It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [141]
The same week we appeared on Kimmel, in July 2007, my dad died. I was glad we had made our peace in the last few years of his life; we’d had some good times and many laughs. He’d been a good grandpa, and Grace and Mae definitely benefited from knowing him.
Now I had the honorable duty of being a strong male figure to my own daughters. Being a dad was a daily learning process—a lot of things I supposed would be simple common sense got thrown out the window. I really never had any idea what was in store for me next. I had to be a “man’s man” at times and at other moments I needed to be sensitive and soft. Earlier in life, I had gauged masculinity by how tough someone was in a threatening situation. More recently I’d come to understand that such bravado was usually a mask for fear. My biggest challenge, and the core of what I now saw as true manliness, was being honest with myself and others and being forthright and true in my actions and dealings with my family, friends, and business associates. I didn’t have this shit figured out—and still don’t—but for me, especially after my relapse offered another glimpse of failure, the true essence of manhood was now clear: being a caring husband and father.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Velvet Revolver headed out on tour for the rest of the summer—first through South America with Aerosmith, then across the United States with Alice in Chains. Slash and I had regained our footholds on sobriety, and Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell had also been sober for a couple years by that point. We would meet every day to support one another. It was a perfect situation for Scott to turns things around.
Instead, things fell apart. Scott went back to dabbling in crack and pills. I felt bad for him in a lot of ways. He was a shell of the cool guy I’d gotten to know quite well, and his marriage was falling apart—again. He traveled separately from us and began to show up late and make our crowds wait around, often drawing boos from our fans. Hadn’t I been through this all before? His performances started to suffer; one time he even nodded off right in the middle of a song only to come to again singing the wrong part of the song. The crowd realized and started to heckle him.
Matt Sorum fell off the wagon at this time, too, before eventually regaining sobriety. The backstage areas of the tour quickly became as debauched as they’d been in the old days. This time, however, none of it affected me. I made sure to keep up my routine. And I got the fuck out of there. I had become the proud owner of a black 2006 Harley-Davidson Road King motorcycle and took it with me on the tour. During downtime, I revved it up and roared out of the vicinity of the band, the crew, the entourage—all the craziness.
Alice in Chains drummer Sean Kinney had gotten sober two weeks before the tour started. Over the years, he and I had become good friends and rode our bikes together a lot in Seattle. In fact, he had taught me to ride my big Harley. He and his drum tech, Tavis, also brought their motorcycles along on that tour. When the strippers arrived and the crack rocks were torched at the latest venue, Sean, Tavis, and I just cruised off into another beautiful landscape. As a result, I never felt trapped.
Riding in a state park instead of listening to drums getting tuned all day over a PA system was a good thing indeed. Sometimes we would ride off to have lunch and browse bookstores. It staved off loneliness while also offering new perspectives on places I had been before but never really seen.
During my teens and twenties, I would say that it was a great and genius thing that I did not have a motorcycle. The one time I did get on a bike during that time was at a video shoot for “Don’t Cry.” I asked a cop to let me try his bike. The poor cop was just working the shoot, but he let me take it for a spin. I crashed it. I owed my later epiphany about the pleasures of the motorcycle to Martin Feveyear, a producer who helmed a lot of Loaded recording sessions over the years. When we made the first Loaded record with him in 2001,