Poison drummer Rikki Rockett says one of the reasons he waited until now to publish his memoir, Ghost Notes: My Life in Poison, was because he "didn't wanna embarrass [his] parents when they were alive."
He tells This Day in Metal, "Then I was, like, 'Oh, now I've got kids, so...' But I'm always gonna have kids, and in a normal life they're gonna outlive me. So at some point I gotta do this. And they're old enough now that I can say, 'Well, let me explain this.' You know what I mean? So I feel like that's okay now."
As for some of the stories that made the book, he says, "Well, everybody wanted to know about the bad things. It's weird how people just have to know. They wanna know about the MTV Awards. They wanna know about the rape accusation. They wanna know about the cancer battle, that kind of stuff. And so I knew I had to go in and talk about those things, and they're part of the ride. So I did. So I think I went pretty deeply into most of those, I think, enough to give a lot of understanding."
And, there were also some that didn't make it.
"There was a lot of things that I later went to the ghostwriters, and I called them up and I said, 'You know what? I don't feel good about that. Let's reel that back in.' I don't feel like I ever threw anybody under the bus — at least I don't think so. If somebody feels that way, it'll be interesting to find out why they feel that way. But, honestly, I didn't set out to do that. What I set out to do was, and it's why it's called Ghost Notes, which are kind of the notes between the notes in drumming; they're kind of like light taps. And so there were these little things that I feel like thread the bigger stories together, and so I thought that was important. And plus, the title 'Best Seat in the House' was taken, so I couldn't use that. [Laughs] But it's still the best seat in the house."
Ghost Notes: My Life in Poison will be published on September 15th.