“Look, Duff,” he said, “you’re a smart guy. I manage Guns N’ Roses.”
“Yeah, I know, Doug. And that’s why we have to—”
“No, you’re not getting it. I manage Guns N’ Roses.”
“Are you trying to tell me you manage the name Guns N’ Roses?”
I was still a member of the band. Not a paid hand. Slash and I still had the same equity stake as before. We had just relinquished control of the name.
Doug looked at me with no expression.
“You manage the guy who owns the name Guns N’ Roses—is that where you’re going, Doug?”
He shrugged. That was where he was going.
I was apoplectic with rage. I couldn’t even speak.
We boarded the plane.
Only five more shows in Europe. Five. More. Shows.
You can make it.
After twenty-six months, the final concerts of the Use Your Illusion tour appeared on the horizon. We had tacked on two shows in Argentina at the end of the European leg, and then it was over. Just two more flights to go now: Paris to Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires to L.A. The finish line had come to seem like a tangible, physical threshold—I could practically see it out the window of the plane as we floated toward Argentina in mid-July 1993, for those last two shows.
By this point, the members of the band had long since stopped showing up for sound check, so the crew would play our instruments, test the equipment, and set levels without us. For this, the crew had assembled a shadow band and even developed a signature tune: “Crack Pipe” by an Atlanta act called the Coolies. The song was from an album called Doug, a spoof rock-opera about a skinhead who bashes a gay chef, steals his cookbook, and becomes rich and famous. Of course, there’s a downfall—it was an opera, after all—and “Crack Pipe” came during that last section.
On the night of the very last show, three hours elapsed after the opening band finished. No Axl.
Please, can’t this end without any more people fucking getting hurt?
Please.
Audiences in South America tended to throw a lot of rocks, and with no sign of GN’R, things were getting ugly. Our production manager gathered the guys who formed the crew band.
“Get up there,” he said. “You’re playing.”
A huge scream went up from the audience as the crew band jogged out to their places and the entire stage set sprang to life. The band launched into a tune. The lights pulsed. Then the jumbotron video screens lit up and showed McBob and the rest of the guys rocking to “Crack Pipe.”
Suddenly 50,000 people started shouting what must have been obscenities.
Then Axl arrived. There would be no riot.
When we finally took the stage for that last show in Argentina, I peered out at the crowd.
This could be it.
Remember this moment, remember this scene, this stadium, these fans.
We limped back to L.A. and quickly went our separate ways. Back into our private lairs to lick our wounds. Except me. For me it was straight off to rehearsals. Geffen had released Believe in Me while Guns were still in Europe, and now I was off on my first solo tour.
That’s when Axl called me, telling me I was crazy to go back out.
“It’s what I do, Axl.”
Besides, I wasn’t going to sit still.
Keep moving, keep moving.
After the incident a few months before with my coke dealer and his pregnant wife, I had quit coke. For the most part that had stuck so far. It would be easier to stick with it on the road. I just had too many drug connections in L.A., and my life there was intertwined with coke. Keep moving.
The tour started with three showcase appearances in clubs in L.A., San Francisco, and New York. And it started badly. I had switched from vodka to wine, but immediately found myself drinking about a case a day. Wine, wine, wine. And blood.
Blood in San Francisco when my wife, Linda, got into a scrap backstage and traded punches with another woman until teeth started rattling to the floor. Blood in New York as fistfights broke out in the audience. Then we flew to Europe to join the Scorpions’ tour. A fistfight broke out between a couple band members in an airport. Blood. Our lead guitar player pulled a knife on the bus driver in England. Talk of more blood. Blood, blood, blood. And wine. I often had to travel alone to get to the next town early to do publicity. I showed up at a record signing in Sweden swilling wine from the bottle. Got skewered in the local press for that—a lot of young kids in line for autographs.
We played some inspired shows, but there were also times when I shouldn’t have been up there playing, times when I let it go too far and my performance suffered. There I was in huge venues, playing with my own band, under my own name, not bringing my A-game.
What’s your excuse now?
At the end of that leg, I needed another guitar player. Couldn’t keep the guy who stabbed our driver. I called Paul Solger, my old bandmate from Ten Minute Warning back in Seattle. I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years. He was sober. Want to tour with my band? He said yes.
On to Japan we went. Bottles and bottles of wine each day. My innards burned. Tums, I need Tums. Sloppy onstage again. What the fuck are you doing?
Home to LAX, a long, long commercial flight. Oh, fuck.
We had a break before heading back across the Pacific for a tour of Australia.
I just can’t do this anymore.
I felt sick, really sick, the worst flu I’d ever had.
Are you going to be that guy—a quitter?
I picked up the phone and dialed the tour manager.
I’m out. I can’t do it anymore.
I was that guy now.
No tour, fine. But I needed to keep moving.
Seattle.
Seattle.
I have a house there. That’s where I’ll go.
March 31, 1994, at LAX, there was Kurt Cobain, looking as lost in the lonely, jagged maze of his mind as I was in mine. Then he was gone. Man, I really wish I’d asked you to come over to my house that night when we landed. I’m sorry.
