It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  Why didn’t you move to L.A. before this happened, Jim?

  I flew home for Jim’s funeral in Seattle. All my old feelings about heroin came flooding back: Joe Toutonghi, who had urged me to get out of town three years prior, spoke at Jim’s funeral—and as he eulogized yet another overdose victim, Joe himself was clearly nodding out. Seeing my old friend and roommate Eddy again at the funeral, I was really scared he might be next. It was clear he was what people called a “to die” junkie. The kind who just couldn’t stop no matter what—only death would break the habit of a “to die” junkie.

  But there was no time to hunker down and reflect on the macabre events. Guns N’ Roses was on our way to London. The gig came about because of our Live! Like a Suicide EP, released six months before, in December 1986. The EP was a fast and furious collection of songs, two originals and two covers. At the time we were relieved to have something—anything—out on vinyl. (By the way, the crowd noise on that EP is from recordings of a 1970s rock festival called the Texxas Jam—we thought it would be funny to put a huge stadium crowd in the background at a time when we were lucky to be playing to a few hundred.) But the EP didn’t make a stir anywhere in the world. Except, we soon found out, in Britain. Unbeknownst to us, a cult following was building over there and was champing at the bit for any news about the band. When Kerrang! magazine sent a photographer over to Los Angeles to shoot us for a cover article in early 1987, we had been completely baffled. Kerrang! was the biggest rock magazine in the UK. We had received some local press coverage in L.A. at this point, but Kerrang!? We were half convinced somebody was playing a prank on us, but the photographer showed up and the article ran. Then a London concert promoter had contacted us and asked us to play the famous Marquee club in June, before the release of Appetite. Up to then, the only place I had been outside of the United States was Vancouver, Canada, to play punk-rock shows with my various Seattle bands when I was a teenager. So this was big news to me. Huge. Magnificent.

  Kids in the UK would sort of latch onto one band and make a big deal out of it. In the mid-1980s, that band was Hanoi Rocks, an amazing group of Finns who had relocated to England and were writing some of the best and dirtiest rock on the planet. When Hanoi came to tour America in 1984, their drummer died in a car crash while making a booze run with Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe during a few days off in L.A. that December. I had just moved to Hollywood that fall, and Slash and I had tickets to the Hanoi Rocks gig that never happened because of the car accident. It was an incredibly sad moment in rock and roll, and Hanoi Rocks never recovered—they broke up soon after.

  Flash-forward to our gig in the UK in June 1987. After the first Marquee gig sold out in record time, they added a second date. That sold out just as fast, so they added a third night. By the time we arrived in London, we were minor celebrities. We discovered we had become the “it” band the youth of England had been looking for to fill the void left by Hanoi Rocks. We stayed in a rent-by-the-week apartment because it was much cheaper than a hotel, and at times people would stop us on the street. They actually knew who we were! It was a weird sensation, even on such a small scale.

  I learned to ride London’s subway system, the Tube, because there were great gigs every night we were there. Slash and I went out one night to see the Replacements and got so drunk that when we caught the Tube after the show, we ended up on a train heading the wrong way. When we arrived at the end of the line, there were no more trains running and we didn’t have anywhere near enough money to take a cab back. And anyway, we didn’t know the address where we were staying. We only knew how to get there from our local Tube stop. We ended up sloppily swinging at each other out of frustration before passing out in the train station.

  The real reason we were there, of course, was to fucking rock. In that period of the band’s career—and with pent-up energy from half a year of virtually no gigs—nobody fucking rocked with as much purpose and sneer, or with the same level of recklessness and bad intentions. This is not me bragging; we were just firing on all cylinders. At sound check before the first show on June 19, 1987, we ran through a cover song. We played it just once, but somehow our feelings found a perfect vessel in this Bob Dylan song and our emotions just came pouring out. Todd Crew showed up unexpectedly that day—he was bumming around Europe on a Eurail pass he’d gotten for graduation but never used—and he told us he was blown away by the way we played the song.

