It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  I started to hit the bottle harder, which meant taking more coke, which allowed me to drink harder, which meant more coke … up to that point I had always thought I would address my drinking someday. Even if it had always been a lie, it exerted an element of control—there was a horizon. Right then, after recording the Illusion records, that horizon went dark. I lost all sense of orientation.

  Then, on January 17, 1991, we boarded an American Airlines jet bound for Rio. This would be one of the longest flights I’d ever taken. A plane is a metal tube with no way out, and I have always been claustrophobic. Whenever I flew home to see family and friends in Seattle, I had to pay for someone else to come with me. Because of my panic attacks, I couldn’t even contemplate heading to the airport alone. I self-medicated with whatever was available. For the flight to Rio, I took bindles of coke to snort in the airport lounge so I could stay upright and shuffle down the jetway. I was terrified. The flight, the gigs, the band. The flight, the gigs, the band. Fear. Doubt. Valium. Stewardess. Vodka. Please.

  Out.

  “Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking.”

  Huh?

  I looked out the window. Nothing.

  “A little news here from the cockpit. I just received word that U.S. forces have begun bombing Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. America is at war.”

  What the fuck?

  I started to worry about our reception in Rio. Would we be greeted as American warmongers? I was hoping just to get to the hotel and duck into my room unnoticed.

  Again: Is anyone going to show up to these gigs?

  Vodka. Valium. Vodka.

  As we began our descent, I was exhausted from the constant to-and-fro of getting plastered and coming to again, from trying to get hold of huge quantities of alcohol from the flight crew to quell my panic without appearing panicked or out of control.

  We taxied in and I staggered off the plane, bleary-eyed. I felt like a fucking Martian after traveling for so long and feeding my body with mind-numbing intoxicants.

  What are all these people doing here? Why are they screaming?

  A crowd of 8,000 fans greeted us at the gate. I was overwhelmed; they were overjoyed. We shuffled out to a van. Lots of security guys in and around the vans.

  Machine guns, really?

  Hotel. Nowhere near the famous beaches. Swank hotel, for sure, but perched just below the city’s most infamous favela, a dense hillside slum called Rocinha.

  Why here? None of the other bands are staying here.

  Prince, George Michael, INXS—the other headliners—were staying elsewhere.

  Why are we being kept apart from the other bands?

  Next day. Rehearsal. Some shitty little space downtown. Guys with machine guns on our van again. A second van carrying more ex-military types with automatics. Following us everywhere. As we wound our way through the city, I had my first chance to see Rio’s inhabitants in their natural state—which apparently was screaming “Guns N’ Roses” at the top of their lungs.

  During the next day there—a scheduled day off—I went to the hotel pool in my shorts and flip-flops to get some sun and drink myself into a stupor. The pool had a swim-up bar and was surrounded by dozens of toweled lounge chairs. Palm trees, exotic flowers, lush grounds all around.

  No wonder there are so many gardeners.

  People hovered around the periphery of the pool and gardens like flies.

  Hang on—are those … I must be fucked up. Are those fans?

  What I had taken for gardeners outside of the high fence surrounding the pool area were actually hundreds of fans. Now the security forces ran off the poor kids.

  This city is on fire for GN’R.

  Maracaña Stadium: 175,000 people and a river of sewage streaming right through the place. An actual river. Of shit.

  People chanting, “Guns N’ Roses, Guns N’ Roses!”

  The audience cried and sang along to every word as we launched into our set.

  Fucking hell, there are a lot of people up here onstage.

  We had two new keyboard players, backup singers, and horn players. The sides of the stage swarmed with crew and management and who knows who else.

  Where my boys at?

  I turned and looked toward the drum riser. Steven wasn’t there.

