It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [27]
So by the middle of 1984, I had lost my long-term girlfriend, my best friend, and my main band to smack. A lot of my other friends and musical mentors—like Kim from the Fastbacks—were strung out, too. In fact, almost everyone I had so much fun discovering music with seemed to be strung out.
I was still having panic attacks, and I was worried I might have a serious disease: the year before I’d had a tumor removed from my chest, and though it was benign, I was sure there were going to be more. Taken together, the future—with drugs encroaching from all sides—didn’t look so bright. I was also starting to drink heavily as a coping mechanism. So much so that my boss at the Union Lake Café had a talk with me about it. It wasn’t that I was drinking on the job, but he could tell I was drinking every night. I guess I reeked of booze when I got to work.
I had been at Lake Union Café almost two years. Two things made it a great job: we listened to music in the back, and there were possibilities to advance. My first few months I had worked as a dishwasher, scraping out muffin tins and cake pans like I’d done at Schumacher’s. Once I proved a hard and dependable worker, however, one of the chefs had taken me under his wing and taught me some of the simple techniques—making breads, dipping strawberries. The boss took notice of my willingness to learn and started to test me. One day after work he asked me to take the next day off and show up at midnight instead. Midnight? Those were baker’s hours! I showed up the following night and they announced that I was now a baker’s apprentice. And the boss gave me a raise!
I had mastered Black Forest cakes and various mousses. I could work with marzipan and filo dough. My raspberry tarts with almond-crust lattice tops were becoming works of art. I even had business cards: Duff McKagan, Pastry Chef.
One of my buddies at the restaurant was a guy named Bruce Pavitt, who had moved up from Olympia the year before. He had started a music column called “Sub Pop” in the weekly Rocket. He told me that summer he had decided to start a record label and put out a single, following through on a dream. He already had a name for his label: he was going to call it Sub Pop, after his column.
An unpleasant thought began to churn in my already agitated mind: Was I at risk of surrendering my dream?
Much as I enjoyed baking, I wasn’t approaching my job at Lake Union Café as a potential career. To become a head pastry chef and make real money, you had to have your own recipes. I wasn’t collecting and perfecting my own recipes, I was just executing other people’s. But with my bands foundering and my friends falling like flies to heroin, what exactly was I doing?
I still had a dream, a dream of finding a team of like-minded musicians who wanted to push the envelope musically, and who were willing to put in the work it would take to do that. And, of course, ultimately I would have loved one day to be able to make a living playing music. It dawned on me that it was time to begin thinking about a way I could start fresh musically and personally.
I cast about for new avenues—avenues not already dimmed by the dark shadow of heroin—and started to expand my social circle. One night, I ended up hanging out with a guy named Donner. I vaguely recognized him from the periphery of the punk scene, but that night we found we had a lot of stuff in common—most important, a growing distaste for the way heroin was killing our relationships with close friends. Donner was just then opening a club called the Grey Door in Pioneer Square. His club quickly became my favorite hangout.