  When we walked to the Marquee that first night for the show itself, we were met by a crowd filling up the entire block in front of the club. We were absolutely amazed that all of these people had come to see us. Trusting Todd’s judgment, we ended up closing the show with the cover song we had tried during sound check that afternoon, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

  We all hung out in the street in front of the Marquee after that show and before and after the next two gigs. We felt awed by our reception.

  When we arrived back in the States in early July, nothing was happening for us. We took an opening slot on a tour with the Cult, a British band with Goth roots. They’d had success with “She Sells Sanctuary” off their second album, Love, and beginning in mid-August, they were touring across Canada and the western United States for their third album, Electric. With our record coming out, we would have a small budget for a crew, so Todd Crew and I hatched a plan: he would come out on the Cult tour and be my bass tech. He could make some money working the tour and then return to L.A. and start a new band.

  There was still a month or so to kill. Slash went off to meet with merchandising companies in New York City just prior to the U.S. release of Appetite. Todd got a wild and drunken hair up his ass and flew out to New York to join him. Todd thought it’d be a fun last hurrah before he had to sober up a bit to work the tour, I guess. Todd always called me about eight times a day, and this didn’t change when he went to New York. But then the calls stopped. I thought that maybe he’d found some girl and was holed up in her apartment without a phone.

  But that wasn’t it.

  At three o’clock on a Sunday morning, my phone rang. The sound woke me from a deep sleep. I picked up the phone and heard Todd’s mother’s voice.

  “Duff! Please tell me Todd is at your apartment with you. Please tell me he is there.”

  “What?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was still rubbing my half-closed eyes.

  “Todd is not dead. He can’t be!” she shrieked.

  Now I was completely dumbstruck. The New York Police Department’s coroner had called her to tell her that they had her son’s body. He had died of a heroin overdose, the coroner had told her.

  It can’t be true. He’ll come bursting through the door any minute now.

  I made some frantic calls. It was true: Todd was gone. Gone.

  To this day, it is hard to talk or even think about it. At the time all I knew was that two of my best friends had suddenly been washed from this earth in quick succession. First Jim and then Todd. I felt as if I had been left to swim upstream in a world that was getting darker and darker all of the time.

  I didn’t know where to turn. Eddy was unavailable. Andy was a thousand miles away. My mom was always on the other end of the phone, but I still felt suddenly lost.

  I feel so alone.

  I had moved in with my girlfriend Mandy a few months before. Now I asked her to marry me. Premature, for sure. But I needed to try to create something solid, to shore up the foundations of my existence. She said yes.

  Guns N’ Roses started the Cult tour in Halifax on August 14, with shows almost every night for a little over a month. Halifax is in Nova Scotia, in the easternmost corner of Canada. Despite everything else, it was an exciting prospect. Nobody in my family had ever been out to Nova Scotia—nobody I knew had ever been out there. I was going to be the first. Every time there was a first like that, I used to think to myself that I should savor the moment. It would also be the first time ever that I was part of a highly organized “campaign”
behind the release of a record. We had a tour bus! We had a couple of real hotel rooms! And catering! Fuck, yes!

  Backstage the first night of the tour, I saw Billy Duffy—the Cult’s guitar player—sitting down to dinner at one of the tables in the catering room. I gave him a sort of half-assed “dude nod” in the hopes that maybe he knew my name—you know, he’s Duffy, I’m Duff—and that we would have a conversation starter. Nope. Didn’t happen. He just saw some tall geezer with a strange tic. He ignored me and went on about the business of eating his fucking dinner. I felt like a complete goof.

  Hitting the stage that night was extra special. It did not matter in the slightest that there were maybe fifty people in the audience when we took the stage. One thing I hadn’t reckoned on were the barricades between the stage and the audience, leaving a ton of space where the building’s security personnel could gather and show their force. Because of that gap, the stage lights did not illuminate the few people in attendance. And all of those lights were blinding. The overall effect was to make us feel like we were playing to this big yawning void.