  PART FOUR

  I’D LOOK RIGHT UP AT NIGHT AND ALL I’D SEE WAS DARKNESS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The shows in Rio should have marked the triumphant beginning of a new phase in the history of the band, but instead it felt as if Guns N’ Roses had somehow changed from a band into a traveling extravaganza in which we each just played a more or less independent role. We had added more people to the band, but there was much less sense that we were a unit of any kind, big or small. During that trip to Brazil, I sometimes felt completely alone and alienated even in my own band. I loved Guns N’ Roses, I loved all the members of Guns N’ Roses, including the new guys. But something still felt terribly wrong.

  I drank every day prior to Rock in Rio, but I could still pull myself out of it at times and curtail my drinking. The shows in Rio were the beginning of a three-year headlong dive into drugs and booze—the darkest days of my life. For me, there was a difference between drinking a half gallon of vodka a day and drinking a quart or a liter. A liter was pretty good. Beginning in Rio, I drank half a gallon a day, every day.

  Back in L.A., Mandy called me to say she was going to start dating. Great, you should. Her new boyfriend had a posse of friends. They showed up at the Rainbow one night and came up to me in the parking lot while I was waiting for my car. The boyfriend introduced himself, all puffed up and threatening.

  “She’s always fucking talking about you,” he said, “and I want to let you know that I’m the guy now.”

  I didn’t have a problem with that, I told him.

  He confronted me a second time another night. Finally, the third time, at Spice club, I was drunk and pissed off that he kept doing this, so I said, “Okay, dude, you want to do something about it?”

  We went outside through a side door. He had his friends and I had mine. He took a swing at me and I ducked. I got lucky—he missed. As I came up I swung and broke his nose. He went straight down.

  I felt bad the next day. Someone called me and said he’d been taken to the hospital. I asked them to give him my phone number.

  He called and said, “Hey, I can’t afford this hospital bill.”

  “Listen, man, I’m real sorry about decking you,” I said. “How much is the bill?”

  “Four hundred and fifty bucks,” he said.

  “Well, I can help you out,” I said. “How about I pay half?”

  “That would be great, man, thanks,” he said.

  Then he added, “That was a great shot you put on me, by the way.”

  I told him to come up to my house to pick up the money, but warned him not to come with his dudes. Come alone. It took him a few days to swing by, but finally he showed up. I could see his mom in the car. Cool. I went out to the front gate and handed him an envelope with $225. At the same time he handed me an envelope and started running back down the street. Huh? I opened it. He had served me. He was going to try to sue me. For $1.25 million.

  I had given my word that I would pay half his bill, I had apologized, and that’s what I got. It pissed me off. I was paranoid, as usual, from all the cocaine. I called management and told them. In the end it went to arbitration and we settled for a few thousand dollars. From then on, I wanted to kill anyone who crossed me at any club or concert. In my mind I was still fighting for righteous reasons—not just to hurt people but to protect, to make bullies stop doing bad things. But it’s pretty clear in retrospect that I was taking out aggression about the situation with the band. I would find offense in the stupidest little things and then I’d just flip and go street. Management quickly set up a security detail to follow me around all the time. Even so, out every night and for days on end, I managed to get into a few more scrap
s between Rio and the start of what would be our first-ever headlining tour.

  As the first tour dates approached, Slash and I would periodically drive down to an industrial area in Compton to check on the construction of the massive stage set that would be our home for the next two and a half years. When it was complete, the set was moved to an airplane hangar over in Burbank where we commenced our full-production, full-set rehearsals. Lights. Monitors. Full PA. Full crew. All the additional musicians.

  In May 1991, we had three warm-up shows. We were ready to go, but the tortuous process of mixing the Illusion records was still dragging on. We were forced to start the tour—a tour meant to support these albums—several months before there was even a release date for the records. Though I am sure it would have been better for our fans to know some of the songs we were playing, I found myself feeling that it was a very GN’R move. The old GN’R. Fuck expectations. Fuck doing things by the book.

  It put us back in the position of having to win audiences over. And that played to our strength. That would draw us together, make us a team again.

