It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [133]
After about two weeks of this, Susan and the girls came up to our cabin, which was about forty miles away from Joseph’s mountain redoubt. It was Susan’s birthday and I was more than happy to see them all. During the six years I had been with Susan, we lived in a safe bubble that we controlled. We now found ourselves in uncharted territory. Susan had my back and even felt some responsibility—after all, she was the one who had introduced me to Scott. Yet she and I had never had a conversation about the possible consequences of working with him. Suddenly her man was gone and she had to take care of our kids on her own—and shit, this was even before recording and touring started.
I continued to get daily calls from L.A.
“Do we have a singer?”
“Should we book studio time?”
I started to see glimpses of hope with Scott up on top of that mountain. Scott became so enamored of the area that he asked Joseph if he knew any local real-estate brokers. This from a guy who just weeks earlier was on a drug run for the ages. Crack houses in L.A. now seemed the last thing on his mind. Looking back, we made progress fast.
Slash and Matt were relieved to hear Scott was getting better, but I’m sure they were also still suspicious. I couldn’t blame them. But when we arrived back in L.A., they saw with their own eyes the results of our Man Camp. Here we were at the rehearsal space with an ass-kicking mountain man, practicing martial arts and meditating before band practices. Scott seemed inspired and focused now. He started to listen to more of the music that Slash, Matt, Dave, and I had written over the past year. We would sort of spoon-feed him two or three songs at a time; to throw everything at him at once would have been overwhelming given the fact that we had something like fifty-five songs by this point.
With the band lineup finally solidified and “Set Me Free” still on the radio, every major record label now wanted a piece of us. One of the people who wanted to schedule a meeting with us was the same executive who had dropped me from Geffen without so much as a phone call back in 1999. He was president of another company now and apparently didn’t remember the incident. But I did. I told the guys the story. At first, they said we should just cancel the meeting. Then they decided it would be more fun to have him in and fuck with him. He arrived at our rehearsal space and went through his routine, using all the standard industry buzzwords: artistic freedom, artist-focused, personal touch, like a family, blah, blah, blah. Then Scott asked him to talk more about the way he would personally take an interest in the project. Scott listened thoughtfully and then started talking—seemingly off-the-cuff—about a friend who had been dropped one time without a call from the label.
“Look, we know the industry is changing,” Scott said, “but we don’t want to work with people like that.”
The guy took the bait: “No way, I treat my artists like family. That would never happen with me.”
Then Scott dropped the bomb: “That friend was this guy here,” he said, pointing to me, “and you’re the asshole who didn’t have the decency to make the courtesy call. Get the fuck out of here.”
We also flew to New York to meet the legendary Clive Davis. He had helped develop everyone from Janis Joplin to Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé. When Clive Davis said he believed in our band, I was sold. Even guys like us, who had been through it all in this industry, respected Clive. After that, the process was just an exercise as far as I was concerned. I knew we would go with Clive from the very beginning of that summer. Done deal.
Another interesting aspect of these meetings was that I found I did in fact understand the lion’s share of what