When we arrived at the Atlantic City House of Blues in the Showboat casino, we were pretty sure we knew what to expect. And we were going to be damn upset if we didn't get it. After all, sitting in the parking lot known as 676 East on a summer Friday had caused our trip from Center City to take two hours. So we weren't in the best mood, because we had to scramble to check in at Harrah's, where we were staying, grab a super-quick bite to eat, and haul ass over to the concert. We just didn't really have time to settle in at all. But, we arrived at the House of Blues with high hopes for an awesome, or maybe just an awesomely bad, time with Bret Michaels.

On the way to the concert, Editor Jill and I had debated how heavily weighted towards Poison music the concert would be. Editor Jill figured it would be basically an all-Poison setlist, whereas I thought Bret would really focus on the material from his solo album, Rock My World and just play one or two Poison songs. As usual, and fortunately for us, Jill was more right on. We got a full dosage of the Poison standards, including "Something to Believe In," "Your Mama Don't Dance," "Nothin' But a Good Time," and, naturally, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." There were a few Bret solo songs, which were entirely unmemorable. The quality of the performance was exactly what you'd expect. That is to say, Bret Michaels is a pretty dreadful musician—a point underscored dramatically by the fact that we'd seen Death Cab for Cutie the night before (check out Pencopal's review of the DCfC concert) and would see Rush the following night (this Phillyist's review of that show can be found here). It didn't help matters that Bret was losing his voice, which clearly affected his performance on a number of songs. But when you go to a Bret Michaels show, you don't go for virtuoso musicianship, but to have a good time, and we couldn't help but dance a little bit to "Unskinny Bop." We got exactly what we'd expected, and that was fine by us.

After the show, we made our way back to Harrah's and went to the pool, where we met up with a number of blogging colleagues. (When you've got some time, check out their sites, linked at the end of this post.) As we predicted, the Bret Michaels pool party was much less of moron-fest than the Tila Tequila party we went to put in a 10-minute appearance at last time we were in Atlantic City. The pool space really is a great party spot. One thing we had a slight problem with, though, was the DJ music. We don't quite understand why, when your guest of honor is Bret Michaels, and the crowd is made up largely of Bret fans, you would pump the typical obnoxious club music through the speakers. We would have had a bit of a better time if the music of choice was more Bret Michaels/Poison-ish. But hey, we might have been in the minority in that regard.

In typical rock star fashion, Bret's appearance was scheduled to be somewhere around midnight. (His concert had ended just after 11.) While he might have arrived at the pool and made his way to his cabana at that time, his musical performance at the party didn't occur until much later. We hung out at the party until 1:30 a.m., at which point our long day finally caught up with us. So we figured we were going to go to sleep without hearing Bret's pool party performance. But all was not lost. We made our way back up to our room in the Waterfront Tower (which was absolutely killer, with a great bathroom and easily the most comfortable hotel bed we've slept in in a long, long time). Our room actually overlooked the Harrah's pool dome and the outdoor area adjacent to it, which turned out to be a plus, because when Bret did his performance (at around 2 a.m.), we were able to get a decent listen. It sounded like he performed "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," both of which he did during his show at the House of Blues, so we don't think we missed much by heading to up to the room early. Of course, we couldn't help but wonder what the guests who might not have been so keen on Bret Michaels thought of his performance being audible in the hotel rooms...

All in all, we had a blast, even if Bret Michaels was far from the best musician we've ever seen. Part of the great time we had can be attributed to the bloggers we met during the course of the evening, and we'd like to give them a mention here. If you have some time, we recommend you check out the sites of these friends of Phillyist:

• Peter Shankman
• Former Phillyist writer Jen Miller of Down the Shore with Jen
• Jane Porricelli of Pinks & Blues Girls
• Ehmonie Hainey of What's Haute
• Chris Shott of The New York Observer
• Douglas Quenqua of The ClickZ Network and The New York Times

Photo by Tom Briglia/PhotoGraphics, courtesy of Harrah's Entertainment. All rights reserved.