It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [116]
In the old days, that sort of thing would ring in my ears, and if I walked away I’d feel like a pussy. Two years earlier I would have been like, “Fuck you, I’ll fuck you up.” Now I had a hard time picturing why I would have been offended. If someone thinks you’re gay or is dumb enough to think that calling you gay is an insult, who cares? And if someone is ignorant enough to say it in public, they’re probably just drunk. I just laughed to myself as I kept walking. It didn’t matter at all.
Benny had talked to me about the confidence to walk away. I had also seen guys from the dojo who I knew could literally kill someone just walk away and smile when someone tried to antagonize them. What was it to them?
Having that same sort of reaction now to the two guys yelling at me confirmed that Benny’s lessons were indeed sinking in: I had gone to my mental safe house and realized I didn’t need a sword. Confidence was a weapon.
All this fight training, it turned out, was designed to enable me not to fight.
PART SIX
YOU SHINED A LIGHT WHERE IT WAS DARK, ON MY WASTED HEART
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
After appearing as Kings of Chaos, Mr. Moo’s Futurama, and Wayne Neutron, Matt Sorum, Steve Jones, John Taylor, and I ended up calling our unintentional “supergroup” Neurotic Outsiders. It was funny to hear it described as a group at all, much less a supergroup. The whole thing was totally casual—our live shows were nothing more than punk-rock parties, a couple of dudes playing loads of cover songs—Clash, Pistols, Damned, Stooges—with lots of our friends jumping onstage to join us for a song or two. But after we played a string of Viper Room gigs and a few national gigs through February 1996, record companies started pursuing us. I was dumbfounded. We were just having a laugh, after all. In the end, Madonna’s label, Maverick, gave us a million-dollar advance. This was four times what Guns got! From our perspective, the deal had an element of a heist to it, and the whole thing—especially with Steve Jones a part of it—reminded me of The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.
John Taylor chuckled about the weird contours of the music business. He was living in an apartment in Venice Beach while we worked on the Neurotic project. He told me cautionary tales about his time in Duran Duran.
“I thought I was just fabulous and that it would never stop rolling in,” he said. “I owned places in Paris, London, and New York. I flew everywhere in private jets. And one day I woke up and it was over. The money was gone.”
The bands I’d been in never talked about business. For most of them, of course, there simply had been no business to discuss. There was plenty of business whirling around Guns N’ Roses, but we were afraid to talk about that stuff for fear of betraying our ignorance. Now, failing to acknowledge the business of being in a band seemed to me like a sort of cowardice, or at the very least a failure to deal with reality: professional musicians may be reluctant businessmen, but we are businessmen nonetheless. To pretend otherwise, or to ignore the obvious, felt dishonest. Now that I knew I was going to live and that I was going to continue to play music, I decided that at some point I should try to figure out how the commerce side of things worked.
But first, Neurotic Outsiders had an album to make. We went into NRG Studios in North Hollywood, recorded the songs we’d been playing live for the past year, and by the end of the summer of 1996 we were preparing to release our self-titled debut album. Even though we had told all the labels pursuing us that we weren’t willing to mount a full-scale tour, we did line up a string of gigs in September to promote the record. I was going back out on the road.
A few days before the album came out, we played New York City’s Webster Hall, which had been one of the launching points for my ill-fated solo tour. This time it was actually fun. Next up were Boston, D.C., and Toronto. Then came September, 13, 1996, and a show in Pontiac, Michigan. We did press at each stop, and here,