It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [24]
With all that driving around town, I began to see how segregated L.A. was. A lot of my colleagues would refuse to make “deliveries” to Watts. That blew me away. In Seattle, there just weren’t places people refused to go. Seattle had a “black area”—the Central District—but things weren’t delineated nearly as starkly as they were in L.A. I went to school in the Central District. In L.A., people who lived in Hollywood didn’t leave Hollywood, people in the Jewish enclave of Fairfax didn’t leave Fairfax, people in Watts didn’t leave Watts and didn’t even seem to know where Hollywood was. Fear swathed the city.
One day in February 1985, as I was coming home from work, I ran into Izzy. He told me he was starting a new band with a couple guys from L.A. Guns, the band Slash had taken me to see back in October. Axl Rose, the vocalist from the version of L.A. Guns I had seen, had grown up with Izzy in Indiana, and had followed him out to L.A. Axl had just moved into a place on our low-rent high-crime block of Orchid Street, this buzzing hive of prostitution and drug dealing. Izzy’s new band also featured Tracii Guns on lead guitar. They were calling the new group Guns N’ Roses.
Almost immediately the new group parted ways with their first bass player. Izzy came to me at that point.
“Don’t you play bass?” he asked me.
“I own a bass,” I said. I was getting comfortable playing four strings by then, but I had not come close to developing my own style yet. Fortunately, one of the advantages of being young—I had just turned twenty-one—was fearlessness and unbridled confidence. Not to mention the fact that I no longer had a guitar. At this point it was bass or nothing.
When I showed up at my first GN’R rehearsal in late March, 1985, Axl and I said hi to each other and started joking around about this and that. I liked him right away. Whoever was running the sound then asked Axl to test out the microphone. Axl let out one of his screams, and it was like nothing I had ever heard. There were two voices coming out at once! There’s a name for that in musicology, but all I knew in that instant was that this dude was different and powerful and fucking serious. He hadn’t yet entirely harnessed his voice—he was more unique than great at that point—but it was clear he hadn’t moved out to Hollywood from Indiana for the weather. He was here to stake a claim and show the whole fucking world what he had.
As for Izzy, he wasn’t a great guitar player, but I liked that—both in him and in general. I wasn’t a great guitar player, either. It was a punk thing. One night when we were talking after a rehearsal, Izzy mentioned a band called Naughty Women. It rang a bell.
“I know that band,” I said, trying to place the name. “I think I played a gig on the same bill with them once. Wait, wait, wait. Were they … cross-dressers?”
“Yep,” Izzy said.
He paused.
“I was the drummer,” he said.
Cool, I thought, this guy really was a veteran of the punk-rock club scene. He was the real deal.
Izzy and Axl already had some songs, and the other guys knew them: “Think About You,” “Anything Goes,” “Move to the City,” “Shadow of Your Love,” and “Don’t Cry.” And we did sped-up punk versions of the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Rob Gardner, the drummer, played a double-kick drum set—a metal dude. Tracii was an incredible guitar player, but his sound was also really metal. My initial impression was that he didn’t have the feel I had recognized in Slash. Once again I realized with a sinking feeling that this was not the band I was seeking, not one that could