It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  That’s exactly what I was betting they would think.

  I had my L.A. friend Billy Nasty in town that night and planned to party. And I knew any hooker would have a coke connection—probably her own pimp. I found a number for an escort service and dialed it.

  When the woman showed up, she took one look at me and my friend and I could see her doing calculations—how much for a double-back, or whatever they called that. When I explained to her that all I wanted was drugs, and that I would still pay her for her services all night, it was on. Her pimp was indeed a coke and pill dealer. Bingo!

  The last date of the tour leg with Metallica, October 6, 1992, we played a homecoming show—for me, anyway—at the Seattle Kingdome. My brother Bruce was living back in Seattle at that point. He called me at the hotel the day of the show.

  “What do you say tomorrow we go out for a round of golf—the McKagan brothers.”

  “I don’t really know how to play,” I said, “but I’ll hang out with you guys, I’ll ride along and drink some beers.”

  “Okay,” Bruce said. “I’ll pick you up.”

  That night Axl was on time. It was out of respect—he knew the gig meant a lot to me.

  The next day, Bruce picked me up at the hotel as planned.

  “We’re going to stop by Mom’s place and pick up Jon,” he said as I climbed into the car. It made sense. I knew we would all be going there for dinner later, so my brother Jon was probably helping to get the place ready.

  When we got there, Bruce had me come in with him. When we went inside, my whole family was there, all seven of my brothers and sisters, including Matt, who lived in L.A.

  Wow, I thought, they’ve thrown me a fucking surprise party.

  But nobody really made eye contact with me. Then the one person there I didn’t recognize stood up. Everyone else sat down. She introduced herself as Mary. She turned out to be a doctor.

  “I’m from a rehab center,” she said. “There’s a van down the street that will take you to a facility where you can dry out.” Blah, blah, blah.

  This is a fucking intervention!

  “Sorry, Mary,” I said. “This just isn’t your business.”

  Rage coursed through my body. Of course I had a drinking problem, but this wasn’t going to work.

  This is bullshit!

  “I love all of you,” I said, “but this isn’t any of your business. You can’t just spring something like this on me.”

  The band had a bit of time off before we headed to Venezuela for a South American leg, but I would never abandon my band midtour, whether or not we had a few weeks to kill. This was not happening.

  My brother Matt—who, it turned out, had not agreed with the idea in the first place—started talking.

  “This isn’t the right way to do it,” he said, directing himself to the rest of the people in the room, rather than to me. “You don’t know what he’s dealing with.”

  I edged toward the door. Jon was standing near the front door, anticipating that I might try to bail. He blocked my way. I made it clear things would get ugly if he didn’t move. Jon stood his ground.

  “Dude, don’t fucking do it,” I said.

  I knocked Jon out of the way. I ran out the door. Matt came after me. He pulled his rental car around and we hightailed it back to the Four Seasons, where the band was staying. From there we went to Sea-Tac and flew back to L.A.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Back in L.A., I called everyone in my family and said pretty much the same thing to each one.

  “Look, I’ve been on the road and you can’t be certain what I’m doing. I’ll sit around and talk with you, but not like that.”

  I assured them I was going to try to get better.

  We kicked off the South American leg of the tour in Venezuela with an open-air show on November 25 in Caracas. The band left the next day for Colombia on the MGM 727. Cargo planes would follow us with the gear and crew once the teardown had been completed.

  When we arrived in Bogotá, Guns N’ Roses was the lead story in all the local newspapers. When we asked what all the headlines were, someone translated for us. A fourteen-year-old Colombian girl had committed suicide after her father refused to let her attend our upcoming show.

  Jesus. Another person whose life we touched … gone.

  That night, more news: a coup had been launched in Venezuela. An air-force pilot named Luis Reyes Reyes and his co-conspirators were able to wrest control of most of the country’s air bases by the morning of November 27. Our cargo planes were grounded. McBob and the rest of the crew were stuck.

  The next morning a bomb went off near our Bogotá hotel.

  Then Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar told the press that we were his friends and that he was supplying us with a bunch of cocaine. He was already in hiding then as a result of American pressure (we never met him), and I guess he was just sticking it to the U.S. government, using us to have some fun. I was already annoyed at the political questions fired at us at press conferences—just because we sold some records didn’t mean people should suddenly care what I thought about Bill Clinton or Boris Yeltsin. Now we had become inadvertent political pawns in a grand international game.

  Great.

  At some point that next day, I went to leave my hotel room. Outside my room stood a machine-gun-toting soldier. He motioned me back inside. I was—we were—under house arrest.

  Oh, shit.

  I didn’t know what to do. I spent the day stewing.

  What are we going to do now?

  At least there was booze.

  That evening there was a knock at my door. I opened it. The hallway was dark. The soldier was gone. Instead there was a guy in a suit—also carrying a machine gun.

  “Yayo?” he said. I had learned this was slang for coke in South America. “Yayo?”

  I slammed the door and locked it.

  Shit.

  I’m being set up.

  I just know it.

  I picked up the hotel phone. Who did I know who could help? Who could call somebody? I didn’t want to scare my mom. Then it hit me: my dad. He’d been a fireman. He must know people at city hall in Seattle.