  We leased a 727 jet from the MGM casino to use for the entire length of the tour. Prior to setting off, we got to pick out our flight attendants from a sort of catalogue. We certainly had a nice-looking crew as a result. Stellar, in fact. The first thing I noticed upon entering the MGM Grand jet was a fully stocked bar that stretched from the door back toward the middle of the plane. Cream-colored chairs and bolted-down tables fanned out from the bar, creating the party room. To the left, running from the door to the cockpit, were big captain’s chairs and a movie screen. I hardly went up there for whatever reason—it was too exposed and open. In the back were staterooms reserved solely for the band members—except Izzy. Izzy traveled on his own. He was still keeping his distance.

  Each stateroom had a door, curtains, a fold-out bed, a dresser with a mirror, and a TV. As the plane taxied out onto the runway for our first flight, Slash and I repaired to one of the staterooms and smoked crack. I remember watching the smoke curl up into the air vent and thinking this just seemed logical. Of course we can smoke on here, it’s our plane.

  I looked at myself in the mirror in the midst of a rock-fueled rush: This is going to be awesome.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At Alpine Valley Amphitheatre in Wisconsin, my sense of anticipation for the first gig of the tour was overwhelming. Our intro music came on: the theme song from The Godfather.

  The crowd roared.

  Here we go.

  My game face came on. I felt we represented something, something primal and animalistic. I felt that fire and anger—I was ready to kick someone in the head. All the background noise of life began to recede. We rushed the stage and I played the first few bass notes for “It’s So Easy.”

  Total fucking bedlam. Tens of thousands of people absolutely losing their shit. I could see the first few rows of people. I could see how far back the masses of bodies went. Everyone was on their feet and the roar was almost louder than the band.

  Again I thought: This is going to be awesome.

  During the first month, we flew to amphitheatres and racetracks and basketball stadiums across the Midwest and Northeast. I did not have one panic attack aboard the MGM 727. It must have hinged on the fact that I had some level of control. With our own private jetliner, I knew I could go to the pilot and say, “Land, now.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that I also had ready access to as much booze and as many pills as I wanted, at any time.

  But I soon realized this was not going to be awesome.

  I’m not sure exactly which gig it was when Axl first showed up late to the venue, but it was very early in the tour. Don’t get me wrong, I had never been a taskmaster about start times. I was as anti-establishment as the best of them, and going onstage right at the exact contractually obligated time wasn’t on the top of my list of things to do each day. But as the fans became more and more upset about the late starts, it dawned on me that they were upset because they had to go to work or school the next day or had a babysitter at home watching their kids. Sometimes we came on so late that a significant percentage of the crowd had gone home.

  A headlining band usually went on about 9 p.m. When we had opened for other bands in 1987 and 1988 and there had been any nervousness about us starting on time, the tour managers—the headliners’ tour managers, that is—used to say, “I don’t know when you’re going on, but I know when you’re going off.” That was because most venues had 11 p.m. curfews and the headliners had to get their sets in by then. Curfews existed for any number of reasons: the venue might have a deal with its union workers or legal compromises with the surrounding residential neighborhoods; there were noise ordinances; the local public-transport schedule might play a role. Broken curfews often entailed a fine for the performer. Sometimes it was a set fee, other times it could be $1,000 per minute in overtime fees. In the most financially extreme cases, the band was on the hook for a huge fine and all the additional double-time wages for union stagehands and police and security. Obviously, unless you just loved to piss away your hard-earned money, you tried to wrap your show up within curfew times.

  We kept going on later and later, and the crowds became restless and angry after our opener, Skid Row, finished and we failed to appear. Slash, Matt, and I ended up pushing our drinking and drug use to the extreme as the tour went on and things got worse and worse. Under normal circumstances, we were trying to get to the perfect level of buzz before a show started. When the shows began to start later and later, we ended up going way past that point.

