It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [121]
Though I’d ostensibly lived in L.A. for more than ten years at this point, I wasn’t around for much of that time and had never gotten to know the surrounding areas very well. We drove around aimlessly until I saw a pickup hitched to a boat on a trailer. The rig was stopped on the shoulder of the road. I pulled over.
“How’s it going?” I said. “Hey, we’re looking for the lake around here. You on your way there?”
“Uh, no,” he said. “I’m on my way up to Lake Arrowhead. I was just fixing a flat.”
“Do you know where the lake around here is?”
“There’s something called Malibu Lake just a couple miles up the road,” he said, “but it’s nothing more than a pond.”
He hopped back into his truck and pulled away with a wave. We kept driving on Mulholland—the same road that runs along the top of the ridge through the Hollywood Hills—and came to a narrow body of water that had to be Malibu Lake. The guy was right about it. Still, I pulled over, we climbed out, and I scanned the surroundings. As I looked across the street I saw a sign: for sale. Up a hill, set back off the road, was a house—or rather a mansion. A huge place. There was a phone number on the sign. For some reason I called it.
After our initial conversation, the voice on the other end said the place was in foreclosure, owned by the bank.
“Make an offer,” said the voice.
We chatted a little more and I arranged to take a tour of the house. I was curious what a place like that looked like on the inside; Susan and I could have some fun and take a peek.
At the top of the hill, the driveway circled a grand fountain. Outside were an Olympic-size pool and a tennis court, and inside eight bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and 7,500 square feet of living space. The place was straight out of a hip-hop video. But it wasn’t in what you would call move-in condition. The couple who owned it had gone through an ugly divorce. The man moved out and the woman had trashed the place.
Waterskiing in the nearby lake was out of the question, but on a lark I put in an offer on the house for significantly less than a million dollars. For a place this size, my offer would have been a steal in Fargo, North Dakota. This, of course, was Malibu.
The next day my phone rang: offer accepted.
What? No way!
Susan and I decided to rent out the place above Dead Man’s Curve and move into this new place as soon as we had it repaired. It turned out the damage was just superficial and the house was soon ready.
Moving out of the cliff-side house on Edwin proved more emotional than I had expected. But I reminded myself of the best rationale for moving out: Where could a little kid play there?
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
As the August due date for the baby drew nearer, I began to think I needed to move on from GN’R, or what was left of it. Guns had been paying rent on studios for three years now—from 1994 to 1997—and still did not have a single song. The whole operation was so erratic that it didn’t seem to fit with my hopes for parenthood, for stability.
I told Susan I wanted to quit.
“Don’t leave Guns because of me!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want that ever to come between us.”
“I’m not, and it won’t,” I said. “Trust me.”
As far as I was concerned, the truly amazing time for the band was from 1985 to 1988, a three-year period that had ended almost a decade before that conversation with Susan in August 1997. It didn’t get more important the bigger we got, it just got bigger—and more bloated. A lot of people in GN’R’s extended social circle had never moved on in their lives. Maybe they didn’t even want to. I knew now that I could move on. And I wanted to.
I called Axl when my mind was made up. We went to dinner and I told Axl, my good friend and business partner, that I was done. We shook hands and that was that.
Despite the anger I felt after the late gigs, there was another side to my relationship with Axl that trumped all of the unpleasantness, and that is the side I choose to remember and hold dear. Axl can be the most tender and thoughtful of friends. Was he the ideal bandmate and business