It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [49]
Splitting future publishing royalties caused a real clash. In the old days, with Rodgers and Hammerstein and other writing teams of the American songbook tradition, one person did music and one did lyrics. But songwriting didn’t work that way for most bands by the 1980s—and certainly not for our band. Guns wasn’t one of those bands where one person wrote all the songs. Or even a band where two people collaborated on the songs, like the Stones. We had done everything together—and in so many different ways. We found ourselves arguing about things we’d never had to deal with before: No, I wrote that part; no, I wrote that part. Everyone had his own version of how things had gone down. It got heated for about a week as we tried to hash it all out. Since it was so difficult to say who had done what with our songs, we finally agreed to split everything equally across the board. Our lawyer enshrined it in writing—and thank God for that.
After all the liquid lunches, Chrysalis offered the biggest advance, something like $400,000. We weren’t going to go with Chrysalis—like most of the record companies, they wanted to soften us up, both musically and imagewise. Geffen’s offer was much smaller, $250,000. But Tom Zutaut, the A&R guy pursuing us on Geffen’s behalf, was saying all the right things about how we should be produced. He got it.
Tom said we would have absolute artistic freedom at Geffen, and that was the clincher for us—but only after it was in writing. Our lawyer took care of that, too. Our songs were by far the most important thing to us—worth far more than the extra money offered by labels not willing to give us free rein. No one was going to tell us how to make our record.
Every step of the way I was thinking, Nobody can ever take this away from us—we will have been signed by a major label. Getting a major-label deal was considered massive, life changing.
There was no big fanfare when we finally signed a six-record deal on March 26, 1986. We never even looked at one another and said anything like, “Holy fuck!” We took $75,000 of the advance up front, divided it by five ($15,000 for each of us), and took half of each of our shares ($7,500) immediately. We had our new accountants sock the other half away to pay for personal expenses as we recorded our debut album. The balance of the advance, $175,000, would be administered by the accountants to cover legitimate band costs and the making of the album.
While the ink was still wet on the contract with Geffen, we rented a cheap rehearsal space out in Glendale, near the Burbank line. We had to get out of Gardner for various reasons, but we were careful not to go to SIR in Hollywood or some similarly expensive place. Our new space was in an old run-down shopping center—now long gone—called the Golden Mall. There was a stage. We had to move our gear out every day. It wasn’t ours twenty-four hours a day with a lock or anything—we didn’t have that kind of money. Our room at the Golden Mall is where the checks were delivered to us. Slash and I took our checks to a bank out in Glendale. We didn’t open accounts; we went in and asked to cash the checks. That raised alarms, I guess. They had to call a bunch of people, including the accountants at Geffen. It didn’t help that Slash’s check was made out to “Stash.”
Axl didn’t get a bank account, either. Like Slash, he had yet to change his name officially and refused to take out an account in any name other