and Quiet Riot — set up Open Up and Say… Ahh!, the 1988 follow-up that made Poison one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

“I Want Action” has never left the setlist. It remains a fixture of Poison’s live shows nearly four decades on — the sound of a band that bet its parents’ money on twelve days in a studio and collected on the wager for the rest of their lives.