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  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.simonandschuster.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Duff McKagan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  The names and identifying details of some of the people described in the book have been changed to protect their privacy.

  First Touchstone hardcover edition October 2011

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Joy O’Meara

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKagan, Duff.

  It’s so easy : (and other lies) / Duff McKagan.

  p. cm.

  “A Touchstone Book.”

  1. McKagan, Duff. 2. Bass guitarists—United States—Biography. 3. Guns n’ Roses (Musical group) I. Title.

  ML418.M2A3 2011

  787.87'166092—dc22

  [B]

  2011013545

  ISBN 978-1-4516-0663-8

  ISBN 978-1-4516-0665-2 (ebook)

  For Marie Alice McKagan

  He went on and on down the road, finally coming to a black woods, where he hid and wept as if his heart would break. Ah, what agony was that, what despair, when the tomb of memory was rent open and the ghosts of his old life came forth to scourge him!

  —Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

  PART TWO

  JUST AN URCHIN LIVING UNDER THE STREET

  PART THREE

  LOADED

  PART FOUR

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

  PART FIVE

  A GOOD DAY TO DIE

  PART SIX

  YOU SHINED A LIGHT WHERE IT WAS DARK, ON MY WASTED HEART

  PART SEVEN

  FALL TO PIECES

  PART EIGHT

  YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My friends and old band members may remember some of the stories I recount differently than I do, but I have found that all stories have many sides. These are my stories. These are my perspectives. This is my truth.

  PROLOGUE

  August 2010

  DJ Morty is standing behind a table in the backyard. The anemic last rays of a late-afternoon California sun stream over the adobe roof tiles of the single-story house I share with my wife, Susan, and our two girls, Grace and Mae. In front of the DJ table is a small patch of polished wood planking—a portable dancefloor we rented along with a few little tables and chairs.

  Morty scans the tracks on his laptop, fiddles with his MP3 console, and double-checks the cords connecting it all to the amp and speakers. He’s getting ready for the party. I’ve met Morty a few times at other events around town; I often end up feeling like the middle-aged dork at hipster shindigs, and sometimes the most comfortable thing to do is chat about music with the DJ.

  Today, though, as the afternoon fades to evening in Los Angeles, I’m even more out of place than usual. Or at least less welcome. Grace is turning thirteen today and we’re throwing a party. Grace has already told me and her mom to stay completely invisible. Her exact words: “You’re not invited.”

  Ah, the joys of parenthood.

  Still, Susan and I are going all out for the party. Birthdays at this age are a big deal. I remember when turning eighteen was considered a milestone, but even at that age my celebration had been limited to a few good friends and family members. Partly it’s to do with socio-economic differences between my childhood and my children’s. These days we live in a far more affluent area than the one where I grew up. When you can afford more, you do more, and the kids in a neighborhood like this develop a set of expectations. So in addition to the DJ, there’s a photo booth and a henna tattoo station.

  Another reason we’ve gone all out is that we suspect this could be the last time Grace, the older of our two girls, will want to celebrate at home. Oh well.

  Planning this party was bewildering at times. When I called the photo-booth rental company, the first question they asked me was, “What will the theme of the photo paper be?”

  Huh?

  “Yeah, the machine spits out strips—four little passport style photos on each strip. You can have writing along the side.”

  I got up to speed fast. The strips of passport photos will read Grace’s 13th Birthday Party.

  Now the day of the party has arrived and I’m making sure everything is ready. The woman at the henna tattoo table has her book of patterns set out and is comfortably settled into a chair. I take her a glass of water. I hungrily eye the food table, where the makings of a delicious Mexican feast are being laid out. The caterer is even dredging up tortillas, made from scratch, out of a kettle of oil. There’s also an ice-cream bar. I love ice cream. This is going to be a kick-ass party.

  DJ Morty puts on Prince’s “Controversy” and cranks the amp up to party volume. I yell to Susan. When she joins me in the backyard, I drag her out onto the little dancefloor and start to shimmy. Little known fact about the original members of Guns N’ Roses: we dance. Everyone knows Axl’s serpentine slither, of course. Far fewer people know that Slash is also a world-class Russian crouch-down-and-kick-your-legs-out dancer. And me, well …

  “Dad!” Grace yells.

  I stop in the middle of a move and turn to look at her.

  “People are going to start arriving any minute!”

  She’s mortified. Already.

  Yes, yes, yes, I can deal with this. She’s just growing up.

  As Grace’s friends start to show up, Grace again makes it clear that she has forbidden us from coming out to the backyard during the party. Apparently parents are an embarrassment at this age. Whatever. Peeking out the back door as the party gets into gear, I see little packs of boys and girls hanging out, smiling, and laughing shyly. Some of these kids are starting to look like adults—one of the boys is almost my height.

