It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [31]
I called Kim Warnick of the Fastbacks from the gas station. Our first gig in Seattle was opening for them. I began to explain the situation. Actually I had to go back further and fill her in on the lineup change that had taken place since I set up the show.
“So Izzy, Axl, and I convinced Slash—”
“Izzy, Axl, Slash—and Duff,” she said. “What kind of names are those?”
“Well, there is a guy named Steven.”
She said it would be no problem for us to use the Fastbacks’ gear if Danny wasn’t able to get up there in time. Okay, that part was taken care of and now it was time to find a ride, someone willing to transport five guys and their guitars—a tall order for sure.
We knew it was going to be tough to hitchhike in such a big group. To make clear the magnitude of the task at hand, I should add that even though I was in my full-length leather pimp coat, I was not the most menacing-looking among us. Even someone who’d be willing to stop for one bedraggled rocker would never take us all. So we decided to try to catch a ride with a northbound trucker. Truckers had those big empty sleeper cabs and would surely love to have some company, right? Someone to talk to on that long and lonely stretch of I-5 that runs up through California’s agricultural outback.
We approached several truck drivers and finally found one willing to give us a lift as far as Medford, Oregon, in exchange for our pooled cash. That was his end destination and for us it was six hundred miles closer to our first out-of-town gig. It was a win for both parties: he would get thirty-seven bucks and we would be heading north at highway speeds.
It was obvious right from the start that this particular trucker was a speed-freak, and that our thirty-seven dollars would be used to supplement his habit. He had probably already been up for a few days, and riding with him in that state in a huge semitruck was a risky endeavor. Fuck it. We were on a mission. Do or die, we were going to make it to Seattle.
I was hoping Kim would spread the word in Seattle that we had broken down and were on the road without a car. Maybe someone would be willing to come down to Portland to pick us up if we made it that far on our own. For now, we piled into the eighteen-wheeler, guitars and all. The other four guys climbed into the sleeper cab. It was tight. I rode shotgun in the passenger seat up front.
The guy couldn’t believe our story.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You guys are fucking hitchhiking to a gig—a thousand miles away?”
“Yep,” I said.
“And you don’t have any equipment—or even any food?”
“Well, yeah, but our equipment …”
“I don’t mean to sound like a prick, but, I mean, can’t you play anywhere in Los Angeles?”
I tried to explain the swashbuckling magic of playing to strangers, in strange places, us-against-them, us-against-the-world … winning over listeners a few at a time.
He shrugged.
The drug-induced sleep deprivation started to take its toll on our driver about two hundred miles into the drive. By the time we hit Sacramento in the morning, he said he needed to rest his eyes and clear his head of the speed demons. It was okay with me. I had been talking with the dude for this first part of the ride and noticed that he kept looking into his sideview mirrors and sort of jumping around in his seat. This kind of stuff happens when you don’t sleep for several days. I had a little bit of experience with speed from my teenage years, enough to know what was happening to the driver.
Sacramento sits at the top of the arid central California valley—the area became a center of agriculture only with the aid of intense irrigation. When it’s hot in the valley, Sacramento always has the highest temperatures. Our venture into the valley coincided with an absolutely scorching heat wave. Now, for some reason, the driver stopped in front of the state capitol building.
“All