Poison’s Potent Pill for Hard-Rock Fame : Pop music: The band has sold more than 10 million records by appealing to teen fantasies. It plans to age gracefully.

Bret Michaels, singer of the massively popular hard-rock band Poison, glanced at his watch and took on a look of disbelief beneath his long blond hair. It wasn’t from wondering where the hours went, but the years.

“Sometimes, I swear to God, I’m doing interviews and they ask me how old I am and I say, ‘I’m 18 now,’ like I’m really thinking I’m just becoming 18,” he said, sitting in his manager’s Beverly Hills office. “It’s really weird.”

Michaels is actually 27, but forgive him this slip back into adolescence: Acting out a teen fantasy--for a largely teen audience--has made him rich and famous.

In the five years since Poison emerged from the Hollywood hard-rock scene, it’s been the pop alternative to the darker Guns N’ Roses. Poison’s three albums have sold a total of more than 10 million copies in the United States (the current “Flesh & Blood” is in the Top 20 and has sold about 2.5 million). The formula for success has involved a neo-glam approach of heavy facial makeup, flashy stage shows and a mix of party-time anthems and broken-love power ballads a la “I Want Action” and the 1988 No. 1 single “Every Rose Has a Thorn.”

With that, Poison’s sold-out show New Year’s Eve at the Long Beach Arena is not just a triumphant homecoming a year and a half after its last Southern California concert, but also the culmination of a tour in which Poison is routinely selling out arenas while most other hard-rock tours are struggling. (Poison also plays at the San Diego Sports Arena on Sunday.)

But prone as he may be to reliving his past, Michaels is growing keenly aware of his future.

“All of a sudden I become 30 and think, ‘How do I appeal to a girl that’s 17? What do I know that she knows?’ ” he said.

In other words: Can teen-rock mature?

“If you ask me this when I’m 45 and I’m still trying to sing ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ and be sexy in front of a bunch of 17-year-old girls, I think you can call me a little foolish,” he said. “But I think the Stones have aged gracefully. And Aerosmith has aged gracefully. I love what they do.”

Already adjustments have been made for age and maturity. Most importantly, two band members addressed drug problems and entered rehab programs in the middle of the group’s last tour, without the self-satisfied publicity that often accompanies such moves.

The most noticeable change on a more cosmetic level is that the makeup has been toned down in favor of a mild tattooed-biker image.

“I still enjoy wearing it,” Michaels said of the cosmetics the band used to be known for. “But for the most part it’s not as shocking as it used to be.”

And the band’s range of music and lyrical themes has grown a bit with time.

“The old songs were adolescent songs, I admit, and I still write semi-adolescent,” he said. “But as I get older I’m finding ways to write how I’m feeling.”

But Michaels knows that how he’s feeling now is a step or two removed from how he felt when he and guitarist C.C. DeVille, bassist Bobby Dall and drummer Rikki Rockett headed from Pennsylvania to Hollywood in 1983, determined to make it on the Sunset Strip.

“Back then all I knew was I wanted my dad to hate us and I wanted my mom to hate us,” Michaels said. “That’s what I lived for. Back in Pennsylvania there was nothing I loved more than flipping a guy off while driving down the street with me and a bunch of my buddies in my car.”

Asked where the anger came from, Michaels continued, “You don’t understand--in Pennsylvania, any state in that area, there was no rock scene back then. If you went to school in a Scorpions T-shirt you had to wear it inside out. You got made fun of.”

That, he believes, is what helped boost both Poison and Guns N’ Roses, made up largely of Midwesterners, above the countless other rockers trying to make it on the Strip in the mid ‘80s.

“Out here it’s a freer culture,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, maybe if I’d grown up out here I might be less angry. I like the fact that I’m a bit angry. I like the fact that some things turn me wrong. It gives me good motivation to write stuff.”