It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [26]
Rob and Tracii were skeptical about the idea from the start. I guess they weren’t sure whether to take the leap of faith necessary to leave home with nothing but your bandmates and wits to depend on. And just a few weeks before we were to leave, they broke the news: they weren’t up for a no-budget road trip. Not knowing where we would sleep each night was too much for them. I assured them we’d find places to crash, and anyway, what did it matter—we would be on tour, a concept that to me was pure magic.
It didn’t matter. First Rob and then Tracii backed out.
We had ten days before we were scheduled to leave for the tour.
“Don’t worry,” I told Izzy and Axl, who were fully committed and for whom hitting the road had the same mythic appeal it had for me. “I know a couple guys we can bring in.”
CHAPTER TEN
By early 1984, my band Ten Minute Warning was becoming the biggest punk act in the Northwest. Back then, to make two hundred bucks for a gig put you on top of the heap. We sometimes made $250 or $300. A weekly alternative newspaper, the Rocket, featured us on its cover, and the Seattle Times, one of the big dailies, wrote a piece about us. We were headlining concerts in Seattle and playing real shows elsewhere with good bands—we had toured with the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., and our heroes, Black Flag. We had broken down what had always been an impenetrable wall between punk and metal when we co-headlined a show at a roller-skating rink—where all the suburban metal acts played—with a band called Culprit. Our songs had made it onto some punk compilations. And in early 1984 we signed with Alternative Tentacles, the record label run by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. They had us recording demos for an album.
The band had evolved from the Fartz. I’d been the drummer at one point and was still close to the Fartz guitarist, a guy named Paul Solger. Paul and I had taken road trips in his ’65 Mustang—a gift from his parents—to see Johnny Thunders in Portland and Vancouver. Eventually, Paul and I began to write songs together on the side—both of us on guitars—and we decided to put together a new band. I switched to rhythm guitar and we recruited drummer Greg Gilmore, who went on to play in Mother Love Bone, and bassist David Garrigues, a local skateboard legend. Our choice for singer was a guy named Steve Verwolf, a dude we all knew from the punk scene. Steve was definitely a visionary. His hair was long and he wore black leather hip-hugger pants and little else. Onstage he was a man possessed, mixing Iggy Pop–like antics with the doom and gloom of Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy and the shamanic power of Jim Morrison. By that stage I’d formed or played in a lot of bands, but up to then there had always been weak links in the bands. Ten Minute Warning felt different.
We created a new sound, too. By then a lot of us in the punk scene were getting fed up with paint-by-numbers hardcore. Ten Minute Warning’s solution was to slow things way down from hard-core speeds and add a sludgy, heavy psychedelic element. Black Flag’s singer, Henry Rollins, told us we sounded like a punk-rock version of Hawkwind—the 1970s British band that launched the career of Lemmy Kilmister, who later formed Motörhead. We took this as high praise. Ten Minute Warning had real character and dimension. We had begun to share the stage with other bands also coming out of the hardcore scene and striving to do something new, like the Replacements, a Minneapolis band we played with when they came to Seattle. We were getting better and better.
Paul, who was always dabbling in something, had gone through a few phases of heroin use. But each time he had pulled himself out of it before getting strung out for too long. In fact, I thought he was out of the woods. But I remember vividly the first time he showed