  I dialed my dad. It went through.

  “Dad, I don’t know who else to call,” I said. “It’s all gone terribly wrong. I’m in a hotel room in Bogotá with an armed guard out front. I don’t know if they’re going to let us out. I don’t know if they’re going to let us play the show—if our planes even get here. And I don’t know what will happen if we don’t play the show. I’m really worried. Is there anyone you can call?”

  I have no idea what my dad did, but the U.S. consul soon showed up on the scene. The atmosphere lightened. The armed guards disappeared.

  Eventually our planes were allowed out of Caracas after the coup in Venezuela sputtered. The crew arrived and began to feverishly set up for a delayed Bogotá show. Then, after a huge rainfall, pooled water on the roof collapsed the stage. The crew started over with what was left.

  The day of the rescheduled show arrived. It rained and rained. It continued to rain during the show. Then, as Axl played the opening chords of “November Rain,” the sun broke through the clouds. Everyone in the audience crossed themselves. After the song, the rain began again.

  This was shaping up to be some tour leg.

  We had a guy who flew ahead of us and greased customs agents’ palms. I don’t remember customs people ever boarding our plane, though our hotel was raided in Chile. Not that there were any stupid motherfuckers among us—we didn’t smuggle drugs from one country to another. We could always get whatever we needed locally.

  Axl tried to reach out to me a few times. One time in São Paolo he called me from his hotel room. Stephanie Seymour was visiting him; Linda was with me.

  “Hey,” he said, “why don’t you come down to our room and we’ll have dinner? We’ll just have a nice time.”

  We had a relaxed dinner and acted like adults. I thought we might be creating ground
s for getting things together again. If it stays like this, I thought to myself, maybe I can dig myself out. I’ll have people I can depend on.

  Half an hour after Linda and I left the dinner, Axl was throwing chairs in the lobby of the hotel and trying to fistfight some guy.

  We started 1993 in Asia, then came back to the States for yet another leg. I was using so much coke by this point that I needed more and more things to counteract it when it was time to take the edge off a coke high. One night when I couldn’t get my hands on any pills and someone had some China white—powdered heroin—I snorted that instead. It did the trick: edge dulled. I found that smoking the brown tarlike heroin on tinfoil—as I had tried once in Amsterdam with Izzy and Slash—also did the trick. I never lost my fear of smack enough to shoot it with a syringe, but I soon started smoking enough of it to get twinges of withdrawal. It didn’t take much, that was for sure. Fortunately I never came to enjoy the effect of heroin for its own sake, but floating away on a silk pillow was infinitely nicer than grinding my teeth in a drunken, paranoid stupor at the end of a coke binge.

  Sorum suddenly got sober. I don’t know what happened, but there was a moment that changed things for him, an epiphany of some sort. That left just me and Slash from the toxic trio. Then Slash and I kind of separated, each spending more time with our own little groups. We were tired of manning each other’s line, which at this point—especially now that I, too, was dabbling in heroin—meant checking to make sure the other one was still breathing.

  On the American leg of the tour, I went looking for trouble with Dizzy or Gilby. I remember landing in Fargo for a show in late March 1993, at the Fargo Dome. We got into town, looked around, and thought, Oh, god.

  Dizzy and I hopped in a limo and decided to cause a stir. We drove to the local rock radio station and went inside unannounced. We went on the air and people started showing up at the station’s office. Then we went to the local mall, looking for drugs or action of any kind.

  Onstage in Sacramento on April 3, a bottle came flying out of the top tier. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It hit Matt’s floor tom and careened off. Then everything went black.

  The bottle had hit me right in the temple and knocked me out. The show ground to a halt. I was rushed to the emergency room. From the hospital I returned to our hotel in Lake Tahoe—the next night we had a show in Reno and our managers deemed the Four Seasons in Tahoe the only hotel in the region worthy of our business.

  Gilby and I had arranged for our dads to attend the show in Reno. Despite all my dad’s fuckups, I figured he was still my dad. And he had bailed our asses out in Colombia. Maybe I was also thinking about my mortality, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. I flew him to Tahoe, where he saw all the chicks swarming us at the fancy hotel. We all drove together from there to Reno for the concert.

  Gilby’s dad was a retired fireman, too, and he tried to engage my dad about fireman’s shit. My dad never told stories about saving this or narrowly avoiding that. I’m sure house fires were harrowing to witness, and he never talked about them.

  Gilby’s dad went on talking, reliving his glory days in the hopes of engaging my dad in conversation.

  Finally he said, “You know, Mac, I always say if I had it to do all over again, I’d do it exactly the same. Wouldn’t you?”

  My dad looked at him. “Hell no,” he said. “I’d do what this kid did here.”

  He had never supported my music career until I started making money. This was his way of showing approval, I guess, though he never apologized for not supporting me earlier.

  At a gig in Mexico City later that April, we called a band meeting. Slash, Gilby, and Matt agreed we had to confront Axl about the lateness. Somebody had to start the conversation.

