It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [37]
I had been seeing a girl named Kat for a while at that stage, and we decided to move in together. I moved out of Orchid Street to another ground-floor place (they were always the cheapest) on El Cerrito, which I shared with her. The apartment was definitely a move up because of the cross streets: instead of being between Hollywood and Franklin, this building was half a block up the hill from Franklin. Lots of strippers lived on the block, but there were no longer hookers plying their trade outside my window. And I could leave my gear at home without constantly worrying it would get stolen.
When Kat and I moved in there, I didn’t have much more than a mattress. This little troll of a guy came out as I was moving in and helped me carry the few things I had. His name was West Arkeen, and he lived in the apartment next to ours. Turned out he was one of those guys studying at the Musicians Institute around the corner from my previous apartment. West was one tough motherfucker. He was one funny motherfucker. And he quickly became valuable not only for his friendship but for his song-writing.
He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to play in a band, but he was an incredible guitar player. He ended up writing songs with several of us. He had a hand in an unreleased song called “Sentimental Movie,” and in “Yesterdays” and “The Garden,” which eventually turned up on Use Your Illusion. All of those songs were written there on El Cerrito together with various members of our band. West also showed me open-E tuning, an alternative way of tuning a guitar so it plays an E-major chord when strummed with no fingers on the frets. That’s why he got a songwriting credit on “It’s So Easy”—without open-E tuning, that song wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t know alternate tunings existed.
Kat and I had heard that an eccentric old musician lived above us, but we didn’t care. We weren’t the best neighbors, either, what with Axl, Izzy, Slash, and Steven dropping by, cranking up music all the time, drinking, singing, and strumming with West. But the guy upstairs turned out to be none other than Sly Stone, whose music Steven and I jammed to almost every day, working on our groove. He started to give me cassettes of cracked-out demos he made on a four-track in his apartment. Then he began to use my place as a sort of psychic bomb shelter. It didn’t go over too well with Kat.
I’d be next door at West’s place, working on some lyrics, and I’d hear her cursing and then she’d scream down the hall.
“Duff, that motherfucker is smoking crack in our bathroom again!”
That was one of those pellucid moments in life. I watched the illusions I had about one of my idols evaporate before my eyes. Was the great Sly Stone living the good life, jamming in a home studio tucked away somewhere in his sprawling mansion? Nope, he was sneaking past my girlfriend to smoke crack in my bathroom.
Our first gig back in L.A. was on June 28, 1985, at the Stardust Ballroom, out east of Highway 101. They had a club night called Scream. It had started as a Goth night; Bauhaus and Christian Death were the most popular acts the DJ played. We were at the bottom of a four-band bill and had to go on stage at 8 p.m. The next show was on the Fourth of July at Madame Wong’s East, a restaurant in Chinatown that hosted a lot of punk-rock shows at night. Guns played second on a four-band bill that night. Only three people showed up for our set, including Kat and West.
The gig at Madame Wong’s was like many of our first shows in that we were booked alongside punk bands. Early in our career we played shows with Social Distortion, the Dickies, and Fear. I guess at first we must have been perceived as that—punk. But the cool thing about our band, and what set us apart from the beginning, was that we couldn’t be pigeonholed. Sometimes this could work against a band. If you weren’t punk enough for the punk-rock set, or metal enough for the heavy-metal crowd, you risked ending up without gigs. But with the addition of Slash and Steven, we somehow seemed to capture the best of both worlds.