It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [110]
Once I got engaged in trying to figure things out and Mark and I started talking, he helped me find an investment guy in Seattle. We started going through basic public information available about companies whose stocks interested us, information like a company’s annual report. You could read how the company viewed itself and what—at the most rudimentary level—it planned to do in the future. It sounds like simple stuff, but it turned out that just reading those sorts of things and deciding whether they made sense put us ahead of most people.
I bought some forward-thinking equities. Everybody in Seattle was buying Starbucks because you could see it growing. It hadn’t turned up on every street corner yet, but it had a foothold in L.A. and San Francisco, and there might have been a couple storefronts in New York. And there were lines at their coffee shops. People were going there. We thought it might be a short-term investment, but at that time it didn’t look as if they were expanding too fast. I also bought Microsoft. A little later, I got in early on Amazon, another Seattle stock. It was cool to start investing in the 1990s and have a connection to Seattle. There was an excitement in the air about some of those companies, and they just happened to be in my hometown. They also just happened to be some of the hottest stocks of the next decade or so.
In late 1994, Axl called and we talked about plans for the band, trying to figure out what to do. The conversation went on for more than an hour. We started to talk about GN’R’s accomplishments—something that none of us had ever acknowledged or discussed together prior to this. We talked about our creative success, about our collective vision, about why that vision had resonated. We talked about how the band had represented a family, how that family had started a business, how that family business had gone global. We had come a long way from the days of Gardner Street.
“We’ve never sat down and said, ‘Look what we did,’” I said. “I know we’re not the type of band to high-five or whatever, but we never even went out to dinner and just shook each other’s hands.”
“You know,” said Axl, “you’re right. But we still could.”
It took getting sober and contemplative about the whole situation, but now it struck me as sad that we hadn’t stood face-to-face and congratulated one another—alone, without management or minions around. At this point, it would have been just Axl, Slash, and me, but there would still have been value in doing it. It could have led to something else we needed to do: to take stock of where things stood, to take a step back and remember that despite the centrifugal forces driving us apart now, we had started the band as friends.
“We should never lose track of that fact,” I said.
Axl was definitely behind the idea, but I never set up any kind of meeting. Somehow it was already too late. This was right around the time the movie Interview with the Vampire came out, featuring a cover of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” credited to Guns N’ Roses. Guitar work by Paul Huge, Axl’s childhood friend, had been added to the track and Slash was more furious now than ever.
There was something else keeping me from acting on it, too. My panic attacks had finally subsided, I was getting comfortable in my own skin, gaining confidence, becoming an adult; I had lost all that booze weight, was feeling good, feeling calm, feeling centered; I had been sober for a good chunk of time. I liked the person I had become. I had made it through—or so it seemed. It dawned on me that perhaps I had let people’s perceptions of me define who I was. In other words, I had believed the hype. I wasn’t Duff-the-king-of-beers anymore. So was I Duff–from–GN’R or Duff-the-punk-rock-guy anymore? I didn’t have to be. These definitions now seemed a bit adolescent. Maybe I was finally growing up, glad my turbulent teens and twenties were a thing of the past. And despite my protectiveness about Guns, it hit me: the band was no longer the most important thing to me.
I decided to spend