Bret Michaels Admits Hemorrhage Struck During 'Busty Cops 3'

Rolling Stone's Austin Scaggs has finally convinced rock & roll survivor Bret Michaels to fess up to what he was watching on TV when his near-fatal hemorrhage struck last month. The truth: "I was going back and forth from SportsCenter to Busty Cops 3," the Poison frontman and Celebrity Apprentice finalist admits. "Maybe that's what did it!" he says about the intensity of the "Skin-e-max" flick.

Nothin' But Good Times: check out photos of Bret Michaels' craziest days with Poison.

Michaels says his recovery playlist includes loads of classic rock, from Aerosmith to Kiss and AC/DC, and adds he heard Don McLean's "American Pie" with fresh ears after being discharged from the hospital in Arizona where he spent two weeks recovering from sudden bleeding at the base of his brainstem. "When I heard lines like, 'This'll be the day that I die' ... I get chills just thinking about it," he says.

Sunday night, the guy known for sloppy groupie hook-ups on VH1's reality-dating juggernaut Rock of Love will enter Donald Trump's boardroom for one last time as perhaps the most improbable Apprentice finalist ever. Michaels gets why people underestimated him, but says he's a real contender. "None of them thought I was going to get out of bed," he says. "I said it on the show: Don't mistake my kindness for weakness." As Rolling Stone reported, Michaels' next reality show will be a more sober look at his struggle to balance his family with his rockin' lifestyle in VH1's Life as I Know It.

Yesterday on Oprah, Michaels got teary-eyed as his daughters and Celebrity Apprentice costars sang his praises. "I think of all the crazy, crazy things I've done in my life, I'm just thankful to be here," he said.

Check out our full interview in the next issue (on sale at newsstands Wednesday, May 26th), where Michaels opens up about his new album, Custom Built, how CC DeVille and his Poison bandmates reacted to his health scare and how he's finally tamed his partying.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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