  We had decided to add “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” to our set as a tribute to Todd, who had loved it so much the first time we played it back in England. When we played it onstage the first night of the tour, the song’s sentiments were further magnified by our decision to use it as a way of publicly acknowledging the death of our friend.

  We had filmed a video for “Welcome to the Jungle” just before we left on the Cult tour, but MTV refused to air it. So nobody knew who we were. In fact, the Canadian release date for Appetite was six weeks later than the U.S. release date for some reason—so our record wasn’t even available until halfway through the tour. We continued to play to empty rooms because nobody turned up for the opening act. After our set each night, I would go out into the audience and bum Canadian quarters to call home on the venue’s pay phone. Mandy, my mom, my friends back in Seattle—they all got to hear about the strange mix of elation and tragedy that accompanied me across Canada.

  From Canada we swung down the West Coast of the United States. When we played the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, I got a bunch of my friends in for free. Seeing Kurt and Kim and Donner and Andy and Brian again put me somewhat at ease, though Eddy was still strung out. Andy Wood came and brought Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament—they were in the process of putting together Mother Love Bone. Jerry Cantrell and Sean Kinney from Alice in Chains came, too. And I got a chance to stop by my mom’s the day after the show. The next tour stop where any people came early enough to see Guns play our set was at the Long Beach Arena; it was a homecoming show for us after not playing there much that year. But the rest of the tour—which then went east to New Orleans via Arizona and Texas—nobody knew us and nobody cared.

  A few days after the Cult tour wrapped in mid-September, we went as a headlining act to Germany and Holland and then back to the UK. I was sick as a dog in Amsterdam with the flu. I was sharing a room with Izzy and Slash and they got hold of some heroin and smoked it. For some reason, despite Jim and Todd’s deaths just months before, when they offered me the tinfoil contraption they were using to smoke it, I accepted. When I inhaled, it felt as if I floated away on a silk pillow. It was the perfect antidote to the flu, but I was still a drinker, not a junkie, and I wouldn’t touch heroin again for quite a few years.

  In Britain we played in Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol. Returning to London on October 8, three months after our first visit, we had a date at the Hammersmith Odeon. This was a huge step up. It was a legendary theater—both the Clash and Motörhead had written songs about the place. When I found out we would be playing the Hammersmith Odeon, I thought to myself, Whoa, that’s it, we’ve made it.

  When we came back to the States we played our first ever East Coast gigs, headlining a small-scale tour in places like Allentown and Albany. It was a bare-bones operation: one bus and a Ryder truck for our gear. In clubs, the lights and sound were already installed and you got what you got. Good or bad, you couldn’t do anything about it. We just hoped the places had a shower we could use. We played the Ritz in New York City for the first time. The buzz about us seemed finally to be building in New York—we played another show at the famous Brooklyn hardcore club L’Amour billed only as “mystery guests.” Rumors that it would be us were enough to fill the place. And we did an acoustic set at CBGB on October 30, 1987, where we debuted “Patience.”

  Next we nabbed a slot on Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” tour starting in Alabama in November. The Crüe had a big production show. Tommy Lee was in a spinning drum riser on a crane arm that could rotate him 360 degrees. Our back line was tiny—just a few amps and my bass rig. After we dumped our gear at each stop, we just waited around while they set up. We ate the free backstage food and started cocktail hour. We could only get onstage a little while before the doors opened and do a quick sound check. Our setup was barely visible in front of the Crüe’s KISS-scale stage set, and at one point our manager wanted to bring out dummy Marshall stacks and make it look huge. We said no way—it wasn’t about the back line, it wasn’t about video, lighting, or dry-ice smoke. It was about us. We had forty-five minutes as an opening band and we just tried to kill it every night.

