Poison drummer Rikki Rockett has looked back on his band’s classic album Open Up And Say … Ahh!, recalling that Walmart initially refused to carry the LP in its stores.
The issue came down to the album’s cover art, which featured a wild, tribal-like figure with a long tongue. During an appearance on The Motley Croc Show, Rockett revealed how the image came together.
“So my buddy Mark Williams, God rest his soul, built that tongue,” Rockett explained. “And it was a prosthetic, obviously. So we had this model. We did this photo session with this one photographer, and the label said it was too mild. We’re, like, ‘Okay.’ It just kind of looked like this rock girl with his long tongue and her hair pumped up and she had very dramatic makeup on, but it wasn’t shocking enough.”
Poison kept the concept, but went to rock photographer Neil Zlozower to further build on the idea.
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“[Bassist] Bobby Dall and I, we got his girlfriend Bambi and we started doing all those stripes on her and did all this stuff. And she had contacts — we had her get the contacts — and then we just kind of did her up, Bobby and I did. And then we did that tongue and everything like that. And everybody loved it, thought it was fricking great.”
Walmart, however, didn’t share the band’s enthusiasm.
Walmart Claimed Poison’s Cover ‘Represented a Demonic Figure’
“Walmart rejected it — Walmart,” Rockett confirmed. “So Wally [Walmart founder Sam Walton], he was alive at the time, said it represented a demonic figure and he didn’t want it.”
Poison and their team were left with a difficult decision.
“So we sat down with management and the label. And, really, at the end of the day, it was like, are we in the album cover business or are we in the music business?” Rockett explained. “Really, we should be able to just make a green cover or a white cover with nothing and put our music out, if that’s what we need to do. Our goal was to get our music out. What’s our percentage of sales at Walmart? Does it matter? Well, it’s 38 percent, sometimes 40 percent of your sales. At that time, man, people were just going through Walmart and going, ‘I’m getting my records here. I’m getting my records here.’ It was cheaper than going to the record store by a certain percentage. So the percentage of people buying records at Walmart was high. And we’re, like, ‘Are we gonna throw away 35 to 40 percent of our market share, getting our music into the hands of fans, or are we gonna gripe about it and fight with Walmart?’ And so it just didn’t make sense.”
A censored cover was eventually agreed upon, allowing Walmart to stock the LP. Released in April 1988, Open Up And Say … Ahh! went on to sell more than 5 million copies in the U.S.A.
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso and Michael Gallucci
