It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [45]
One thing that we knew about ourselves by that point was that Guns was the best and most committed band that any of us had ever been in, and we had become very protective of it. Kim had a storied but checkered past; I had opened for Joan Jett when I was with the Fastbacks shortly before she became a household name with “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” and I knew the stories. We were dubious.
When Kim sensed that we were not going to let him manage us, he came at us from a different angle. He invited us to breakfast at Denny’s on Sunset. Slash, Axl, and I went. Kim said that he wanted to buy the publishing rights to our song “Welcome to the Jungle.” He had a contract with him and a traveler’s check for $10,000. To us, this was big money. But if Kim Fowley was offering this money to us now—if this one song was worth so much money to him—wouldn’t that mean we had something valuable? Shouldn’t we play this out a bit? I think in a weird way, we owed it to Kim that we eventually ended up keeping the publishing rights to our songs when we later signed our record deal. If Kim Fowley thought our music rights were worth something, then by God, they probably were. He could spot this stuff, and we knew it.
Kim intensified his efforts, coming to see us again a few weeks later to offer $50,000. But it didn’t matter. By that time we knew to hold on to anything that was ours. It was all we had and all we believed in.
Like Joan Jett and the Runaways, we were chasing a dream and the world was exciting and wild and fast. We avoided getting involved with people like Kim Fowley not because he wasn’t fascinating and smart, but because by 1985 we had heard lots of stories about bands that had been ripped off. Between what happened to the Runaways—they never really got the shot they deserved and lost control of their name and songs—and the financial straits the members of Aerosmith faced in the early 1980s despite their enormous success in the 1970s, we were familiar with the full spectrum of rock-and-roll pitfalls.
We could see the sharks beginning to circle us, and we were wary.
On January 18, 1986, before our show at the Roxy, a friend ducked his head into the backstage area.
“This fucking gig is sold out!”
When we looked out at the crowd, we still saw the same faces. We knew most of the people in the audience, even after we started selling out venues like this. Del, West Arkeen, Marc Canter, and assorted girlfriends assembled backstage as usual. The big difference? One of my nephews stood in front of the backstage area as “security.”
There were no high fives. And yet I was proud of how far we had come. I had played some big gigs with Ten Minute Warning, and GN’R’s shows in early 1986 had that feeling. Except this was L.A., one of the biggest cities in the world. Still, the members of Guns never looked at one another and said, “Fuck yeah, we rocked it!” We celebrated that kind of stuff onstage—we would be better onstage than in rehearsal. We recognized that there were transcendent moments, but we didn’t need to talk about them. You have this silent relationship as players in a band; it takes all these parts and you have moments—whether it’s between a guitar player and singer, a bassist and drummer, or everyone together. And when you saw that look in the audience—people just blown away—that feedback from the crowd was enough. Especially since we were playing to a lot of the same people, we could see the looks on their faces and feel the electricity when we hit a new high.
Around this time a friend of Izzy’s named Robert John became our “official” band photographer. Robert had shot pictures of another L.A. band, W.A.S.P. His girlfriend, a dominatrix at some club in Hollywood, was the bondage girl in W.A.S.P’s horror-movie-style stage show. Nice girl. I liked her. Robert had come to one of our shows to hang out with Izzy and took a