• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I moved to Seattle in 1983 with a friend of mine. I was 19 at the time and looking for a new adventure, and boy, did I ever find it.

DANIEL HOUSE Matt didn’t stay very long with Bam Bam, but somehow I managed to find him. The guitar player was a guy named Tom Herring, who went by the moniker Nerm—I have no idea why. Together we created Feedback, which was a very cerebral, very mannered prog-rock instrumental three-piece.

For a lot of that year I was actually in both Feedback and 10 Minute Warning, which is largely known as the band that Duff McKagan was in before he moved to L.A. When Duff quit, so did their bass player, so I joined playing bass.

JOHN CONTE (the Living/the Blunt Objects singer) Duff was the youngest of like eight in a Catholic family where every person is musical. He was the type of guy that you could shut in the room with a new instrument, and within 15 minutes he would’ve learned a song and come out and played it for you. Everywhere you went people would just come up to him because they knew his brothers and sisters, and he always had tons and tons of girls. I mean, just flocking to him, just to be around him.

DUFF MCKAGAN When I was 14, a friend of mine who was a drummer and I formed a band with Chris Utting called the Vains—it was my first punk-rock band. My first gig ever was opening up for Black Flag at the Washington Hall in ’79. Later, the Fastbacks asked me to play drums because Kurt Bloch was initially playing the drums and he’s really a guitar player; Kim Warnick became my musical mentor. By ’82, I was playing drums with the Fartz, which was a hardcore band. I was in a million bands and really having fun, starting to tour down the West Coast and play Vancouver all the time. I was writing music with Paul Solger of the Fartz, and these songs were really dirgy and slow and weird and long. We got Greg Gilmore to come in and play drums and we got a different singer, Steve Verwolf, and that was 10 Minute Warning.

BRUCE PAVITT When I first moved to Seattle, I got a job in a yuppie restaurant called the Lake Union Cafe, working as a prep cook, and Duff was working as a baker’s assistant. I’d be chopping carrots, and he’d be next to me putting pecans on cakes. I very distinctly remember him saying, “I’m gonna move to L.A. and try to have a career as a musician.” It was indicative of just how impossible it was to make music a career in Seattle.

RICK FRIEL (Shadow singer/bassist) Duff and Mike McCready were really good friends. Mike, my brother Chris, and I were hanging out at my parents’ house, and Duff came by with this guy named Chris Utting, who went by Criss Crass, and Duff had his SG guitar over his shoulder. He was like, “I’m moving to L.A., and I wanted to say good-bye to you.” And we’re like, “No way! That’s so cool.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go for it. I’m gonna drive down there and live in my car if I have to.” We were speechless. Somebody’s actually doing something.

DUFF MCKAGAN I’ve heard people quote me as saying, “I’m gonna move to L.A. and become a rock star.” Then they add, “And he did.” Everybody says they knew me in 1984, when they actually didn’t. It wasn’t any of that. I wanted to be a musician, and the people I was playing with in Seattle, everybody was doing heroin, and I wasn’t. Heroin decimated 10 Minute Warning. A friend of mine who was strung out said, “Man, if you don’t get out now, it’s going to pass you by. You’re the guy, you’re our hope.”

JOHN CONTE Duff was a no-drug guy. Just beer and cigarettes or booze and cigarettes. And the Living even had an antidrug song called “No Thanks,” which he wrote. For a lot of us, when he gets introduced to the hardcore drug scene down in L.A., it was sort of like, Geez, Duff. Someone really worked on you. That was too bad.

DUFF MCKAGAN Becoming a famous rock guy was never really my intention; I wanted to be in a band that felt amazing and go tour, because that’s what I do. It was between going to New York and L.A., and I had this old piece-of-shit