Every 80s hair band had to have at least one song that showed that, underneath all the debauchery and the partying, they were actually sensitive poets.  Motley Crue had Home Sweet Home.  Def Leppard had Two Steps Behind.  And Poison had Every Rose Has Its Thorn.

This song was inspired by Bret Michaels’s relationship with his then girlfriend, Tracy Lewis.  After playing a show in Dallas, Michaels called Lewis in Los Angeles and, in a scene reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he was shocked when another man answered the phone.  Michaels wrote the song the next day while sitting in a laundromat.

(Presumably, the death of the landline phone has all but eliminated the risk of getting caught cheating as a result of the wrong person answering phone.)

The concert scenes in this video were filmed at a show in Green Bay, Wisconsin while the scenes of Bret Michaels and his girlfriend (his Rose?) were filmed in a warehouse.  The video’s director, Marty Callner, was one of the top music video directors of the 80s and 90s.  He worked with just about everyone.

Incidentally, Poison is a band that I always used to make fun of but then I saw them interviewed in Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II and they came across as being surprisingly well-adjusted, especially when compared to W.A.S.P’s Chris Holmes, who was famously interviewed while floating in a pool and pouring a bottle of vodka over himself.

Enjoy!