It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [4]
I quit coke that day and drank myself through two brutal weeks of serious depression.
Even though the effects of my drinking were more noticeable without the coke, drinking proved harder to rein in, much less kick. These days I know what having the “DTs” actually means. The clinical definition of delirium tremens is a severe psychotic condition occurring in some persons with chronic alcoholism, characterized by uncontrollable trembling, vivid hallucinations, severe anxiety, sweating, and sudden feelings of terror. All I knew then was that it wasn’t cool. I felt really sick. My body was falling apart so badly that I looked like I was getting radiation treatment.
Throughout the Use Your Illusion tour I had recorded songs on my own, ducking into studios here and there. This project had served largely as a way to kill time I would otherwise have spent drinking, and I didn’t know what the demos were for, really. One of them—my version of Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”—ended up on GN’R’s Spaghetti Incident, the album of cover songs issued just after the end of the Use Your Illusion tour.
I played a bit of everything over the course of the sessions—drums, guitar, bass. I sang, too, and if you listen to the album, it’s clear I wasn’t able to breathe through my nose on some songs. Then at some point during the tour, a record label employee who was out on the road with us asked where I kept disappearing to on off days. I told him. When Tom Zutaut, who had signed Guns to Geffen records, caught wind of the demos, he asked me if I would like a solo deal. Geffen, he said, could release the tracks as an album. I knew he was probably being mercenary about it—by this time Nirvana and Pearl Jam had broken, and Zutaut probably figured leveraging my Seattle roots and punk connections could help the label reposition GN’R.
But I didn’t care. To me it was a chance to realize a dream. I had grown up idolizing Prince, who played over twenty instruments on his debut album, which featured the amazing credit line “written, composed, performed, and recorded by Prince.”
Cool, my own record done the way Prince did it—largely on my own—getting distributed around the world.
Geffen rushed it out as Believe in Me in the summer of 1993, just as the Illusion tour was wrapping. Axl talked it up on stage during the last few gigs. And I even started to promote it while Guns was still in Europe—at a signing in Spain, so many people showed up that the street outside the record store had to be shut down by police in riot gear.
I had scheduled a solo tour that would start immediately after GN’R’s last shows—two final gigs in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1993. My solo tour would send me first to play showcases in San Francisco, L.A., and New York, and then to open the Scorpions’ arena tour around Europe and the UK. Returning to L.A. from Argentina, I joined the group of friends and acquaintances I’d arranged to back me on the tour. They had already started rehearsing before I got home. Together we did whirlwind preparations for the tour.
Axl heard I was planning to go back out on tour. He called me.
“Are you fucking crazy? You should not go back out on the road right now. You are insane even to think about it.”
“It’s the only thing I know how to do,” I told him. “I play music.”
I also knew that if I stayed at home, it would probably devolve into more drug insanity. I didn’t have any illusions about getting sober, but at least out on the road