It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  I bought a new place in 1990. It was also in Laurel Canyon, but this time right at the top, on Edwin Drive, perched on a cliff overlooking Dead Man’s Curve on Mulholland Drive. The place was up the hill from the old mansion built by Houdini. Here on the Hollywood side of the hills, Laurel Canyon was still quite countercultural—it was certainly no Beverly Hills. The name originally came from a studio owned by Stan Laurel, as in Laurel and Hardy, and the road up and over the Hollywood Hills through Laurel Canyon had originally been built to connect to that studio. The first places put up in there were hunting lodges. Later Houdini and Marilyn Monroe moved in, development mushroomed, and it became a countercultural enclave. By the 1980s, the Houdini mansion had been split up and a bunch of unreformed hippies lived there in a sort of wizened dorm-party milieu.

  There were secret entrances to the area and I could avoid main roads and cops. This seemed important because it was getting harder and harder for me now to wait until 1 p.m. to start my daily doses of pain management.

  Early in the afternoon on the day I moved in, Billy Nasty—one of my partners in crime—and I were hitting golf balls off a tee we’d stuck in an artificial fire log. Neither of us knew how to play golf; both of us were wasted. My dog, Chloe, looked on with an expression of placid amusement on her face. She never seemed to hold my shortcomings against me. One ball hit the fence, ricocheted off, and—crash, shatter—went right back through the massive picture window of my brand-new place. Chloe flinched. I couldn’t stop laughing. The movers looked at me like I was an asshole. I just didn’t care.

  The house itself had a cool loft space with a spiral staircase. It was fun, light, airy. It provided the inspiration for another new hobby: shooting shotguns off the balcony. Another perk: my go-to coke dealer, Mike, lived right around the corner, and I could whip down to his place and get in and out via little local roads. Or he would deliver the stuff to me.

  There grew such trust between us that I had a key to his place and he had a duplicate of my ATM card. I knew he wouldn’t steal from me—I was too good a customer. Shit, he even helped me paint things in my new house. We had an ingenious system whereby he would write me fake receipts for stereo components or music equipment, or for servicing or installing the phantom electronics. With these receipts, I had some explanation for my accountants for my constant drug expenditures. Only later did I realize the expenses were always the same amount, three hundred dollars. I didn’t really care whether the accountants caught on or not. I was living a constant lie at this point and only halfheartedly trying to hide it.

  I needed multiple dealers in case one of them ran short. A guy named Josh was my other main dealer. He brought supplies to my house himself or sent his wife, Yvette. I became social friends with Mike, Josh, and Yvette. I knew that they were not really the type of people I should be hanging out with, but I also convinced myself that they had my best interests at heart. It was just another one of the lies I was telling myself.

  I bought a potbellied pig. Again, Chloe took it all in stride. But with me in a haze of drug-fueled partying, the house became quite literally a pigsty. It barely registered with me that there was pig and dog shit everywhere. In fact, it didn’t register at all until one of our accountants came by; soon after, he recommended a housekeeping company to me. And I thought, Oh, is that what you do—house cleaners?

  Pig shit notwithstanding, my house quickly became a regular stop for hard-core partiers. The pool behind the house clung to the very top of the ridgeline and offered a spectacular view out over the valley side of the Hollywood Hills. Now that I was finished with the divorce and was partying for nights on end at various L.A. club nights, that basin of sapphire-blue water often ended up a naked free-for-all. Somehow I still lived the life of a Gardner alleyway urchin: sex, drugs, and, um, excrement. Nice.

  One of the girls I started to hang out with was a newscaster. She had pictures in her office of herself with Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson. She repeated a catchphrase to close all her on-air reports. Years later she landed a job at a national news network, and every time I heard her finish up with that catchphrase, the image on TV would fade and I would see her paddling around nude in my pool.

