It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [36]
Another new band called Jane’s Addiction was using Nicky Beat’s space, too. They had an interesting rhythm duo made up of Eric Avery on bass and Stephen Perkins on drums. I suppose competition makes for a better “product,” and Steven Adler and I would go watch Jane’s Addiction play gigs whenever possible once we got to know them. It made us better—and I think we made them better, too.
As Steven and I crafted our sound as a rhythm section, I got to know him a lot better as a person, too, and quickly realized I couldn’t have asked for a better musical partner or a better friend. I also realized that, as with all the members of the band, what you saw with Steven was not necessarily what you got. Despite his metal-dude hair and the fact that he’d go off and see Leatherwolf shows, he liked nothing more than to listen to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
One night when we were out together, Steven said to me, “You know, all I want in life is to make enough money one day so I can have a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack around—all the time.”
I laughed.
“We’ll never make that kind of money,” I said.
And besides, I thought to myself, if we ever do, you’ll look back at that dream as nothing more than a teenage joke.
The Seattle road trip marked the start of a period of almost round-the-clock interaction between us five Guns members. We would go see bands together, play acoustic guitars together, learn to play as a unit, work on songs together, and post flyers together for the increasing number of gigs we started to book. Of course, we got into a ton of mischief together, too, and drew and redrew new lines in the sand as we pushed toward the outer edge of survivable behavior. Sex was blissfully plentiful and carefree; booze and drugs remained inextricably tied to partying, not coping; and rock and roll became the redemptive raison d’être of the next two years of our lives in a way it never had been in any of my other bands and, unfortunately, in a way it would cease to be in Guns a few years later.
Our social circle soon included a group of recently transplanted New Yorkers who moved out west to—I always suspected—escape legal problems. “Red” Ed, Petey, and Del melded nicely into our lifestyle, which included twenty-four-hour alcohol consumption, scoring any available drugs (I was starting to warm up to various kinds of pills at this point), sundry debaucheries, and plenty of Motörhead, Rolling Stones, and Sly and the Family Stone.
In addition to Big Jim, I had been corresponding with Eddy since I’d left Seattle, too. It seemed he took my departure as something of a wake-up call. He’d been trying to clean up. He got himself on a methadone plan with the help of his mom. When he got out of a stint in rehab, Eddy’s mom called and asked if he could come down and spend some time with me. She thought it might be a good idea for him to come join me in Hollywood to get away from all of the dealers and junkies up in Seattle.
Eddy flew down and I picked him up at the airport. Over the next few days I guess I was too busy rehearsing to notice much beyond the work right in front of me. I didn’t pick up on the fact that Ed had gone off methadone and slipped back into a nice heroin run right there in my tiny apartment. It took about four days. Junkies can always find other junkies. And in this case it happened to be our rhythm guitar player that Ed found. I just didn’t think Eddie would put it together so fast. I couldn’t deal with him or his drug use at this point, and I told him that he would have to leave. Over the next few years, horror stories trickled down from Seattle about how strung out Eddy was. I heard that someone Ed knew well was murdered. I heard Ed was on the run. Hearing things like that made me put on my blinders even tighter and forge