It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [53]
We played at the Whisky again on August 23, a month after a “Farewell to Hollywood” show at the Troubadour. Still, it’s hard to imagine the label people were too upset, because we debuted two new songs in concert that night, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Mr. Brownstone.”
We continued to take high-profile opening slots for national tours—I suppose Geffen saw those gigs as different from shows in a club milieu, as we were getting in front of new audiences. We played with Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Alice Cooper. The night of the Alice Cooper gig, Axl showed up late again and then was unable to get into the venue. Izzy and I sang. At the time it was almost funny—though we were definitely pissed, too, and we absolutely trashed the dressing room. We traded some words with Axl when we found him in the parking lot afterward, but at the end of the day the situation lacked much in the way of consequences. We did the show, we got paid, and the crowd was there to see Alice anyway. That was that. For now.
Probably the most memorable show of this sort took place on Halloween, 1986. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were just starting their rise as a national act, and the Dickies were headlining a show at Ackerman Hall at UCLA, and we opened. We still had yet to enter the studio. We were feuding with Geffen about whether we had enough songs to warrant recording, and we still hadn’t found a producer we liked. We reached a compromise with the label to put out a limited edition “bootleg” EP, Live! Like a Suicide, and we had finished it just before this show. That night we felt like we were finally making some forward motion.
The Dickies were still a big draw then and, aside from Social Distortion, pretty much the last band standing from the original wave of L.A. punk rock. For me, the cool thing about this show was that Black Flag’s Henry Rollins watched our entire set from the wings of the stage and came up to us afterward and told us how much he liked our band. I considered him the most credible guy in rock, and he had a reputation as a guy who didn’t mince words. He definitely wouldn’t fawn over a band just for the sake of doing so. And we got the thumbs-up. Kick ass!
It turned out he had seen us once before. The year before, someone in Black Flag’s crew had dragged him to some Hollywood club to see a couple glam bands. Apparently we had opened the show. Rollins described the night in his journal, published years later as Art to Choke Hearts: “The opening band was called Guns and Roses and they blew the headliners off so hard it was pathetic.”
And then we met Mike Clink. He had produced a couple of Triumph records. I hated Triumph. But Clink loved GN’R and had seen us live a few times. He said he would come down and record us for nothing and convince us with his recording. When we got together, he said a cool thing about how the microphone picks up the sound and it goes through a cord and onto a tape—it was his way of saying he didn’t want to change us, couched in producer-philosophy speak. He did a playback and said, “This is how I think your record should sound.” And it was basically us live. And I immediately thought, That’s exactly right.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With my favorite punk bands, the bass was the loudest thing and led the way. And now as Mike Clink started to produce the songs that would make up Appetite, the bass was the loudest, roundest thing on the recordings. It had a lot of space. And it wasn’t on the outside or underneath the way it was on a lot of records back then—Clink had it right in the middle.
We were pretty disciplined about the sessions, but outside the recording studio it was business as usual in our world—partying, fighting, getting into scraps with the police. Half the band slept at the studio