  A circuit of clubs dominated Hollywood—Bordello, Scream, Cathouse, Vodka, Lingerie, Spice. There was a club to go to each night of the week except Wednesday. I have no idea why Wednesday was an off night. I didn’t care. Wednesdays—and after-hours the rest of the week—the party came to my place. I plucked the stand-up bass to accompany Tony Bennett onstage one night in the VIP section of Spice. I got up and played drums with Pearl Jam the first time they came to L.A. for a show at the Cathouse; there was a lot of alcohol consumed that night, but I think we played a song by the Dead Boys together.

  I swelled with pride at what was happening up in Seattle—even if I was a little jealous it had taken off without me. Although I loved and lived for GN’R, with things going off the rails I began to do the obvious—to torture myself with what-if scenarios. What if I had stayed in Seattle? Would I have been in Soundgarden or Mother Love Bone? Would I be making records for Sub Pop, the hip and suddenly successful label set up by Bruce Pavitt, my old coworker from the Lake Union Café? I could have stayed close to my family and childhood friends, people I missed more and more as the fabric of Guns—my surrogate family unit—began to fray.

  When Alice in Chains came to L.A. for their first gig—at the Palladium right as “Man in the Box” was blowing up as a single—they asked me to come down to the show and play that song with them. Awesome. After their gig that night, I invited the whole band and various hangers-on back up to my house for an after-show party. The party went on for three days straight.

  Other news reached me from Seattle—unexpected news about Eddy. He had cleaned up for real. Life was funny: from now on, I was hiding from him, and not the other way around.

  My brother Matt moved in with me on Edwin Drive while he fulfilled his student-teaching requirements. He lived in the back bedroom; off his bedroom was one of only two bathrooms in the house—one of the few shortcomings of the place. He taught every day, so he’d come home and sleep while I headed off to wherever the party was that night—and eventually showed up late at night with a gang of people looking to continue the party. I had installed a billiard table and a drum kit in a room abutting Matt’s. One night Lars Ulrich from Metallica came over and went up to the bathroom off my brother’s room without realizing Matt was there. Lars came out and sheepishly discovered Matt sitting up in bed, wincing. All he said was, “Uh, sorry, man, I just took a big shit.”

  Sometimes my student-teacher brother had some fun when the parties raged at my house. Mostly, however, he just dealt with the fallout of my dissolute lifestyle. Sometimes I’d head off in the morning to keep partying someplace else and leave any half-dressed, passed-out girls in the house for Matt to drive home. At the time I didn’t even realize somebody was driving these girls home. I just knew they were gone when I came home. Yeah, I wasn’t exactly the world’s most thoughtful roommate at this stage.

  There was always a core group of friends around, but the people on the periphery changed all the time. There were hangers-on, interested only because of the notoriety of the band. Those people always changed. People started to ask for money now, too. Not family members; I’d give them anything. All these other people started asking for loans to start businesses. Friends, or friends once removed. “I’m going to start a record store in Manhattan—be my backer on this.” At first I would just give money away, feeling my punk-rock guilt.

  One solid group of people I hung out with were the guys in some of the gangsta-rap groups of L.A. I became friends with Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube from N.W.A. as well as people in Ice T’s posse. I had seen the sensationalized reaction Guns got by presenting an unedited look at our lives on Appetite. And white boys in Hollywood weren’t exactly a marginalized group. The glimpse of street life presented by N.W.A. and some of the other new hip-hop acts from black Los Angeles was
a true shock to the system. These guys lived hard, too, and we had some great parties up at my house.

  I did still have some level of self-awareness. I must have harbored an inkling that I was in the process of jumping the rails. That summer I bought a small vacation place in Lake Arrowhead, California, to get out of Los Angeles. I hoped periodically to escape my bad drink and drug habits, and to retreat from the fishbowl effect of living a highly public life in the city.

