It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  Throughout the Use Your Illusion tour I had recorded songs on my own, ducking into studios here and there. This project had served largely as a way to kill time I would otherwise have spent drinking, and I didn’t know what the demos were for, really. One of them—my version of Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”—ended up on GN’R’s Spaghetti Incident, the album of cover songs issued just after the end of the Use Your Illusion tour.

  I played a bit of everything over the course of the sessions—drums, guitar, bass. I sang, too, and if you listen to the album, it’s clear I wasn’t able to breathe through my nose on some songs. Then at some point during the tour, a record label employee who was out on the road with us asked where I kept disappearing to on off days. I told him. When Tom Zutaut, who had signed Guns to Geffen records, caught wind of the demos, he asked me if I would like a solo deal. Geffen, he said, could release the tracks as an album. I knew he was probably being mercenary about it—by this time Nirvana and Pearl Jam had broken, and Zutaut probably figured leveraging my Seattle roots and punk connections could help the label reposition GN’R.

  But I didn’t care. To me it was a chance to realize a dream. I had grown up idolizing Prince, who played over twenty instruments on his debut album, which featured the amazing credit line “written, composed, performed, and recorded by Prince.”

  Cool, my own record done the way Prince did it—largely on my own—getting distributed around the world.

  Geffen rushed it out as Believe in Me in the summer of 1993, just as the Illusion tour was wrapping. Axl talked it up on stage during the last few gigs. And I even started to promote it while Guns was still in Europe—at a signing in Spain, so many people showed up that the street outside the record store had to be shut down by police in riot gear.

  I had scheduled a solo tour that would start immediately after GN’R’s last shows—two final gigs in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1993. My solo tour would send me first to play showcases in San Francisco, L.A., and New York, and then to open the Scorpions’ arena tour around Europe and the UK. Returning to L.A. from Argentina, I joined the group of friends and acquaintances I’d arranged to back me on the tour. They had already started rehearsing before I got home. Together we did whirlwind preparations for the tour.

  Axl heard I was planning to go back out on tour. He called me.

  “Are you fucking crazy? You should not go back out on the road right now. You are insane even to think about it.”

  “It’s the only thing I know how to do,” I told him. “I play music.”

  I also knew that if I stayed at home, it would probably devolve into more drug insanity. I didn’t have any illusions about getting sober, but at least out on the road—with a band made up of old Seattle punk-rock friends—I figured I had some chance of toning things down. And of staying off coke. If I stayed in L.A., the temptation of readily available cocaine would likely be too much for me to resist. GN’R management sent Rick “Truck” Beaman, who had served as my personal security guard on the Use Your Illusion tour, out on the road for my solo tour, too. By this stage his concern for me seemed to extend beyond his professional duties. He had taken a deep personal interest, as a friend, in trying to limit the damage I was doing to myself. Now, finally, our goals had dovetailed—at least as far as cocaine was concerned.

  But Axl was right. Before the first gig in San Francisco, my then-wife Linda got into a fistfight backstage with another girl and lost a tooth. Blood spattered everywhere.

  Hell’s Angels packed the show at Webster Hall in New York, and brawls broke out. I shouted at the crowd to settle down, thinking I could somehow make a difference.

  After the show, people tried to come backstage but I wanted to be alone.

  “I’m too tired,” I told security. “I just can’t take it.”

  Lyrics from “Just Not There,” one of the Believe in Me songs we were performing, reverberated in my head:

  You know I look but just can’t find the reasons

  To face another day

  Cause I feel like crawling up inside,

  Just fading away, fading away …

  I toured the record as planned until December 1993. There was still a fervor for all things Guns, especially in Europe. Audiences knew my songs and sang along. With the exception of keyboardist Teddy Andreadis, who had been out with Guns for Use Your Illusion and who had been touring with artists like Carole King since he was barely out of his teens, the band members were fairly inexperienced with arena-scale touring. The band had also been thrown together quickly and lacked cohesion: we had some rough patches, including an intra-band fistfight at an airport somewhere in Europe.

