Hometown Headliners
Material for Headliners vignettes was gathered from various sources including Wikipedia, Baseball Reference, Princeton, IMDB, Poison: Official Website, SRU Athletics, Oberg Industries, the New York Times and the University of Michigan.
March 15, 1963 —Bret Michael Sychak was born in Butler in 1963, and raised in Mechanicsburg. He has family in Lyndora.Better known by his stage name, Bret Michaels, he gained fame as the frontman for the band Poison.Michaels began playing guitar as a teenager and started a band with Rikki Rockett, Bobby Dall and David Besselman. They played the bar circuit in Pittsburgh before moving to Los Angeles in search of fame.This is also when the band changed its name to Poison.They released their first album, “Look What the Cat Dragged In” in 1986. That album rose to No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard Top 100 in 1987, went platinum and the band became famous.In 1987, Michaels' breakup with his then-girlfriend, Tracy Lewis, inspired him to write the song “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” The song released in 1988 and became the band's only No. 1 single.Poison split in the late 1990s and Michaels released his first solo album, “A Letter From Death Row,” in 1998.Michaels would release several more solo albums and singles and also star on several television programs, including “Rock of Love” in 2007 and “Celebrity Apprentice 3” in 2010.Recently, Michaels released the solo album “True Grit” in 2015 and new singles, “Jorja Bleu” and “Unbroken” in 2017 and 2019, respectively.Michaels has performed at the Big Butler Fair Grounds on several occasions and, in 2015, donated $10,000 to the Butler County Tourism & Convention Bureau to help restore the Kaufman House in Zelienople.
