RIKKI ROCKETT Says He Has Stayed Cancer-Free For More Than A Decade: 'It's Never Been Back'

In a new interview with Get On The Bus, POISON drummer Rikki Rockett offered an update on his health, more than 11 years after he was diagnosed with oral cancer. The 65-year-old Rikki, whose real name is Richard Allan Ream, said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Once I was diagnosed [in June 2015], I did the whole normal sort of path to be treated for it, standard of care, as it was. And it didn't work. It didn't work.

"I remember the doctor told me, he goes, 'What are you doing for the next three months?' He goes, ''Cause this is gonna be your job.' And I said, 'Okay. Uh, nothing, I guess,'" Rikki continued. "So, I did 37 rounds of radiation, five days a week, where they make a mask and they put you down on a metal thing. They twist these things so your head can't move, and the machine comes over. It's very scary stuff. And then you get chemo. I had that. I had a good type, a better type of chemo — Martha Stewart drug, they call it. At least I thought it was better. But it didn't work. And at the end of the five months, because it was three months of treatment, then two months you have to wait until everything calms down so they can do the imaging, and it was like it had jumped to the other side, and I had some on the front of my tongue now. And there wasn't that many choices. But there was something called immunotherapy. There was a doctor in San Diego that was heading up some clinical trials, and I did some research on him, and I said, 'I'm gonna meet this guy.' They made the introduction… I got in a car, and met with him. And he said, 'I think I can get you on a trial.' I said, 'Well, my surgeon told me I may not have time.' I said, 'If I let this go and try immunotherapy, and therapy doesn't work, it'll be too late to do surgery.' And he goes, 'I don't think so, 'cause I don't think that's the case. I think if it doesn't look like we're going the right direction, I'll get you on something to shrink the tumor right away. It'll buy more time. We'll figure this out. Somehow we're gonna figure this out.' So, within nine weeks, I was 90% cured. Within another few weeks, it was gone. It's never been back. I celebrate[d] my 10-year anniversary on July 13th."

Rockett was declared cancer free in July 2016 after undergoing the aforementioned experimental immunotherapy, which eradicated the tumor.

In June 2015, Rikki visited his primary care doctor with a sore throat. His doctor found a small tumor at the base of his tongue, and Rikki learned he had human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oral cancer. He endured nine rounds of chemotherapy and 37 sessions of radiation therapy. The tumor initially responded, but returned three months later, spreading to his lymph nodes. Rikki then saw Cohen at UCSD Moores Cancer Center, who helped him enroll in a clinical trial of pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Rikki's tumor responded immediately. Just over two months into the trial, a scan revealed that his tumor had shrunk over 90 precent.

In 2020, Rockett told "Trunk Nation" that he was afflicted with the same type of cancer as what IRON MAIDEN's Bruce Dickinson and MEGADETH's Dave Mustaine had.

"It was base of tongue with an associated lymph node, which is pretty common as far as head and neck cancers these days," he said. "HPV-related head and neck cancers usually are base of tongue. There's a few people that I've sort of mentored or helped out, and many of 'em are musicians. And HPV is pretty rampant — it really is. If you have a kid, get 'em inoculated."

Asked what his symptoms were, Rikki said: "I had a sore throat that wouldn't go away. That was the main thing. And then I had a lymph node that was kind of sticking out. First, they tried antibiotics, and they didn't work at all — they didn't even touch it. So it was, like, 'Okay, we need to do a biopsy. We're gonna go down and scope and take a look.' And there was a lump down there. Then, after a few weeks, it started to get hard to swallow, 'cause the lump was getting bigger — the tumor was getting bigger. So I went and did the typical treatment for it, which is chemo and radiation, and it did not work. And by the way, it's a fairly curable cancer, especially with HPV — there's a high percentage rate of success with it, of cure. But in my case, it didn't cure, so my options were a whole lot less. My doctor told me recently — he didn't tell me this before — but he told me recently that I had about a 10 percent chance if I would have went down the regular path. But we didn't — we used immunotherapy, and it put it in remission in about 10 weeks. When it works, it is amazing."

Rockett first revealed that his tongue cancer diagnosis was caused by HPV — the most common sexually transmitted infection — in a 2015 interview. He said: "It is the number one leading cause of oral cancer these days. There's less and less of the truck drivers that chew tobacco for thirty years getting it, because people are more aware that that kind of stuff isn't good. So we are getting marathon runners and all these elite athletes with this. I have a friend that's a therapist, and five years ago, it was five percent of the people she treated, and now it's close to ninety percent."

He continued: "It can be spread sexually, but now they're saying that it can spread [through] deep-kissing and actually hand to mouth. I mean, if you see the Olympic swimmers, they swim and they smack their hand on the side of the pool for each lap, and their hands are full of warts and stuff from HPV. Now the wart kind of HPV is not the same as the strain that causes cancer, but it is spread almost identically. For men, you can't tell if you have it. For women, you can get a papsmear. But the doctor estimated probably it was 15 [or] 20 years ago [when I contracted it], and my body probably got rid of it, but it mutated itself and my body would probably see that again and get rid of it. But there's no way to tell who got it. I mean, I know a couple that's been married for 15 years and they've never cheated on each other, and they're pointing their finger at each other [after one of them was diagnosed with oral cancer], and it turned into a thing until the doctor sat 'em down and went, 'Look, you can get this so many ways.'"

Rockett's long-awaited memoir, "Ghost Notes: My Life In Poison", which was written with writer duo Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson, will finally arrive in September 2026 via Rare Bird Books.

Press photo credit: Dean Karr (courtesy of Pavement Entertainment)