May 10, the paralyzing pain. The unbearable pain. The pain, the pain.
I’m going to die. Here. Alone.
Andy.
Please let him come upstairs. I don’t want to die alone.
Dr. Thomas.
Demerol. Nothing. Demerol. Nothing. Sheer panic.
Emergency room.
“Kill me.”
I begged over and over.
“Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”
PART FIVE
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As I was pleading with the ER doctors to kill me, they brought in an ultrasound scanner so they could monitor my burst pancreas. My childhood doctor, Dr. Thomas, was in charge of assessing the ultrasound images they kept taking at regular intervals in preparation for emergency surgery.
Landing in the Northwest Hospital that day didn’t surprise me. In fact, the surprise was that I was alive at all in May of 1994. I had long thought I would die by the age of thirty—and I had just reached that milestone in February of that year.
You knew this was coming, I thought.
All you ever wanted to do was leave your mark on the world.
Get in, get out.
You’ve done that.
I figured as part of Guns, I’d left a big mark.
What else do you have left to live for anyway?
Then Dr. Thomas suddenly said, “Hang on a minute.”
My pancreas had expanded and then burst. But now it was starting to contract again. Once the expansion stopped and the blood started to coagulate, they decided not to perform surgery after all. I just might be able to survive with my organ intact—no dialysis necessary. Instead of wheeling me down to an operating room, they continued to monitor me in an intensive care unit.
They put me on really high doses of morphine and Librium. At first I had buttons to push to self-administer them. For the first two days, it w
as constant. Pushing the button, pushing the button. Then, at some point on the third day, I realized, Wow, I didn’t push the buttons as many times this hour. By the sixth day, they took the buttons away from me—because I was a full-on junkie. They switched me to drip doses.
I started to have withdrawal from the morphine.
I’ll never forget when my mom came to the hospital to see me. She was in a wheelchair, from Parkinson’s disease. There I was, her youngest son, with a morphine drip in my left arm and a Librium drip in the other arm for the shakes from alcohol withdrawal.
I saw myself in the hospital bed with tubes in my body and her in the wheelchair.
The order isn’t right here—I should be taking care of her. It’s not right.
You’re a fuckup.
You’re a fuckup.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The old adage about addiction is that the first thing you have to do is to admit you have a problem. In my case, I already knew I had a problem; the key for me was admitting how selfish I was being. Look, you’re hurting your mom.
I didn’t know whether I would survive during those first few days in the hospital, but I felt strongly that if I did live, I would be prepared to change. When I was released from the hospital, Dr. Thomas asked me to come talk to him in a consultation room.
“I’ve arranged for you to enter a drug and alcohol rehab facility near Olympia,” he said. “We can transport you directly there.”
I thanked him for all his help.
“I think I can do it on my own,” I told him.
I saw the look in his eyes change. Instead of expressing a helpful glint, they now betrayed skepticism hardened by experience. Frustration crept into his tone.
“Duff, if you have one more drink you will die.”
I thanked him again. “Two weeks alone here in the hospital has done as much for me as any rehab could possibly do.”
I believed that. The mental work had started as soon as I saw my mom in her wheelchair forced to tend to me, to worry about me—anxious she might have to grieve for me. I was done. Now that I had been granted this reprieve, it was time to turn my shit around.
When I got to my house, my yellow lab, Chloe, was waiting faithfully at the front door, just as she always had been whenever I came home between tour legs. I had brought her with me when I flew up from L.A. and Andy had taken care of her while I was in the hospital. Chloe seemed to sense my fragility; she stuck close to me at all times and nuzzled me even more than usual.
Thanks to the Librium, it had been a kind withdrawal from alcohol—at least while I was in the hospital. They juiced me pretty good in there. When they sent me home, they gave me a two-week supply of Librium pills. And there was a prescription—you know, take two pills six times a day, then two pills five times a day, and so forth, with the number of pills diminishing each day.
That was my first challenge. But I did it; I did exactly what the prescription said. Still, I was shaking all the time. During the first few weeks, I shook so badly from alcohol withdrawal that I was afraid to drive my car. I was sure I would crash it. I found an old steel mountain bike in my garage and started riding that instead.
One of the first things I did was to go to the grocery store to buy food. It was a novel idea at the time—it had been years since I really shopped for food. Now here I was, thirty years old, an adult with a credit card, a checkbook, and an ATM card. I could buy whatever I wanted in the store, but I had no idea where to start. I thought everyone was staring at me—I was sure my shaking was freakishly visible. It had also been so long since I had been anywhere sober that I didn’t know how to act or how to deal. It was like being on LSD. The lights in the store were glaringly bright and I could swear the music was playing hidden messages. I grabbed some milk, barbecue sauce, and cigarettes, and that was all.
I looked at the girl at the cash register.
“I give you this money, right?”
My shirt was drenched in sweat and I was having a full-blown panic attack.
