How to Be a Man

by Duff McKagan

  The four of us little dudes were already trying to form a band, and the term “punk rock” was being whispered from somewhere deep and dark in downtown Seattle. But for now, we’d have to wait in line with the Columbian shake pot we brought and the bologna and Velveeta sandwiches our moms forced on us as we scrambled to catch the #75 bus downtown.

  We waited in that line all day. We saw older girls—maybe sixteen, seventeen—who we thought were real women! They had jean shorts on, lipstick, feathered hair, and . . . uh . . . boobs! This was badass. No one looked at us like we were kids, and no one grumbled at the surely low quality of our non-bud bud. And hell, the hours and minutes were getting smaller to see sonofabitchin’ LED ZEPPELIN!

  (As a side note: My own daughters are now the age of those girls I just mused about in that last little bit. It’s a little weird to ponder back to that age while also being a father. Just a thought. Don’t get all freaked out about it, alright?)

  As it got closer and closer to showtime, we noticed that the crowd outside the Dome had grown large. Close to 20,000 fans were waiting to get in. They started to chant: “We want in! We want in!”

  When we finally got in, we found a great place to see the show. There was no opener. Just Zeppelin. From the opening moments of “The Song Remains the Same” through the epic finale of “Rock and Roll,” we knew every riff, drum beat, guitar solo, and lyric. This was our first real rock concert, and the air was thick with pot smoke and the overwhelming scent of Teen Spirit. Seattle didn’t get all of the big tours back then, so when big bands did come through, I think they most definitely were overcome with the absolute riotous din that came from our rock-starved region. Seattle always has been a little louder.

  The band played harder for us that night. We knew they were putting everything into it for us. The crowd felt like one conjoined mass of emotion and praise and power. We were seeing this all happen together, in one place. It was the best night ever in rock-and-roll history. Ever! My best friends and I had seen it together, and we just knew then that nothing again in our lives could ever touch this experience we just had.

  We were wrong.

  Nothing had ever come close to that night until the Seahawks met the 49ers that day.

  There was a weird smoke over the field for the whole game, not unlike that Zeppelin show. The crowd at that game, like that Zeppelin gig at the Dome, was truly anxious for what was to come and completely and unbelievably rowdy when it arrived.

  Seattle has had a tough run as a professional sports town. We didn’t even have the NFL or MLB until ’76, and our 1979 Seattle Supersonics brought us our one and only championship trophy.

  In the ’70s and ’80s, to the rest of the country, Seattle was “that little town up there somewhere.” All we had was Boeing. Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, and grunge music helped expose the region to the rest of the world. Sports, however, remained veritably nonexistent in national media.

  I think we like it that way. Seattleites are different. The 12th Man ethic, I believe, came about because, hell, if no one else was going to pay attention to the Seahawks, screw ’em! The fans would appreciate and support this team all by themselves.

  And that’s what we did on Sunday, January 19, 2014. We got behind our Hawks as they took the field, cheered louder than a jumbo jet when they fell behind at the half, and made some ears bleed as our team came from behind in the fourth quarter to give us another shot at winning the Super Bowl.

  Special season, indeed.

  21

  CHAPTER

  SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING

  THE HAWKS’ WIN MEANT TWO THINGS:

  1.I was going to be celebrating my fiftieth birthday in New York, with my Seahawks in contention for the world championship.

  2.We really needed tickets.

  Jerry and I immediately went into a mad scramble to get tickets to, yes, the Super Bowl. We were finally willing to utter the word. Finding a place to stay was easy, and getting plane tickets was a breeze. But getting through the gate proved to be a bit harder. Paying $8,000 a ticket on StubHub was not going to happen (not when you’ve got two daughters in private school. Plus, who buys those tickets? Corporate accounts, right?).

  I had a connection with an NFL executive back in ’06 when we got excellent seats at face value. When I found out the exec was no longer with the NFL, I went back to square one. We’d figure it out. Somehow.

