It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [16]
Soon I was bringing girls home, cockroaches be damned. Once I even hosted the hostess of the Black Angus. She was definitely not used to vermin-infested apartments. But, as I found with other women who came over, she either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice. I guess it was, if not exactly romantic, at least an expected part of the rock-and-roll milieu—and everyone knew I was in L.A. to make music.
I also found a gig playing with the Michael McMahon band, a Tommy Tutone–like pop group with regular club gigs. It gave me a chance to work on my bass chops—and they even paid me. I was playing clubs and meeting people. I was observing, looking for my opening.
Things were going so well, in fact, that I began to have grand illusions of being there in L.A. for a reason. It steeled my resolve to find the right group of musicians with whom to push toward something special.
By then the local punk community knew I was in town, too. One day I picked up the phone at my apartment and the guitar player from the Mentors was on the line.
“Hey, Duff, it’s Sickie Wifebeater. El Duce wants you to join the Mentors.”
The Mentors called their music “rape rock.” El Duce was the drummer and sang. He played with dildos. Every song was about sodomy.
“I’m here to offer you a welcome call,” Sickie continued. And I was thinking, How do I get out of this?
Chuck Biscuits, the drummer from D.O.A., Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks (and later Danzig and Social Distortion) called me, too. He’d been my favorite drummer since I was a kid. He and the guitar player from M.I.A. had me come down to Long Beach so the three of us could play together.
Fuck, I’m playing with Chuck Biscuits!
But I soon learned that what they were doing wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t going to join a band with Chuck Biscuits just to play with Chuck Biscuits, even though I idolized him. Just as I wasn’t going to be in a band with Slash and Steven just to do it—it was all too comfortable.
CHAPTER SIX
Early in high school, I embraced the exciting new punk-rock scene that had recently hit Seattle. Together with my friend Andy, I started going to shows and slam-dancing among the other scruffy kids in basements, garages, and nearly derelict downtown buildings. Andy and I practiced our instruments, listened to albums that got passed around the scene, and tried to put together bands. In the daylight hours, I would take the bus anywhere and everywhere that I had to be for band practices or various jobs I held. But the buses stopped running at midnight—and it being Seattle and all, it was always raining and usually cold. There had to be a better way to get home than trudging along on foot for miles.
Andy and I had heard of a simple and easy way to trip the ignition on pre-1964 VW Bugs. It was typical of the stuff middle-school boys talked about and dreamed about. One night Andy and I decided to put that knowledge to the test. It was 2 a.m., and we were stuck without a ride home at a punk-rock party deep in the Ballard section of town. It was raining. Andy and I got only about ten blocks into our seven-mile walk when we came across a 1963 Bug.
Hmm, what do you say we, um, borrow this Bug and drive ourselves the rest of the way home?
It all seemed innocent enough at first. We clumsily broke in a window with one of our boots. The hot-wiring trick worked. But once we got the car started, we realized that neither one of us knew how to drive a car, let alone one with a clutch. We found out that first gear can indeed get you from point A to point B, seven miles away, albeit slowly.
Andy and I had a dangerous new piece of information: we no longer had to wait until we were sixteen years old to have access to a car. We began to hone our tactics