  Back in the halcyon days of GN’R, when everyone in L.A. thought we were the most badass hard-drinking and hard-drugging motherfuckers around (and maybe we thought so, too), we quickly found out we were in the minor league compared to Mötley Crüe. After their shows, we often ended up partying together, learning their code names for different drugs, even flying on their private jet a few times. Our peek into their world was a look into an abyss. They’d found a way of skating around the edge of that abyss while perfecting the dark art of drinking and drugging for a while there back in the 1980s.

  My brother Bruce, the one who first got me started playing bass, now worked for a music management company. He tracked the pop charts as part of his job. And he tracked Guns because of me. He kept all the weekly Billboard magazines. He watched Appetite for Destruction creep from the high hundreds up to 110. He called me when we cracked the top 100.

  “Brother, you’re ninety-five!”

  After a quick interview on MTV’s weekly late-night metal show, Headbangers Ball, the video for “Welcome to the Jungle” was finally getting some plays on MTV, and audiences on the Crüe tour were receptive to our sound. In December, we joined Alice Cooper’s tour as the opening band for the opening band: the bill went us, Megadeth, then Alice. That meant going through the Midwest in a bus playing in front of two bands’ gear. We finished the year with four homecoming shows at Perkins Palace in Pasadena.

  Whew, what a year. Our first album, our first taste of national and international touring, CBGB’s, and the fucking Hammersmith Odeon. It had all been very exciting—in my case, the fulfillment of dreams I’d had since I started playing in bands at fifteen. But I had also found that flying triggered panic attacks. Sometimes the attacks were so bad that I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I would sweat profusely. I wanted to take off my clothes because everything felt like it was binding me, but at the same time I was freezing because my breathing was so shallow. It felt like I was going to suffocate. People around me—the guys in the band, friends—could see the frantic look on my face, but there was nothing they could do to help me. I began to drink heavily prior to our increasingly frequent flights. The trick was to be able to walk straight during boarding but pass out as soon as they sealed the aircraft doors.

  Yeah, what a year. I’d lost dear friends; in fact practically every triumph had been tempered by a deep sense of loss.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We spent most of the first few months of 1988 back home, right up until we shot the video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” in early April. We also did an acoustic recording session to lay down tracks we figured would be good for B-sides or whatever.

  Among those tracks were “Patience,” and a song Axl brought in lyrics for called “One in a
Million.” When he first showed them to us, I cringed at some of the words—especially niggers. It wasn’t that I thought Axl held racist views—there was never any question on that front. I realized Axl’s lyrics represented a third-person observation about what Reagan-era America had become: a nation of name-callers, a land of fear. It was just a word my mouth would not form. Among my earliest memories as a child was my mom pulling me out of kindergarten to march in a peace rally after Martin Luther King was shot and killed. But Axl was bold. And nobody at the label seemed concerned.

  A few months prior, Axl had also come up with a great idea for “Patience,” seemingly out of nowhere, that had immediately become the story and melody of that song. The whistle part at the beginning was another ballsy and unusual move by Axl; the song just wouldn’t be the same without it. “Patience” quickly became one of my favorite GN’R songs to play live.

  When we went out in L.A., which was every night, people at the rock clubs recognized us, but life was still quite similar to the way it had been for the last few years. We had our bars, our clubs, our friends, we were always together, and we were not public figures except when we wanted to be—buying rounds of drinks or hopping up onstage with friends in other bands. We had no idea it would be the last time we would ever be able to walk around L.A. without feeling like we were in a fishbowl, isolated and on display.

  One night Slash and I went out to the Rainbow, a restaurant next to the Roxy on Sunset that was famous as a rock-and-roll hangout. They gave us a booth. This was a new level of deference. A booth! At the Rainbow! As we proceeded to get blasted, a really big, drunk guy wandered over to our table. Though he looked like an overgrown hick, he was in fact the guitar player from a band considered quite big just then—much bigger than Guns. He addressed himself to Slash: