In December of 1988, a song entitled Every Rose Has Its Thorn finally topped the Billboard Charts. Focusing on the heartache of unfaithfulness, the song gave Poison their first (and only) #1 hit.
But the band’s joy was tempered by the fact that the song was based on the real life pain of their lead singer.
Halfway through 1988, the glam rock band known as Poison was still touring the nation in support of Look What The Cat Dragged In, the album they’d released the previous year. But life on the road is challenging…even for rock icons. Guitars, clothes, and boxes of hairspray had to be crammed onto tour buses and moved from city to city, night after night.
One evening after a show in Dallas, the band’s exhausted frontman, Bret Michaels, was so lonely he risked a 3am phone call to his live-in girlfriend in Hollywood, CA. But that call would change his relationship, and his life….
“She answered the phone, but she sounded a little odd. Immediately she gave me that ‘I’m really sleepy’ line, which was not something she would normally say. And then I heard it – the whispering in the background. It was obviously a guy’s voice. Now, a female voice, that I could’ve lived with, you know what I’m saying? Hell, I may have even welcomed it! But another guy…it broke my heart.”
While Michaels may have been disappointed that night, he probably wasn’t all that surprised. After all, the girlfriend – whom Michaels refuses to name all these years later – was a stripper. Dating women who dance naked in front of other guys for money every night has its liabilities.
Contrast her with the woman of noble character mentioned in Proverbs 31, and it’s easy to see a difference with respect to their integrity. Among her many lofty attributes, the godly woman “brings her husband good, not harm, all the days of her life.”
Devastated that his stripper-girlfriend was unfaithful, Michaels grabbed some dirty clothes, his guitar, and a notepad, and headed down to the motel’s laundromat. There, in the middle of the night, he penned the lyrics to the song that has defined his musical career for three decades.
Moral of the story? If you date a stripper, you could become a famous rock star…or just heartbroken. Choose your significant other carefully.
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Topics Illustrated Include:
Busted
Celebrities
Character
Cheating
Choices
Disappointment
Integrity
Music
Pain
Relationship
Relationship Problems
Risk
Sexual Immorality
Women
(Resource cataloged by David R Smith)