  Tension mounted within the band as we waited for Axl to show up and agree to go on. And because ticket holders also had to wait, tension mounted between the band and the audience. Some nights we would go on forty-five minutes late. Other times, one, two, or even three hours late. The only way I could bear the chants of “bullshit” from crowds of 20,000 people for an hour or two was to guzzle more booze. Inevitably, given the constantly changing amount of time I had to kill and the shifting magnitude of band strife and audience annoyance, I would drink too much. Then I’d have to do some coke to come up off the floor. Then, oops, too much coke, better drink some more. It was a vicious cycle.

  I guess I hoped management would handle the lateness so we could avoid intraband strife. That’s what I thought managers did, the very reason we paid them. But Axl had become a dictator before whom everyone—crew, promoters, even management now that Axl had switched us from Alan Niven to Doug Goldstein—quivered in fear. Doug seemed more concerned with the short-term goal of placating Axl than with making things run well for the long term. So I silently fumed at others, building up black resentment.

  Izzy’s sobriety functioned only if he traveled separately and stayed in different hotels from us. I had gotten used to not having him around, but it was still a blow to the band. From day one, Izzy and I had shared the right side of the stage. We had seen everything—from our rise through the L.A. clubs to these massive arena shows—from the exact same perspective. The perception in popular culture is that the singer and the lead guitar player are generally the artistic brain trust of any band. In our case, Izzy was probably the most significant force—without his initial vision and his songwriting cues, there would have been no Guns N’ Roses. He and I still had our time together on the right side of the stage. But those moments made me think Izzy was extremely uncomfortable with the way we were treating our fans.

  Still, I didn’t have the self-confidence—or whatever—to do anything about it. Mostly because that would have meant looking in the mirror. I couldn’t start calling people out—that guy’s always late, that guy’s always high—without eventually coming back around to my own drinking. So I just threw up my hands. It’s all fucked. The situation made me angry, really angry; I’ve never dealt well with anger.

  I began to have panic attacks all the time, bad ones. The attacks felt like being on a merry-go-round just starting up, then going faster and faster until it was to
o fast; then the ride turned into a Gravitron, where you are spinning so fast you are pinned to the walls and the bottom drops—you’re unable to move, unable to make it stop, unable to get off. I’m trapped. The sugar in alcohol exacerbated panic attacks, as did cocaine. But drinking even more was the only way I knew to combat the attacks. It was a harrowing experience each time I arrived at a concert venue.

  There were transcendent moments onstage. Some nights we were so “on” that it was otherworldly. A few nights we got into such a groove that we played three-hour sets. But we never aired what was bothering us about one another. Nobody ever stated outright to Axl how much we resented going on late or having him stop shows. Nobody told me I was drinking too much or doing too much cocaine. We were all kept separate and that is the way we began to like it. We each had our own security guards. We each had our own twenty-four hour limos picking us up planeside and taking us to the hotel and anywhere else we wished to go. We rode separately to and from the gigs. We had separate dressing rooms. A sense of band unity was evident only when we were onstage. Otherwise it was every man for himself.

  Then came a gig at the Riverport Amphitheatre outside St. Louis on July 2, 1991.

  The show started about an hour late—which by this point almost counted as on time. We played about an hour and a half, and were in the middle of “Rocket Queen” when all hell broke loose. For reasons that don’t matter—they were immediately eclipsed not only by the coverage of the incident but also in the moment, onstage, as events unfolded—Axl dove into the audience to try to address something the house security had not. His foray didn’t last long, and I helped pull him upright as he lunged back up onstage. He then strode to the mic and announced that because security hadn’t done their job, he was leaving. He slammed the mic down and stormed off. We quickly followed.

  For about ten minutes, we waited in the wings, unsure what to do. Since we all had our own dressing rooms and staff and Axl had hurried off to his, we didn’t know whether or not he was planning to return. We thought he probably would. The crowd seemed to think so, too.