She nodded nervously, barely able to disguise her disgust. She gingerly took the money from my hand, trying to avoid actually touching me.
Something I failed to realize was that simply functioning in life again was going to be my biggest hurdle. I guess I always thought that avoiding bars and drug dealers and cravings would be the biggest impediments to sober progress. Yes, those things would be a challenge, but first I had to figure out things like what time to go to bed and what to do with my waking time. How do I talk to someone on the phone now? Who do I call? Should I tell people that I’m sober? Should I just go away somewhere and disappear? How are people going to view me after a crisis like this? What the fuck should I do?
Those questions reverberated until the fragile web of my existence shook. How was I going to play music again? Could I do it sober? Guns N’ Roses was a shambles, and the dynamic inside the band—if you could even call it that—had changed. Was there anything there to salvage, and if so, could I do it in a completely new and unfamiliar state of mind?
Initially I rode my heavy old mountain bike just to stave off the shakes, but I quickly realized riding made me feel better. And it was something to fill the time. Those first few days I just rode around aimlessly and only realized I’d been out for a long time when darkness gathered. Without ever thinking about it, I soon found myself riding around for eight hours a day—slowly, in flat areas, but all day long.
My muscles ached each morning. I hadn’t exercised for years. But the soreness lifted my spirit. Not spirit as in mood, but my actual spirit—my body was so wrecked from abuse that my spirit was the only thing keeping me afloat, all I had left.
After about a week of long flat rides, I began to challenge myself on the bike. Seattle is hilly and I had no trouble finding steeper and steeper climbs to test my endurance and my tolerance for pain. These increasingly hard rides came to represent a form of self-flagellation, a way to punish myself for all the damage I had done to myself and others. I could feel this healthy new kind of pain searing every muscle fiber and neuron in my body. I was on fucking fire—and I liked it.
As the weeks passed, my endurance started to increase and my mind started to clear. It was like I hadn’t been alive for a long, long time. I was smelling the grass and trees for the first time in years. Smell is the strongest sense we have, and my long-dormant olfactory system was triggering memories that I had thought lost. The whiff of newsprint reminded me of riding in the backseat of my sister Joan’s car, delivering newspapers along my paper route one morning in middle school when she saved me from doing it on my bike in the rain.
The smell of Lake Washington evoked memories of swimming and fishing with my brother Matt. Rain on fresh-cut lawns took me back to practices when, from ages eight to fourteen, I played pee-wee football. Our team always had the smallest players in the city league, and our coaches compensated by putting a premium on physical conditioning. The hope was to run other teams into the ground. The practice field adjoined a steep hillside. Anytime someone screwed up a block or jumped offside, we would instantly hear our coaches say: “To the hill, gentlemen!” This was the cue to run wind sprints up and down the muddy incline. It was intense and I got sick frequently, but we weren’t allowed to stop to throw up—we just kept running. The coaching staff always said such suffering built character.
Like that, biking for entire days hurt but also felt somehow positive—as if the aches might represent a moral victory of some sort. And for the first time in years, I thought I might actually have a chance at survival. I started to feel human. My kidneys no longer ached when I urinated, and my stomach hungered for actual nourishment.
Eddy came over to my house with a book on nutrition, outlining a diet suited to the reduced capabilities of my body’s digestive system in the wake of the damage to my pancreas—lots of fish and greens. He told me he had decided to go on the diet with me.
Those first few weeks out of the hospital were probably the most important in my e
ntire life. People say things happen for a reason, and if I hadn’t been shaking so badly, I probably would never have hauled that rusty bike out of my garage. And if I had never straddled that old frame and cranked those creaky pedals, I might never have held it together in those early days—I simply had no idea what else to do.
Of course, I was still in a band that was trying to make a new record. At some point, I would have to return to Los Angeles and that thought terrified me. The only hope I had was to get a mountain bike down there. It would be the first thing I did, I told myself.
Not long after I got out of the hospital, Axl came up to Seattle to visit me. He was the only member of the band who had called me in the hospital, though McBob and Adam Day from the crew also called. I think from afar it must have sounded to Slash like just another brush with the line—and besides, he was dealing with an addiction of his own. Not that anyone owed me a call in a situation that was of my own making, but Axl’s concern still touched me.
Axl and I talked about Guns. The challenge was to figure out how we were going to make a new record and what direction we were going to go musically. Obviously the trust and understanding within our band—the sense that we had one another to rely on like a family—had been tainted, perhaps irrevocably. A lot of wedges had been driven between us. Looking back now, it is all so fucking clear. But at the time I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that people we were paying to facilitate the business side of our band seemed willing to exacerbate all the personal problems among the people who made up the band—that they could be so selfish and moneygrubbing and shortsighted.
Now, however, I was doing sober things with Axl, riding bikes and eating healthy food, and, once he returned to L.A., talking with him on the phone about productive musical directions. Maybe he, too, had changed. Maybe there was something to salvage in Guns N’ Roses. Axl and I decided we should regroup and start writing the next album.
It’s So Easy Page 22