It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [28]
Donner and I even briefly started a band and I went back to playing drums. It wasn’t a serious endeavor, but it was a blast. Like me, he was a big drinker, and always had a bottle of something nearby. Seattle being Seattle, we would mix whatever we had with really strong, homemade coffee—our version of a speedball, I suppose.
The Grey Door is also where I met the singer Andy Wood. His band Malfunkshun would come over from Bainbridge Island and stay the weekend at the club—it also served as a crash pad. With maybe ten people in the audience, Andy would point to the rafters and yell out, “I want all of you on the left side to say ‘hell,’ and all of you on the right side say ‘yeah,’” just the way his hero Paul Stanley of KISS did in huge arenas. A few years later, his next band, Mother Love Bone, signed a major-label deal and recorded a benchmark EP. Then Andy died of a heroin overdose—only a few days before the band’s full-length album was supposed to be released. A couple of the remaining guys soldiered on with a new singer and took the name Pearl Jam.
Andy and I would talk for hours about music in general and Prince in particular. Purple Rain came out that summer of 1984 and I bought it the day it came out. I had loved 1999 and listened to Prince’s records constantly, either at home on my record player or on cassette on the crappy little boom box I always carried around. A new girlfriend also started making me really cool mixtapes of Parliament, Lakeside, Gap Band, Cameo, and other R&B stuff. Along with Black Flag’s My War, T-Bone Burnett’s Proof Through the Night, the Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock and Roll, and a new album called Two Steps from the Move from the band Hanoi Rocks, this made up the soundtrack of my life during that period of soul-searching.
Prince records had made me realize, too, that being a multi-instrumentalist could open doors. Prince wasn’t so much a solo artist as a one-man-band. Maybe one day I could create records all by myself. I had whisky-and-coffee-induced daydreams of moving somewhere like Hollywood, recording cool Prince-like records, making it big, buying a house, and having Donner and all my friends move down there with me to live happily ever after in a pimped-out punk-rock commune.
Those daydreams took on additional heft when another friend, Joe Toutonghi, suggested I leave Seattle. I had always admired Joe. He picked up on new kinds of music—he was among the first to play me Bauhaus, for instance, and British ska, like Madness and the Specials. He was part of the Jaks, a skateboard crew with members up and down the West Coast. Joe would hop freight trains like an old-fashioned hobo—a skateboard under his arm instead of a stick and bundled handkerchief over his shoulder—just to get out and see other places.
Joe was strung out at this point, too, and he pulled me aside one day and spoke conspiratorially.
“You have to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve squandered my chance. You still have a chance—you are our chance.”
Even though Donner and I were becoming thick as thieves, by the end of the summer of 1984, I began to think that if I didn’t get out of Seattle then, I might never get out at all. A lot of my calculations about where to go were based on practical considerations: my old Ford had a slant-six engine that was ultra-dependable, but it already had 200,000 miles on it. Also, my budget was tight and I had punk contacts and crash pads all the way down the West Coast. And my brother Matt was studying down in Los Angeles. Okay, so things were not exactly pointing toward New York City, which had been my initial thought.
Joe’s last music tip—during the conversation when he urged me to leave town—had been about a new group called the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Los Angeles skate-punk band experimenting with funk sounds. Hmm. I could make it to L.A. in my old car, leapfrogging from crash pad to crash pad, maybe land at my brother’s apartment for a few nights. Beyond that, there was nothing