It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [124]
I never heard what his fucking kids thought of my record. In fact, I never heard from the guy again. On my birthday—the day of the album’s supposed release—an intern from the label called and left a message on my answering machine to say it wouldn’t be released that day or any other day.
I subsequently offered to buy the album back from the label so I could release it some other way. After all, I had put a lot of work into it and was proud of the results. I said I would pay all the recording costs—about $80,000. They said no, sorry, we will only sell it at a profit. You can have it back for $250,000. Otherwise we’ll just keep it in the vault.
Fuck this, I thought.
This was just another test, another challenge.
Rise above.
I rented a van and Loaded did its first-ever tour, punk-rock style, playing the songs from the unreleased album up and down the West Coast for a few weeks. I wanted to stay in motion rather than sitting around and stewing over the severing of this last tie to the past.
That tour reminded me of one of the reasons punk was so great: the interaction with the audience. The fans weren’t in Row 600. They weren’t behind a barricade. They were right in front of our faces. Obviously, if they were at our show, we shared musical interests; the sweaty intimacy of these hastily organized, small gigs amplified that feeling of camaraderie.
Still, once I was back in L.A., I began to think.
Fuck this business.
Fuck this whole fucking town.
You’ve been itching to go back to school. So let’s fucking do it.
I pictured myself up at Seattle University, following in Uncle John’s footsteps. I pictured my family living in our place on Lake Washington, far away from L.A.’s bullshit. I pictured being able to visit Mom every day.
We were already shuttling back and forth to Seattle constantly. I asked Susan what she would think about moving there full-time. We started talking about marriage, too. It felt like the right time, so I proposed to her. We started to plan an August wedding. We sold the place in Malibu. And along with our toddler and an aging yellow lab, the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. McKagan moved to Seattle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Those first few months in Seattle in 1999 were an exciting time. Grace had just passed eighteen months and was building up a vocabulary. I started counting the words she used and quickly hit one hundred. We saw my mom nearly every day. Together with Mom and my uncle John—my mom’s brother, a doctor, and sober since the early 1980s—I tried to figure out what I wanted to study when I started at Seattle U—which now felt like an inevitability. Finally I decided on my goal: the undergraduate business program at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.
Then one afternoon in April 1999, I was driving to my mom’s place with Susan and Grace. We had just stopped to pick up some lunch for her at Taco Time. My phone rang.
Mom had died.
What? I just spoke to her this morning! This can’t be!
Mom had been battling Parkinson’s for a long time, but the doctors thought she had a lot of life ahead of her. Anyone who has lost a parent knows the huge and bottomless hole left yawning in the lives of the children. For a while at first, it was tough to curb some habits—I would instantly reach for the phone to call her every time Grace used a new word, for instance. Mom, guess what Grace just said …
My mother’s death had a huge impact on me. Her sage advice and calm demeanor helped not only me but dozens of my friends—and even kids who were random strangers to me. I’ll never forget coming home on various occasions after I’d left the family house to find bedraggled punk kids sitting with my mom, talking over a cup of tea about whatever was eating at them. That sort of generosity of spirit was important for me. Always had been, and I hoped it always would be.
Her well-lived life