It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [29]
To some people, moving a thousand miles might be a big deal. For me, in the end, it was just a way to avoid embarrassment. I was out one night, drunk off my ass, and told a bunch of people I was going to move to L.A. So that was it, decision made. I had to do it now.
My move to L.A. presented immediate dilemmas. My drum kit was a piece of shit and falling apart. Drums were hard to lug around and set up and break down all of the time. Hey, I was a multi-instrumentalist—no drums, no problem. Okay, then, settled: I would sell my kit. I got eighty bucks for it.
I decided I would take a guitar—my killer, black, late-1970s B.C. Rich Seagull. But I sold my Marshall combo amp to help pool money for the move. A new amp would be easy to pick up once I got down there, found a job, and settled in. And anyway, I doubted guitar would be the best way to break into the L.A. scene: 1984 was the biggest year yet for Van Halen, and the band’s hometown was awash in guitar players inspired by Eddie Van Halen’s ornate, light-speed shredding. I doubted people in Los Angeles were going to understand someone coming down and playing guitar like Johnny Thunders or like Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols—raw and fucked up, with the song at the center, not the solo. Of course, I wanted to do that Johnny Thunders stuff, but I thought first I would need to find the right people. And I figured the best way to do that—and to get a gig at all—was to make bass my main instrument. If nothing else, I could get my foot in the door and meet people.
A few years earlier I had played bass briefly in the Vains, but I was not what you would call a great player. I had recently been experimenting on bass again and had bought a black Yamaha and a crazy Peavey head with an Acoustic 2x15 cabinet. To anyone who knows gear, this may seem like an odd combination to play bass through, but it had the beginnings of a unique sound. I was searching for my own signature as a bass player, and this gear was a good start.
There were so many kids and kids of kids in the McKagan clan that there wasn’t any drama when I told my family about my plan to bail. The owner of the Lake Union Café understood when I handed in my notice, too. He knew music was what I did. He also respected the work I had done at the café. The head pastry chef wrote a nice reference for me to take along; it would serve me well.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On Friday, May 31, 1985, Slash had a gig at the Country Club with Black Sheep, a band he had recently joined. I had already been thinking that his guitar style would mesh well with Izzy’s. So I took Axl to the show and we talked to Slash. The next day I called Slash and tried to convince him to bring Steven Adler and come by to rehearse with us. They both knew Axl, too, having played a few gigs with him as Hollywood Rose in 1984, not long after Axl arrived in L.A. But in the interim there had been some bad blood. Apparently Axl had slept with Slash’s girlfriend. Not only that, but when the singer of Black Sheep figured out the reason for our visit to the show the night before, he was so angry he called Slash’s mom and told her we were drug addicts—a point on which he was only partly right.
Slash was inclined to try it out because Guns seemed more where he wanted to go musically than Black Sheep. His interest in that job was primarily mercenary: it was a place to be plucked from to fill a gap in an established band—the way Ozzy plucked Randy Rhoads from Quiet Riot. But rather than wait around in Black Sheep hoping to get the call to fill in as touring guitarist for KISS or whatever, Slash liked the idea of joining a band with the intention of making its own mark.
Finally Slash and Steven agreed to come to a rehearsal, just days before a previously scheduled June 6 gig at the Troubadour that was supposed to serve as a warm-up for our tour. We met at a space in Silverlake—we rented it