  After the high of that momentous win over the 49ers, I began to feel well enough to get back into the gym. Sure, I was weak as hell, and nine weeks in bed had caused a few muscles to atrophy a bit, but I was back. When you train hard at my age, you get familiar with the sundry aches and pains in different parts of the body. People like us will sacrifice our bodies to pain and injury in the constant physical pursuit of mental ease and confidence. Even spiritual heights and clarity can be sought this way. It turns out there was an upside to being forced to lie prone for weeks on end: the time off my feet did wonders for my various joint aches. I took note that more days of rest should be in my future.

  But not now, I thought: I’m gonna turn fifty! And my Seahawks are going to the SUPER BOWL! I’ll rest later. There was work to do. Jerry and I—guys who didn’t dare bring up the words “SUPER” or “BOWL” during the season—had been hell-bent on finding tickets from the moment the clock ticked to 00.00 during the NFC championship game. We were headed to New Jersey, and we were going to the game.

  The reality of the Seattle Seahawks making it to the game of all games set the 12th Man and the entire city of Seattle on fire. The exaltation we felt as a city that week morphed into a sort of quiet confidence. I don’t think the rest of the country gave the Hawks much of a chance against Peyton Manning and his lofty squad of receivers. They were “destined.” We were “upstarts.”

  I was really fortunate to have been able to write about my ticket search on NFL.com that week. A direct result of my quasi-public search for seats to the game was that a friend of mine who works for a guitar string company knew a guy who used to work at the Staples Center, and he called a friend of his who works for an NFL franchise who knew a guy in NFL ticketing who knew where to get a direct line on face-value tickets (got that?). All of this resulted in my pals and I getting some pretty kick-ass tickets. It kind of reminded me of long-past days of conducting shady deals and waiting by the phone for “the man” to call. Supply-and-demand economics in its rawest form.

  Back in Los Angeles later that week, I’d been wearing my Seahawks baseball cap everywhere. At any other time of the year, it would have been just another hat. Just another team. But with the Super Bowl coming up, the hat became much more than just some other team’s insignia. It became an indicator of what other people thought of my team.

  My doctor told me he was sorry (already) for the brutal beating we were sure to take in New Jersey. I disagreed rather strongly and politely, but my ire was officially up. I went to the Jimmy Kimmel Live show to watch my buddy and fellow Seahawks fan Nikki Sixx and his band, Mötley Crüe, announce their Final Tour. It was a free, outside gig, hence there were a ton of people there.

  “Seahawks suuuck!” was one young rocker’s exclamation to my proudly worn colors. I, once again, soundly disagreed. (I think I went highbrow with a “YOU suck!” retort. You know, keeping it classy.)

  After Kimmel, I called Tim Medvetz, a longtime pal you might know as the “biker” who was featured on Discovery Channel’s Everest: Beyond the Limit.

  Tim leads a profound life. His main mission these days is getting young amputee US servicemen and servicewomen up the biggest mountains on the planet. He raises the money and trains these young soldiers on his own. But Tim is also a proud New Jerseyite and was more than a little pissed about how the Super Bowl was being labeled the “New York/New Jersey Super Bowl.”

  “I mean, what the hell!?!?!” Tim said. “The Jets play in New Jersey, and they are called the New York Jets. The Giants play in New Jersey, and they are the New York Giants. The Super Bowl is in East Ru
therford, NEW JERSEY, and they are calling this thing the ‘New York/New Jersey Super Bowl!’”

  Tim was just getting started: “And, they didn’t even ask the Boss or Bon Jovi to play halftime!” A conversation with Tim always seems to end up at the Boss or Bon Jovi, no matter what the initial subject matter is. Kind of like us Seattleites, where the conversation always ends up with Jimi Hendrix or coffee or the Sonics getting stolen from our city. Or the 2013 Seahawks.

  Jerry and I did a video feature for NFL Network about our support for the Hawks. The interviewer asked us both what it felt like to have our team looked at by the rest of the country as the bad guys. I guess I hadn’t thought about that at all. The Seahawks are the bad guys? All right. Even that prospect felt OK with the both of us. We’ll take it any way we can.

  The Broncos, even for us Seahawks fans, were nearly impossible to vilify. Peyton Manning was the golden boy of destiny, and a large part of the rest of that team was made up of beloved veterans. We Seahawks are punk rock, and they are classic rock. But, remember, without punk rock actually shaking things up in the late 1970s, classic rock would have gone further and further into mellowsville. It would have died a slow death of gluttony. The Seattle Seahawks have shaken up how the NFL game is played, and it is fun to watch as your team is at the forefront of something new and exciting.

  At the time, an old friend of mine was just moving to Manhattan’s West Village. The place was all set up with furniture and beds, but he wasn’t staying there yet. He offered the place to me and Jerry and my buddy Ed to crash during the Super Bowl—and my fiftieth. There you go. We wouldn’t have to compete with all of the other Super Bowl–bound folks for a hotel room. We packed our cold-weather clothes and got a Friday Jet Blue flight to JFK. This was it!

  The location of the seats we got for the game was still a mystery for us until just before our flight. We knew we’d be somewhere in the lower bowl of the stadium and were told that every seat down in that bowl had a great view. The tickets arrived via FedEx just before we left for the airport. Quickly checking the aisle and seat number against a stadium schematic that Jerry pulled up on his iPhone, we saw that we were in a veritable “position A.” Our seats were in the fourth row, directly behind the Seahawks bench. This escalated our excitement, to put it mildly.

  After landing at JFK, we headed into the city. The NFL Network had set us up to go to some party thing that we were only half interested in. Since the event was only four blocks from the place we were staying, we decided to wander up there after dropping our bags off at my buddy’s pad in the Village.

  There was a long line outside the party, and, after waiting in it for fifteen minutes or so (and the line not moving at all), we went around to the side VIP entrance to see if our names were there. “Yeah, you are on the list, guys, but we are just letting girls in now. No dudes. Just chicks.”

  Oh. We really didn’t care. After all, we were in town for the game, not some dumb party. But for the rest of the weekend, the “no dudes, just chicks” saying became our mantra every time we got frustrated for dinner reservations or were faced with long lines at the myriad Super Bowl events we went to over the next forty-eight hours. Just when you think that maybe the “Duff from Guns N’ Roses” tag or the “Jerry from Alice in Chains” handle can open doors, reality has a way of keeping one humble. I mean, seriously, my life at home with a wife and two daughters is a constant NO DUDES, JUST CHICKS affair. I don’t need some beefy doorman to tell me that!

  It was supposed to be really cold in the Northeast that weekend, and every face on television was trumpeting how the championship game would be affected by single-digit temperatures and the expected snowstorm. I was worried about my health in those temperatures and brought just about every layer of mountain gear I had. Mountain gear is really not meant for a fashionable place such as Manhattan. As a result, I was the only one in the fashionable West Village dressed ready to summit a 14,000-foot mountain. Fuck it. I ain’t gettin’ sick again, and this week was about football, not haute couture.

  There is an important feature that binds Ed, me, and Jerry together besides our love of the Seahawks: all three of us are clean. Finally. The three of us all came very close to the edge with our consumption of alcohol and drugs, and we’ve survived a bunch of our fallen comrades. This point wasn’t lost on us, and the simple fact that we have each lived long enough to finally be at this 2014 championship game, following the team through a bunch of our personally dark years, was not taken lightly. We’ve each had each other’s backs through this fight and have been there to help others, as others have helped each one of us in the past. It’s a cyclical and ongoing thing, being clean.

  The place we were staying at in the West Village was on a tiny street with very little car traffic. The din of the big city seemed miles away. On Saturday, we had plans to go to Times Square to see Super Bowl Lane. We were going to go see the Foo Fighters later that night and maybe get some Super Bowl T-shirts for friends and family back home. Exiting the apartment, we ran smack-dab into a very famous actor. Being as this was an almost private street, we simply nodded to him and kept on our way, not wanting to intrude on his private life. Ed commented that the actor had been clean for something like twenty-three years, but he’d heard that he’d recently started using again. Should we turn around and offer to take the guy for a coffee? As I said, keeping sober is a group effort. We trudged on through the cold, discussing the matter.

  Later that afternoon when we came back, we saw the actor in the street again and could tell that he was waiting to score. Should we offer our friendship and a safe place? This is sometimes the dilemma for sober guys—as we all know, you can’t force a guy to get sober. He has to come around to it himself. We went back into the apartment.

  Later that night, before the Foo Fighters show, the three of us were hanging out in a backstage green room with a bunch of music industry folks and whatnot, when a couple of security guys came in and cleared the room. But they told the three of us we could stay. We assumed that because we are actual friends with the guys in the Foos, they were just clearing out everyone else so that the band could pass through the room, hassle-free, on the way to the stage. Suddenly, two bigger security guys came through with none other than Sir Paul McCartney. We “no dudes, just chicks” guys were good enough, apparently, to be trusted in such small confines with a fucking Beatle!

  “Hi, Duff! Hi, Jerry! How’s it going, guys?” Pretty good, Paul . . . pretty good. And yeah, screw those dudes over at that other VIP line from the night before! All was suddenly right in the world. Our Seahawks would be on the world’s biggest football stage the next day, and Paul goddamned McCartney knew me and Jerry by name! No dudes! Just chicks!

  After the show, we were visibly giddy about the game, which was only a few hours away. We took a cab back down to the apartment and got dropped off in front of the place at about 1:30 a.m. We ran smack-dab into the actor again. On the street. Waiting. Again. Shit, man. We thought that maybe he was on a last run before getting clean. Surely if we saw him again in the morning, we’d have to say something.

  Bro, c’mon. We’ve been there. Come on out of the cold. We understand. We’ve been there. Really. We’ve been there.

  The next morning—Sunday, February 2, 2014, the morning of the Super Bowl—I heard a ruckus outside our front door. I went out to take a look. There was an ambulance and police, and a whole crowd of press people and fans. The actor had OD’d and died sometime after we saw him at 1:30 a.m. the night before. (Out of respect for his children and our joint association with a “fraternity,” I don’t feel comfortable calling him out by name.)

  The three of us gathered in the kitchen of our apartment. We were stunned. I’ve been through this before with friends, and friends of friends, but I’ll never get used to it. Sure, none of us knew the actor personally, but he was one of us. The three of us understood that we could, at any time, be just one small and easy step from being the guy out there on the street waiting for the de
aler to show. When guys like us witness something like this go down, it makes you take stock of where you are at in your sobriety.

  We’d been following this Seattle team since we were twelve years old. Ed has OD’d countless times and shouldn’t be here. Jerry abused himself so badly that here was a point in his life when he didn’t care if he lived or died. My pancreas burst at thirty, and here I was three days away from turning fifty. We’d all lost close friends to this thing, but we’d survived. It may seem trite, but it was so heavy to us that we were going to be able to celebrate our team at the Super Bowl later that day. The actuality of the three of us still drawing breath, living long enough to witness this day, was profound at that moment. A great actor’s sudden death drove the point home.

  There was nothing left for us to do. We shook hands and looked toward the stadium. The game became even more of a thing for me. In my private thoughts, I was proud of Jerry and Ed, and grateful that I made it, too. I was grateful to have a family of girls who look to me at times for guidance and security and comfort. As our car eased into the parking lot of Giants Stadium, my stomach churned with so many emotions.

  Our team came to New York so ready to play and tore the unsuspecting Denver Broncos to shreds. We stood in the stands and didn’t let our guard down—or even breathe—until that game was over and we were Super Bowl champions at long last. It was really quite unbelievable for us Seattle fans. The underdog city, the underdog team, and I think we three dudes felt like the underdogs who had survived when many betted against us in the past.

  It was a victory, to be sure. But there was something bittersweet about it. Thinking about the great actor, his final day, and being among the last people to see him alive reminded me that I’d been here before.

  I was on an LA-SEA flight with Kurt Cobain in 1994. We were both fucked up. We talked, but not in-depth. I was in my hell, and he in his. This, we both seemed to understand.