  An hour or so later I’m thinking I should really take a glass of water to the guy running the photo booth and see how things are going for the henna tattoo artist and make sure everyone is behaving. I’m responsible for these kids, after all. Hell, the DJ is a friend of mine, so I have to visit a little bit with him. And, well, the food looks really good, too, and I should probably get a plate for Susan. And while I’m at it, might as well get one for myself.

  I’m not snooping, I tell myself as I push open the back door and step out. By no means. I am just being a responsible dad. Yep.

  Should I go for ice cream now, or come back for it later?

  As I round a blind corner of the house I stop cold, stunned: a boy and a girl are kissing.

  Oh shit.

  I freeze, not sure what to say or do.

  I w
asn’t expecting this.

  My mind rushes through a checklist I didn’t even realize I had in my head. It’s a checklist of things I was doing at this same age—and it doubles as a checklist of things that as a parent I do not want a group of kids in my charge doing in my backyard.

  Are they boozing?

  No.

  Smoking pot?

  No.

  Dropping acid?

  No.

  I started smoking pot at a really young age: fourth grade, to be exact. I took my first drink in the fifth grade and tasted LSD for the first time in sixth grade when I was offered blotter acid by an eighth grader on my way to Eckstein Middle School in Seattle. In the Northwest, mushrooms grew everywhere—on parking strips and in people’s backyards and just about everywhere else—and I soon learned which ones got you high. By the seventh grade, I was an expert at distinguishing liberty-cap mushrooms from all the ones that didn’t get you high. I first snorted coke in seventh grade, too. I also tried codeine, quaaludes, and Valium in middle school. There wasn’t a huge stigma attached to child drug use in the 1970s, and there weren’t warnings blaring everywhere about the dangers.

  Then I got into music. The early punk-rock movement in Seattle was pretty minuscule, so we all knew one another and played in one another’s bands. I was only fourteen when I started playing drums, bass, and guitar in various bands, and I went on tour with the Fastbacks at a time when other kids in my class were eating cotton candy and dreaming of the day they’d be old enough to get their driver’s licenses. I continued to drink a ton of beer and to experiment with LSD, mushrooms, and coke.

  Are these kids taking mushrooms?

  No.

  Cocaine?

  No.

  Then, sometime in 1982, as the music scene became bigger and a recession hit Seattle, we all noticed a huge influx of heroin and pills. Addiction suddenly skyrocketed within my circle of friends, and death by overdose became almost commonplace. I witnessed my first overdose when I was eighteen. I saw the first love of my life wither away because of smack and one of my bands implode because of it. By the time I was twenty-three, two of my best friends had died from heroin overdoses.

  Heroin?

  No.

  Thank God.

  These kids aren’t doing drugs or drinking. No telltale scents or dilated pupils out here.

  My mind races on to other activities I had gotten into by Grace’s age.

  My best friends and I started hot-wiring cars in middle school. Car theft led to breaking and entering. I remember breaking into a church one night in hopes of getting some microphones for my band. My liquid courage at that age had no conscience. When I couldn’t find any microphones, I swiped the Communion chalices to use as pimp cups for my cocktails. That crime made the papers.

  Any of these kids stealing cars?

  No.

  I saw all these kids arrive. Their parents dropped them off. None of them arrived on their own.

  Oh, God, what about…?

  I was introduced to sex in ninth grade. The girl was older—I was playing music among an older set of people. The thing about that first time, though, is that I got the clap. Of course, I couldn’t just stroll up to my mom at thirteen and announce that I had something wrong with my penis. Luckily for me, somebody in this older group of friends steered me to a free clinic run by Catholic nuns. The experience was not cool at all. Nope. It scared the hell out of me. Still, after a three-day dose of low-grade antibiotics, I was gonorrhea-free.

  But these kids are not having sex. In fact, these kids’ hands aren’t even wandering. No, these kids are just kissing.

  Sex?

  No.

  This reverie—the run through my mental checklist—takes less than five seconds, but the boy and girl have stopped kissing and are now standing there frozen, their shoulders pulled awkwardly up toward their necks as if to withstand the bluster they expect to come their way.

  I take a deep breath.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  I nod and quickly retreat back into the house.

  PART ONE

  KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’ve known a lot of junkies. Many of these addicts have either died or continue to live a pitiful existence to this day. With many of these same people, I personally witnessed a wonderful lust for life as we played music together as kids and looked toward the future. Of course, no one sets out to be a junkie or an alcoholic.

  Some people can experiment in their youth and move on. Others cannot.

