Poison Drummer Rikki Rockett To Release ‘Ghost Notes’ Memoir In ’25

If you know me at all, as a drummer, there’s 100% chance this book’ll get purchased. Poison drummer Rikki Rockett wrote his memoir with writer duo Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson! “Ghost Notes” is due out, through Rare Bird Books, on July 15, ’25!

Rockett (real name is Richard Allan Ream) was recently a guest of SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” and talked about “Ghost Notes”, “I was working on it all year last year. I was gonna launch it at the same time as the (Poison ’25) tour, but the tour is not gonna happen (next year). So we’re gonna launch (the book) anyway.”

Ghost Notes. Great name for a drummer’s book.  “The first chunk of our career, like (early Poison albums) ‘Look What The Cat Dragged In’ (1986), ‘Open Up And Say… Ahh!’ (1988), all those records, even most of ‘Flesh & Blood’ (1990), the way they were producing records at that time, they did not want drummers playing ghost notes, if you know what ghost notes are… It’s kind of like a lighter tap on the snare drum, for example, the kind of the notes in between the notes that are not fully pronounced, I guess would be the best way to explain it in layman’s terms. And so a lot of times it gives it that little bit of swing groove to it. And producers did not want that in the early 80s — they just wanted straight drums, almost machine-like and heavy and loud and detuned snare drums and all that kind of stuff. And it wasn’t really until ‘Flesh & Blood’, but even more ‘Native Tongue’ (1993) where I was able to really play the way I wanted to play. I think a lot of other drummers dealt with that. I know I talked to various drummers about their frustration back then. So I decided to name it. I finally was able to play however I wanted. And all those little notes between the notes are my kind of what I’m talking about in my life. Instead of just the highlights that you always hear about, you know, ‘Poison did this’ or ‘Rikki Rockett did this’ or ‘Rikki got arrested for this’ or whatever, these are like all the stuff in between. So those are the ghost notes between all the big things that you’ve heard about. So I kind of made a little connection there, and that’s why I named it that.”

Rikki told Trunk that you should expect a more semi-autobiographical memoir, “Yes. Or more in depth. A lot of the things are more in depth. You’ve heard some of these stories about Poison, but you never really dig that much deeper or maybe they just haven’t been reported much more than what you’ve heard on the surface, for example. And so I talk about a lot of those kinds of things. Everything (that you hear about the 1980s glam rock scene is) always focused on the Sunset Strip. And that was only a couple years of our life, honestly. What’s more interesting is our years in the tri-state area and Pennsylvania and all the crap we went through trying to play gigs and trying to find our space, and that stuff, to me, is more cinematic, if you will, than, ‘Oh, yeah, they played the Troubadour and the Strip and they hung up flyers. I mean, we’ve all heard those stories. But it’s the other stuff, like trying to hold jobs down and renting VFW halls and renting vans and trying to scrape enough money to get to the next gig and all that stuff. That was really the meat of our struggle, I think. Not that being on the Strip wasn’t interesting, but I feel like when you talk about the Strip, you’re just lumping every band together that was our contemporaries. But, really, we kind of came, fought, got our deal and got out even sort of before that. I mean, the Strip continued to explode after we were off the Strip.”

Rockett is a co-founder and Poison’s drummer; over 50 million album sold, eight studio albums, four live albums, and four compilations. The boast 10 singles on the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, including six Top 10 singles and one Hot 100 number-one smash hit, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.

No doubt this’ll make the book – Rockett was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2015. Declared cancer free in 2016 after undergoing experimental treatment.