  “Listen,” I said to Axl when everyone was assembled, “we’re drinking ourselves into oblivion, waiting three hours listening to our fans chant ‘bullshit.’ We’ve been working hard to keep this thing together …”

  I paused and looked around for support. The other guys looked away and shrank down in their seats a little.

  That was it.

  Later, at the show itself, I was too fucked up—and I knew it. I could hear myself babbling incoherently backstage, the guttural sounds spilling from my mouth between gulps of vodka and cranberry barely resembling words. Then we took the stage. I finally stumbled across the line I had always held sacred: I found myself falling behind.

  Stay in the pocket. Stay in the pocket.

  Just play.

  You can always play.

  Always.

  Just stay with Matt.

  I tried to hold it together. I stared at Sorum banging the drums and tried to stay with him, concentrating. He exaggerated his strokes to help me. He nodded. His shoulders rose with the beat. Come on, man.

  Still not getting the fingers on my left hand to the right spots in time.

  Still not moving the pick fast enough.

  Pick it up.

  Pick-me-up.

  We had hidden rooms below the stage, so I staggered into one at the first chance to get more coke to sober up. Not happening. I could barely bend over to snort without tipping over. I righted myself. No time. Back out onstage.

  Struggling.

  To stay.

  In sync.

  With.

  Sorum.

  Pick it up.

  Can’t quite.

  Come on.

  You fuck.

  Fuck.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  In the middle of May 1993, we headed back out for another summer swing through Europe.

  For the first five nights—in Israel, Turkey, Greece, and at two shows in England—Izzy rejoined the band to fill in for Gilby, who’d broken his hand in a motorcycle accident just before we left. Crowds stopped the show for minutes on end to chant Izzy’s name. It was great. Greek teenagers seemed to understand something we had lost track of to some extent: this was—or had been—first and foremost a band of friends who believed in our music and in one another.

  Izzy and I had started out as neighbors who would take a city bus to get to a gig where we were the fourth band on a bill of four bands, just happy to be playing a gig with a band we believed in with everything we had. And we saw it through. Now I looked at Izzy and recognized the clarity he had, the sense of purpose behind his decisions. Izzy had his feet beneath him and could walk away—which he did again after those five shows. My feet felt stuck in cement. Or quicksand. I wanted what he had, but had no idea how to get it. Though I guess I didn’t want sobriety badly enough to go to Izzy and ask him for help. That would have put me in a situation where I would have had to either follow through or fail.

  With Izzy gone and Gilby recuperated, we worked our way through soccer stadiums in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and France. Izzy’s departure triggered a realization: perhaps the simplest explanation for what was going on with Guns N’ Roses was that the band members had stopped needing one another. Sure, we wanted to continue to make a living playing music, and these record sales weren’t going to go on forever. But we no longer needed one another to write ourselves out of poverty through our songs. Guns didn’t start out about money, but once we all had houses and cars, we just needed one another less. The layers of infrastructure and the assistants, bodyguards, and drivers were fine: we could afford not to deal directly with one another anymore. Pissed off? No problem, I have my own hotel room, my own home. Not working on new songs as a band? No problem, I’ll rent a studio on my own. Shit, we had a management team: Oh, we’ll take care of this, we’ll take care of that.

  On this last European leg of the tour, we sometimes weren’t all together in the same city except for the performance itself. On a few occasions, we weren’t even in the same country. Our plane could drop some of us here and others there.

  On July 5, 1993, we all rendezvoused in Barcelona for a huge outdoor show at the Olympic Stadium. Axl came in from Venice. I returned from a vis
it with Linda to the Spanish island of Ibiza. Slash was already in Barcelona.

  After Suicidal Tendencies and Brian May had played their opening sets, our manager, Doug Goldstein, sent an oddly formal request to see me and Slash before the show. This was unusual.

  When Slash and I arrived at the vibe room, one of the tour managers was sitting there waiting for us. The guy was clutching some papers. He put a slim stack of pages down in front of each of us. I leafed through it. It was a legal document giving Axl the right to continue to play as Guns N’ Roses even if either Slash or I—or both of us—were not part of it. Though it didn’t affect our status as shareholders in the operation, Axl and Axl alone would control the name if we signed this agreement.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Look, man,” the tour manager said. “The truth is, you guys are not in good shape—you know that yourselves. If one of you dies, nobody wants to have to spend years in court battling your families or whatever.”

  That was not what it said, however. There was nothing about death in these documents.

  With the crowd outside already getting rowdy, the guy then implied Axl wouldn’t go onstage that night unless we signed the documents.

  I pictured people getting hurt if a riot started—at least that was my fear. And I was so fucking exhausted—it felt as I though I’d been dragging a house around behind me for the last two years. Besides, at the time I never thought GN’R could possibly exist without us. The idea seemed ridiculous. And in that case, maybe the documents didn’t need to be fixed?

  Fuck it.

  I signed. So did Slash.

  Guns N’ Roses—the trademark now owned by Axl—took the stage.

  The next day, I grabbed Doug Goldstein on the tarmac at the airport. I had woken up really upset about what had happened the previous night. Slash and I shouldn’t have signed those papers. But management wouldn’t let the whole thing go forward anyway. Right? I shouted at Doug, saying he needed to fix things.