  When Guns N’ Roses began to break into the public consciousness, I was known as a big drinker. In 1988, MTV aired a concert in which Axl introduced me—as usual—as Duff “the King of Beers” McKagan. Soon after this, a production company working on a new animated series called me to ask if they could use the name “Duff” for a brand of beer in the show. I laughed and said of course, no problem. The whole thing sounded like a low-rent art project or something—I mean, who made cartoons for adults? Little did I know that the show would become The Simpsons and that within a few years I would start to see Duff beer glasses and gear everywhere we toured.

  Still, given what I’d seen, a reputation for drinking didn’t seem like a big deal. But by the time Guns N’ Roses spent twenty-eight months from 1991 to 1993 touring the Use Your Illusion albums, my intake had reached epic proportions. For the round-the-world Illusion tour, Guns leased a private plane. It wasn’t an executive jet; it was a full-on 727 we leased from MGM casino, with lounges and individual bedroom suites for the band members. Slash and I christened the plane on our maiden journey by smoking crack together. Before the wheels had left the ground. (Not something I recommend, incidentally—the smell gets into everything.) I don’t even remember playing Czechoslovakia; we played a stadium show in one of the most beautiful cities in East Europe not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the only way I knew I’d even been in the country was because of the stamp I found in my passport.

  It wasn’t clear anymore whether or not I would be one of those who could experiment in his youth and move on.

  Every day I made sure I had a vodka bottle sitting next to my bed when I woke up. I tried to quit drinking in 1992, but started again with a vengeance after only a few weeks. I just could not stop. I was too far gone. My hair began falling out in clumps and my kidneys ached when I pissed. My body couldn’t take the full assault of the alcohol without bitching back at me. My septum had burned through from coke and my nose ran continuously like a leaky faucet in a neglected men’s room urinal. The skin on my hands and feet cracked, and I had boils on my face and neck. I had to wear bandages under my gloves in order to be able to play my bass.

  There are many different ways to come out of a funk like that. Some people go straight to rehab, some go to church. Others go to AA, and many more end up in a pine box, which is where I felt headed.

  By early 1993, my cocaine use had gotten so bad that friends—some of whom did blow or smoked crack with me—actually started tentatively talking to me about it and trying their best to keep my dealers out of my life when I arrived back home for a break between legs of the tour. Ah, but I had my ways to circumvent all the do-gooders. There was always a way in L.A.

  One of the lies that I told myself was that I wasn’t really a cocaine addict. After all, I didn’t go to coke parties and never did cocaine by itself. As a matter of fact, I hated the idea that I was doing coke. My use was strictly utilitarian: I used its stimulant effects to stave off drunkenness and to allow me to drink for much longer—often days on end. Actually, mostly days on end.

  Because I was adamant about not becoming the stereotypical “coke guy,” I didn’t have any of the fancy grinders that made coke a lot easier to snort. I would just get my package, open it, break a rock into a few smaller pieces in a half-assed way, and shove one of the pieces up my nose. Of course I could tell that my primitive process was taking a toll. The inside of my nose was always on fire; sometimes it flared so bad
ly that I would double over in pain.

  Then the wife of my main coke dealer, Josh, got pregnant. I started to worry that she had not given up her own coke habit. One thing that never seeped from my otherwise porous ethical system: almost anything could be deemed fun and games when it was your life and your life alone that you were toying with, but endangering someone else was unacceptable. I was not going to participate in any situation where an innocent third party was being harmed. This was not just basic human decency. I came from a huge family, and by this point in my life I had something like twenty-three nephews and nieces, all of whom I had known since they were infants. No, I was going to put my foot down here with Josh and his wife, Yvette, and insist that she quit. I didn’t yet have the capacity to lead by example, but I did offer to pay for her to go to rehab.

  Both Josh and Yvette swore to me that, Geez, of course she had stopped and that there was absolutely no fucking way she would do that while the baby was in utero. I was suspicious.

  One weekend they came to stay with me and some other friends at a cabin I had bought on Lake Arrowhead, up in the mountains east of L.A. Josh had of course brought drugs, and I had given him and Yvette one of the downstairs bedrooms. I could tell Yvette was high. To check on my suspicions, I quietly entered their downstairs bedroom and found her bent over, snorting a line of coke. Seeing this for myself made me realize that I had sunk to an all-time low in my life. I lost it. I kicked them out of my house and told them that I never wanted to see them again. I was seething—at them, and at myself.

  I quit coke that day and drank myself through two brutal weeks of serious depression.

  Even though the effects of my drinking were more noticeable without the coke, drinking proved harder to rein in, much less kick. These days I know what having the “DTs” actually means. The clinical definition of delirium tremens is a severe psychotic condition occurring in some persons with chronic alcoholism, characterized by uncontrollable trembling, vivid hallucinations, severe anxiety, sweating, and sudden feelings of terror. All I knew then was that it wasn’t cool. I felt really sick. My body was falling apart so badly that I looked like I was getting radiation treatment.