It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [128]
Backstage at the Key Club, I had my business statistics textbook under my arm and tried to cram while the other acts played. The crowd lost it when we came out and started our set with “It’s So Easy.” By the end, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith got swept up in the excitement and hopped onstage with us to close out the benefit singing “Mama Kin” and “Paradise City.” It was a great night of rock and roll that has stayed with me ever since. I let myself forget for a little while the early-morning flight and the exam awaiting me back in Seattle. That was tomorrow, and tonight we had just conquered. Everyone who was there said the same thing, and I believe it to be true: Randy Castillo was in the room smiling down on us that night.
My flight departed on time and I got through the exam, but now Slash, Matt, and I faced a bona fide dilemma. It felt too good together not to continue after that gig. We didn’t have any new material yet, and had only the foggiest of ideas about what we might do, but the sheer power of us playing together was unmistakable and we knew that if we worked hard, the rest would somehow come. Same as it ever was, really.
Any lingering reluctance to continue had to do with a funny thing that happens after you’ve been in a popular band like GN’R—the personal stakes are higher for anything you do together with those same guys. It went unspoken, but I’m sure there was a tinge of fear about forming a band without Axl and having it fail. Then we might be dismissed as having been just the sidemen of a lead singer—sidemen who couldn’t hack it on their own. Rumors that we were going to start a band without Axl had already circulated in 1996. We heard murmurs of “What do they think they’re doing, trying to replace Axl?” One thing will always be certain, Axl is irreplaceable. Even now, in 2002, we figured we’d get slammed as GN’R–without–Axl. The difference now was that I didn’t care. I’d been through way too much to let a few threads on Internet chat sites dictate the course of my life.
The search for a singer was on.
At that point, my band Loaded had been going for about two years and our latest lead guitar player was Dave Kushner. Not only had Dave played in the band Wasted Youth, but he and Slash had gone to high school together. Small world. I suggested to Slash and Matt that Dave might be a good fit as second guitar in our new band. He came down to rehearsal one day and got the gig. Just like that. Izzy was coming around a lot, too. I think he thought we could use a helping hand; plus he got to hang out with his old buddies. Whatever his motivation, Izzy gave us a nice spark from the get-go. I had watched and learned from Izzy from the moment we met in L.A. years prior—he was the quiet tough guy in a town that could have eaten me alive, and I learned to survive with his help. Izzy and I rarely ruminated about the past, but now that I was sober, I watched and learned from him again—now with a completely different perspective on survival. I found he was still a guy I looked up to. My sober friend. My old friend. It was something of a miracle that he had made it out of the darkness during all that madness, and he had become a guy who could see the humor in it all.
Dave Kushner was understandably a bit wary that Izzy was going to steal his gig, but I knew Izzy was just coming around to play some music and that a long-term band project complete with a lead singer was never again going to work for him. He already had a nice solo career that he could start and stop as he pleased and that suited him just fine, thanks. I totally