It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [102]
Meanwhile Guns was trying to happen. If the band was going to work for me, it was going to have to work with me sober. We booked a rehearsal place. The first day Axl didn’t show up. The next Slash failed to show. After a week of that, I stopped going down there unless one of them called me to say he was actually walking out of his house.
Slash was beyond the heavy nodding, but he was still using heroin. Still, that posed no immediate problem for me. When I saw him ducking out to fix, I wasn’t thinking, Oh, that looks good.
Axl had demonstrated a lot of compassion over the years—and especially in the wake of my pancreatitis. That’s what also drove me crazy. He knew that I’d changed my life around, that I got up early and went to bed early, that I was doing whatever I could to stay alive. And yet, right at this point he made a big switch and became a night person.
One night he showed up at the rehearsal studio as I was packing up to leave.
“Sorry, man, but I have to go,” I told him.
“What do you mean you have to go?”
“Dude, it’s four a.m., and I’ve been here all fucking night. I’ve got to get home.”
“Fuck that, man!”
What made dealing with Axl maddening was the fact that he and I were also in agreement on a lot of things. One of the points of contention between Slash and Axl was a batch of songs Slash brought to the table. Axl thought it was Southern rock—not Guns N’ Roses material. I backed Axl.
Slash and I started trying to write new stuff with other guitar players added to the mix. This was the first time we’d written without Izzy to bounce ideas off of and to bring ideas of his own.
Zakk Wylde, who played with Ozzy Osbourne on and off for years, brought energy and enthusiasm that was lacking within Guns at the time.
“We can build on the legacy,” he said excitedly. “We can make something great. Listen to this.”
He saw a piano against the wall and sat down and elegantly played it. I had no idea he could play piano at all, much less like this. We recorded a few demos with him, but nothing panned out.
Then Axl wanted to bring in a guy named Paul Huge.
“You want to bring in your old buddy from Indiana?” Slash said incredulously.
“Look, he’ll just jam with us and maybe it’ll work out,” Axl said.
“No,” both Slash and I said.
“Yes,” said Axl.
This wasn’t some wedding band you could just bring friends into. If I wasn’t going to bend for the sake of one of my best friends—Slash, and his Southern-rock songs—I sure as hell wasn’t going to let a stranger come in and fuck around with Guns.
“Fine,” Axl said. “How’s this: you guys try him out on your own, give him a few days.”
We let him come in. Gave him a couple of days. It was hopeless.
We told Axl.
“Fuck you guys,” he said.
That was pretty much it for Slash. After that he concentrated on his solo band, Slash’s Snakepit, and eventually released a record under that name early the next year.
I started to get calls from our manager, Doug, and from Ed Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, pleading with me to somehow get the band back into the studio. I suppose in their eyes they finally had a sober and clearheaded member of the band who could somehow pull everything together. But Jesus, I was only just sober, and if they knew how fragile my sobriety was at that point, maybe they would never have called. I still didn’t know if I would stay sober for the rest of my life.
Sure, I could say I was done. But I still had urges. The urge to grab a bottle of vodka and take the edge off when these motherfuckers called me, for instance. Goddamn it, I can’t have a glass of wine to take the edge off? Maybe urge is the wrong word. Perhaps it was