  Lake Arrowhead turned out not to be the ascetic wilderness retreat I had envisioned. Little did I know that Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe also had a place up there. Bikers and meth ruled the whole area—the sleazy juke joint used for the Patrick Swayze movie Roadhouse was the local bar. Instead of drying out on my trips to the lake, I used its remoteness as an excuse to act more extreme. I invited my coke dealers—Mike, Josh, and Yvette—to come up with me for weekends. I bought a boat for waterskiing; parts and service for it provided a new source of fake receipts. Musician friends made road trips up to Lake Arrowhead, too, people like Lenny Kravitz and Ernie C, the guitar player from Body Count—the band that got threatened by the FBI for their song “Cop Killer.” The house quickly became an even more debauched party scene than my place above Dead Man’s Curve. Back in L.A. one day, Ernie C told me he was scared for me after seeing my intake up at the lake.

  Sure, I could scare the shit out of most people who partied with me. But for the second time in my life I realized that nobody—not even me at the time—could hang with the dudes in Mötley Crüe: within two months of buying the house at Lake Arrowhead, I was throwing up blood at Tommy Lee’s cabin.

  Back in L.A., Chloe broke through the fence around my yard and got pregnant. I had never had her spayed—just couldn’t bring myself to have a vet do anything to her that would cause her pain. She had a huge litter of fourteen puppies. Lucky for me, my brother Matt was doing his student teaching at a large school in a very affluent part of the city, and he helped me out by asking there if any kids wanted puppies. We found nice homes for all of them.

  Chloe was different after that. She transformed from a lively young lass into a portly grandma almost overnight. Now, instead of lunging headfirst into the pool, she would just walk to the first step and wade there all day long, coming out only for meals and naps. She became a world-class napper after that.

  I could have stood to sleep more myself. When I just drank and went to sleep at night, things went fine. Bad decisions would be confined to that one day or night. I might do something stupid, like hit golf balls through my picture window. I would never crash a car—or stick a needle in my arm. Or so I thought. But as I continued doing more and more coke so I could stay up longer and drink more, it began to change my thought processes.

  Late one night I heard someone on the doorstep of the Edwin Drive house fumbling with keys. Cowering behind the door in my bathrobe, I tried to figure out what to do. My mind raced immediately to a dark, paranoid place. I ran and grabbed my twelve-gauge and threw open the door, the double barrels of the shotgun shoved in the face of the intruder. Only it was my brother Matt, who was trying to find the right key on his chain, his eyes now gleaming with fear, cursing once I lowered the shotgun and retreated backward into the foyer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In the autumn of 1990, we booked our first gigs in more than a year. An eternity. We were going to headline two nights at the Rock in Rio festival in January 1991. When I was growing up, I never dreamed that I might one day have the opportunity to visit such exotic and far-flung places as a result of my music. Bakersfield maybe, but not Brazil. Those gigs now functioned like a lighthouse for me—a reassuring beacon twinkling on the horizon, something fixed and steady to steer toward through churning seas.

  We also went into the studio that fall to record the songs for Use Your Illusion. When producer Mike Clink and I had pieced together the drum track for “Civil War” earlier that year, it was clear Steven was not going to be able to perform with us if he didn’t turn things around. When we had played a couple songs to a huge crowd at Farm Aid in April, he was a mess onstage. After that, we thought we would scare him straight. We told him we were auditioning drummers and figured he’d snap out of it as soon as he heard that. When that didn’t work, we hired a professional sober coach, Bob Timmons, who had helped Aerosmith get clean, to talk to him.

  Bob took along Sly Stone—who had gotten sober—to Steven’s house. Steven had met Sly at my apartment on El Cerrito.

  “You know, man,” Sly told Steven, “your band is worried about you. You’ve got to pull it together, Stevie.”

  Slash and I served as the voice of the band during Steven’s last days with GN’R. But no matter what we said to him, nothing changed. We told him we were getting ready to enter the studio. Still no change. Finally, we suggested he get a lawyer. It was meant to scare him, but it proved convenient for Slash, Axl, Izzy, and me. In the end, we had our lawyer tell his lawyer that he was permanently out.

  It sounded ironic to a lot of people for us to kick someone out of such a notoriously debauched band for drugs. The truth is we didn’t care what drugs people did or how much they did. We cared only about our work and our ability to keep the band moving forward now that we finally had songs to record and shows to play. We didn’t give a shit about cause, just effect. Drugs? Sure. But it could just as easily have been something else. Lack of motivation. Jail time. Death. For me, I always thought death and death alone could ever push me across that line when it came to this band. (I was wrong.) For Steven, coke and heroin proved enough to nudge him across.

  It was heartbreaking, especially for me and Slash, but we had to find a replacement drummer.

  When we booked Rock in Rio, we thought we would have plenty of time to find a new drummer. After all, the trip was months away, and we had lots of songs to record, too; we assumed that between rehearsing and recording, the new rhythm section could gel in plenty of time for those gigs. But the studio time kept getting pushed back further and further as we cast about for someone acceptable. The same thing that had made Steven an important part of our sound also made it difficult to replace him—his sense of groove. We tried out drummer after drummer. Things started to look a bit grim. Shit, maybe this would be the end of the band. Like Hanoi Rocks. Like Led Zeppelin. For those bands, losing their drummers signaled the end of the road.

  Thankfully, at the very last moment we found Matt Sorum, who had been playing with the Cult. We had twenty-seven songs to record, and some of them—like “November Rain,” “Coma,” and “Locomotive”—were epic in length. Matt had to learn all the songs in rehearsals and make charts of them for the recording sessions. At the same time, he started to try to keep up with me and Slash on the drinking front. We recorded the first twenty-four songs fast. But between the volume of work, the volume of booze, and the pressure of recording with a band that was being treated as the biggest thing in town, Matt hit a wall. With three songs to go, he disappeared. I left messages begging him to come in and finish the last three songs. No answer. I told him I’d buy him drugs out of my own pocket. No answer.

  He was renting my old place on Laurel Terrace during the recording sessions, so I went down there to look for him.

  “Matt?” I called as I entered the house. “Where are you, pal?”

  No answer.

  I walked through the house.

  In the bedroom, there was a deep walk-in closet. The door was closed, but I could hear someone in there. I opened the door tentatively and peered in, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness: there was Matt, cowering in the back of the closet with a pile of coke, just hiding from the world. He looked at me with no sign of recognition in his eyes. He was completely out of it and paranoid. I made him a very strong vodka drink to bring him down a bit from his coke high.

  Matt pulled it together and nailed the last three songs. But by the time we started the process of mixing the records, something snapped inside me, too. There were so many songs to deal with. There was so much con
tention in the band over credits and everything else. I could tell there were subplots developing among the remaining band members, among management, among the label people. I looked around at how fame and a little bit of power and money had affected the guys I’d been in the trenches with.

  Oh, really? This is how we’re going to react to it all?

  I was disappointed. It was a mess and I wanted nothing to do with it.

  We—was it “we” anymore?—had finally made it to the threshold of another accomplishment. A record. Actually a double record. But I was no longer sure what it represented.

  Is this why I moved to L.A.—for this? Is this what “making it big” meant?

  I had already attained some of the things I’d wanted to when I left Seattle for California. Far more than I’d wanted. Far more than I could even have imagined. But as I looked around now, it was more clear than ever that things hadn’t panned out the way I had expected. I wasn’t living in a utopian punk commune with Donner and the gang. Friends were dead. Fans were dead. My marriage was dead. My band had lost a member and seemed to be either dying or transforming itself into something I no longer felt connected to.

  Something else nagged at me, too, as Rock in Rio edged closer and closer.

  Is anyone going to show up to our gigs in Brazil?

  Sure, the promoter told us the gigs would sell out, but that was just his word. We had long since learned that a promoter’s word wasn’t always a solid piece of currency. Maracaña Stadium was the biggest in the world! Frank Sinatra had played there, Paul McCartney had played there, Pope John Paul II had played there. But us? We had played fewer than a half-dozen gigs in the past two years, and our one and only proper album had come out nearly four years ago.

  Headlining two nights? In South America? Really?