  For the most part I did stay off the coke, though it was by no means a clean break. There were slip-ups. I also switched from drinking vodka to wine.

  Downshifting to wine was all well and good, but the volume of wine quickly skyrocketed until I was drinking ten bottles a day. I was getting really bad heartburn from all the wine, taking Tums all the time. I wasn’t eating but I was badly bloated; my body felt awful.

  At the end of the European leg, our lead guitar player pulled a knife on our bus driver in England. I had to fire him—luckily the tour was finished. Back in Los Angeles, I called Paul Solger, an old friend I had played together with as a teenager in Seattle, and asked him to fill in for the next part of the tour. Solger had gotten sober in the ten years since I’d last played with him; needless to say, I had not. Still, he agreed.

  My band and I headed to Japan in early 1994. Over there we crossed paths with the Posies, a veteran jangle-pop band from Seattle. They came to our gig and said they thought it was cool that the new version of my band was sort of a Seattle punk-rock all-star band. Good to know: I was still Seattle.

  After Japan, we had a few weeks off. I returned to L.A. before the next leg of the tour in Australia.

  Back home I felt as sick as I ever had. My hands and feet were bleeding. I had constant nosebleeds. I was shitting blood. Sores on my skin oozed. My L.A. house was awash in the fetid effluvia of my derelict body. I found myself picking up the phone to tell my managers and band that we weren’t going to Australia.

  I’d bought a house back home in Seattle at that point—a dream house, right on Lake Washington—and I could feel its pull. I had bought it a few years before, sight unseen, in a neighborhood where I used to go to steal cars and boats when I was a kid. In the interim, I had barely had a chance to spend any time there because of the endless Use Your Illusion tour. I thought it might be the right place to try to recover, relax, recharge.

  On March 31, 1994, I went to LAX to catch a flight from L.A. to Seattle. Kurt Cobain was waiting to take the same flight. We started talking. He had just skipped out of a rehab facility. We were both fucked up. We ended up getting seats next to each other and talking the whole way, but we didn’t delve into certain things: I was in my hell and he was in his, and we both seemed to understand.

  When we arrived in Seattle and went toward baggage claim, the thought crossed my mind to invite him over to my place. I had a sense that he was lonely and alone that night. So was I. But there was a mad rush of people in the terminal. I was in a big rock band; he was in a big rock band. We cowered next to each other as people gawked. Lots of people. I lost my train of thought for a minute and Kurt slipped out to a waiting limo.

  Arriving in front of my house in Seattle, I stopped in the driveway and looked up at the roof. When I’d bought the place, it had been old and leaky, and I had paid to have the cedar shakes replaced. The new roof was rated to last twenty-five years, and looking up at it now I thought it was funny: that roof would surely outlast me. Still, staying in the house gave me the feeling that I had finally made it, able to live in a place like this, in a part of town like this.

  A few days later my manager called to tell me Kurt Cobain had been found dead at his Seattle house after putting a gun to his own head. I’m embarrassed to say that upon hearing the news I just felt numb. P
eople in my band had overdosed multiple times. My own addiction had spun out of control and my body was failing. I didn’t pick up the phone and call Kurt’s bandmates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic. I figured my condolences would be meaningless anyway—a few years prior, I’d gotten into a scrap with Krist backstage at the MTV awards, where Guns and Nirvana both performed. I lost my shit when I thought I heard a slight of my band from the Nirvana camp. In my drunken haze I went after Krist. My means of dealing with any sort of conflict had been reduced to barroom brawling by then. Kim Warnick from the Fastbacks—the first real band I played with as a kid in Seattle—had called me the day after the awards show and scolded me. I had felt so low. Now I felt lower still, staring at the phone, incapable of calling to apologize for the earlier incident and to extend my sympathy for his loss and Dave’s.

  Not that Kurt’s death made any difference in how I dealt with my own funk. I just didn’t deal at all. Until one month later.

  Even after GN’R became wildly successful and my world spun out of control, my three closest friends from childhood—Andy, Eddy, and Brian—would still call and come down to L.A. By the time the tour was winding down, I didn’t want them to see too much. I was playing a game by then. But they saw the pictures in the magazines and the interviews on MTV. And I’d call them on the phone all the time. I called them too fucked up too many times, too late at night. I probably called Andy every second day while I was out on the road. He would defend me back in Seattle. He would tell people they didn’t know what my life was like, what I was going through. He was protective. But I knew he was going to have a talk with me—the one my mom couldn’t have. I knew now that I was off the road, it was just a matter of time—that either I was going to die or Andy was going to give me the talk. I didn’t know what I was going to do when we had the talk. I went to sleep on May 9, 1994, with those thoughts in my head, albeit garbled by the ten bottles of wine I had consumed that day.

  The morning of May 10, I woke up in my new bed with sharp pains in my stomach. Pain was nothing new to me, nor was the sickening feeling of things going wrong with my body. But this was different. This pain was unimaginable—like someone taking a dull knife and twisting it in my guts. The pain was so intense I couldn’t even make it to the edge of the bed to dial 911. I was frozen in pain and fear, whimpering.

  There I was, naked on my bed in my dream home, a home I had bought with the hopes of one day having a family of my own to fill it.

  I lay there for what felt like an eternity. The silence of the empty house seemed as loud as my raspy, muffled moans. Never before in my life had I wanted someone to kill me, but I was in such pain I just hoped to be put out of my misery.

  Then I heard Andy, my best friend from childhood, come in the back door. He called, “Hey, what’s up,” just as he had ever since we were kids. Andy, I’m upstairs, I wanted to answer. But I wasn’t able to. I could only silently sob. I heard him start up the stairs—he must have seen my wallet in the kitchen. He made it upstairs and came down the hall.

  “Oh, shit, it’s finally happened,” he said when he reached my room.

  I was thankful to have my friend there. It was comforting to think that I would die in front of Andy. But he had other ideas. He pulled some sweats on me and began to try to move me. He must have felt a jolt of adrenaline—otherwise there is no way Andy could have carried the two hundred pounds of dead weight of my bloated body. As he carried me down the stairs and out to his car, the searing, stabbing pain in my intestines spread farther down to my quadriceps and around to my lower back. I wanted to die.

  The doctor I’d had since I was a kid lived just two blocks away, so Andy took me there. Though Dr. Brad Thomas was my longtime physician, I hadn’t let him see me very often once I descended into full-blown alcoholism. Together, Andy and Dr. Thomas carried me to his first-floor office. I heard my condition being discussed and I felt the prick of a needle in my ass. Demerol. Nothing. Another shot of Demerol in my ass and again nothing, no relief whatsoever. One more shot. Again nothing. The pain kept on spreading and I was starting to panic. I whimpered as my spirit began to blacken and fade.

  They decided to rush me to the emergency room at Northwest Hospital. Dr. Thomas told Andy to drive me, as it would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. He said he would meet us there. Andy drove as fast as he could without jerking the car too much—every little movement made me moan and cry.

  As they put an IV drip of morphine into my left arm at the hospital, the staff asked me questions I could not answer.

  “Name? Address?”

  Andy answered those.

  “How much do you drink on a daily basis?”

  “Are you on drugs right now?”

  I just whimpered.

  I was mute from pain. The morphine wasn’t working as I knew it should. I knew a thing or two about opiates by that stage in my life. I knew the warm rush they offered, yet I was getting none of it.

  They wheeled me into a room next to another guy on a gurney. The motion made me writhe in agony.

  “Dude, I broke my back,” said the guy in the other bed. “And I’m glad I don’t have whatever you have.”

  Dr. Thomas and an ultrasound technician ran a scanner over my organs and I saw my doctor’s face go white. My pancreas, apparently swollen to the size of a football from all the booze, had burst. I had third-degree burns all over the inside of my body from the digestive enzymes released by the damaged pancreas. Only a few parts of the inside of your digestive tract can handle the enzymes, and the outsides of your organs and your stomach muscles are definitely not among them—it just burns all that tissue.

  A surgeon with thick glasses explained the surgery. They had to take out the top part of the pancreas—cut it off. Sew me back up. And then I’d have to be on dialysis for the rest of my life.

  Suddenly I understood the pleading mouthed by miserable souls back to antiquity, those left breathing after being run through with a rusty sword or scalded with hot oil. I was there.

  I summoned all my power to whisper to the ER doctor.

  “Kill me.”

  I begged over and over.

  “Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  It happens in a flash, life does. Only the ever-deepening lines on my face tell me that I have been alive for a while. I don’t feel any different. I still have geeky and adolescent thoughts. I still tell the same dumb jokes. I look up at that cedar-shake roof on the house in Seattle—now looking a bit the worse for wear—and think, Hang on, didn’t I just have that redone?

  But then again, the real question is different: How did I manage to outlast that roof? To put it another way, how did I get here from there? And how did I find myself there in the first place? That’s what I’ve tried to figure out through the process of writing this book. Because it certainly wasn’t a given that my story would amount to anything more than a lurid cautionary tale. It had all the elements: sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and fame, fortune, and a fall. But instead, the story became—well, it became something else.

  Here’s what I do know, as I set out to answer those questions. I let myself lose track of what I thought was meaningful in life even as Guns N’ Roses began to become meaningful to others. Back then—on the few occasions that I thought about it at all—I could think of a million excuses for going off the rails. But in the end it seems to have hinged on a failure to grapple with a few basic definitions—of what it meant to be successful, of what it meant to be an adult, of what it meant to be a man. The way I liked to define myself diverged from the actions that actually defined me. And this disconnect proved a nearly fatal level of self-deception.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I’m afraid this is one of those stories that takes a long time to unfold. There have never been any easy epiphanies for me; it took a lifetime to start to understand even the slightest goddamn thing. So I’ll just have to start at the start.

  My dad was a Wor
ld War II vet who began having children with my mother when he was eighteen and didn’t stop until he was thirty-eight. He went straight from the war to working for the Seattle Fire Department, desperately trying to provide for what would become a family of eight children by the time I arrived, born Michael McKagan on February 5, 1964.

  There were several Michaels on my block—including one of the kids immediately next door. The Michael next door had a grandfather from Ireland living with him, and his grandpa apparently gave me the nickname Duff to simplify things on our street. Later, once Guns N’ Roses took off, my dad liked to claim credit for the name, too. He said he used to call me McDuff. Either way, I was called Duff from before I can remember.

  I’m not sure a little boy could ask for much more than having a father whose vocation happens to be working as a fireman. If at times during grade school I was embarrassed that my mom and dad were much older than my friends’ and classmates’ parents, at least I could find comfort in the fact that my pop was a heroic older guy.

  Both my parents had come of age during the Depression, and that experience colored their thinking on money, on work, on life. I remember my mom telling me stories of what it was like growing up in the Depression. Stories of not having enough money to heat the house in the winter, of having to wear sweaters and coats all of the time. Stories of how her mother would fix a broken roller skate or doll and that would be her sole Christmas present.

  If you are at any McKagan family gathering (a large crowd to be sure), try muttering “FHB” and see what happens. Well, I’ll tell you what will happen: you will suddenly see the eight brothers and sisters each take a minuscule portion at the pot-luck buffet table. “Family Hold Back” is a saying that comes from years of too many kids and not enough to feed us all of the time. One of us would almost always have a friend over for dinner and this is when the secret code of FHB started: make sure the guest had enough to eat, take a small portion, don’t say anything. We kids were taught lessons of frugality and thrift by example.