It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [2]
Then I got into music. The early punk-rock movement in Seattle was pretty minuscule, so we all knew one another and played in one another’s bands. I was only fourteen when I started playing drums, bass, and guitar in various bands, and I went on tour with the Fastbacks at a time when other kids in my class were eating cotton candy and dreaming of the day they’d be old enough to get their driver’s licenses. I continued to drink a ton of beer and to experiment with LSD, mushrooms, and coke.
Are these kids taking mushrooms?
No.
Cocaine?
No.
Then, sometime in 1982, as the music scene became bigger and a recession hit Seattle, we all noticed a huge influx of heroin and pills. Addiction suddenly skyrocketed within my circle of friends, and death by overdose became almost commonplace. I witnessed my first overdose when I was eighteen. I saw the first love of my life wither away because of smack and one of my bands implode because of it. By the time I was twenty-three, two of my best friends had died from heroin overdoses.
Heroin?
No.
Thank God.
These kids aren’t doing drugs or drinking. No telltale scents or dilated pupils out here.
My mind races on to other activities I had gotten into by Grace’s age.
My best friends and I started hot-wiring cars in middle school. Car theft led to breaking and entering. I remember breaking into a church one night in hopes of getting some microphones for my band. My liquid courage at that age had no conscience. When I couldn’t find any microphones, I swiped the Communion chalices to use as pimp cups for my cocktails. That crime made the papers.
Any of these kids stealing cars?
No.
I saw all these kids arrive. Their parents dropped them off. None of them arrived on their own.
Oh, God, what about…?
I was introduced to sex in ninth grade. The girl was older—I was playing music among an older set of people. The thing about that first time, though, is that I got the clap. Of course, I couldn’t just stroll up to my mom at thirteen and announce that I had something wrong with my penis. Luckily for me, somebody in this older group of friends steered me to a free clinic run by Catholic nuns. The experience was not cool at all. Nope. It scared the hell out of me. Still, after a three-day dose of low-grade antibiotics, I was gonorrhea-free.
But these kids are not having sex. In fact, these kids’ hands aren’t even wandering. No, these kids are just kissing.
Sex?
No.
This reverie—the run through my mental checklist—takes less than five seconds, but the boy and girl have stopped kissing and are now standing there frozen, their shoulders pulled awkwardly up toward their necks as if to withstand the bluster they expect to come their way.
I take a deep breath.
“Sorry,” I say.
I nod and quickly retreat back into the house.
PART ONE
KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
CHAPTER ONE
I’ve known a lot of junkies. Many of these addicts have either died or continue to live a pitiful existence to this day. With many of these same people, I personally witnessed a wonderful lust for life as we played music together as kids and looked toward the future. Of course, no one sets out to be a junkie or an alcoholic.
Some people can experiment in their youth and move on. Others cannot.
When Guns N’ Roses began to break into the public consciousness, I was known as a big drinker. In 1988, MTV aired a concert in which Axl introduced me—as usual—as Duff “the King of Beers” McKagan. Soon after this, a production company working on a new animated series called me to ask if they could use the name “Duff” for a brand of beer in the show. I laughed and said of course, no problem. The whole thing sounded like a low-rent art project or something—I mean, who made cartoons for adults? Little did I know that the show would become The Simpsons and that within a few years I would start to see Duff beer glasses and gear everywhere we toured.
Still, given what I’d