It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [56]
We all hung out in the street in front of the Marquee after that show and before and after the next two gigs. We felt awed by our reception.
When we arrived back in the States in early July, nothing was happening for us. We took an opening slot on a tour with the Cult, a British band with Goth roots. They’d had success with “She Sells Sanctuary” off their second album, Love, and beginning in mid-August, they were touring across Canada and the western United States for their third album, Electric. With our record coming out, we would have a small budget for a crew, so Todd Crew and I hatched a plan: he would come out on the Cult tour and be my bass tech. He could make some money working the tour and then return to L.A. and start a new band.
There was still a month or so to kill. Slash went off to meet with merchandising companies in New York City just prior to the U.S. release of Appetite. Todd got a wild and drunken hair up his ass and flew out to New York to join him. Todd thought it’d be a fun last hurrah before he had to sober up a bit to work the tour, I guess. Todd always called me about eight times a day, and this didn’t change when he went to New York. But then the calls stopped. I thought that maybe he’d found some girl and was holed up in her apartment without a phone.
But that wasn’t it.
At three o’clock on a Sunday morning, my phone rang. The sound woke me from a deep sleep. I picked up the phone and heard Todd’s mother’s voice.
“Duff! Please tell me Todd is at your apartment with you. Please tell me he is there.”
“What?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was still rubbing my half-closed eyes.
“Todd is not dead. He can’t be!” she shrieked.
Now I was completely dumbstruck. The New York Police Department’s coroner had called her to tell her that they had her son’s body. He had died of a heroin overdose, the coroner had told her.
It can’t be true. He’ll come bursting through the door any minute now.
I made some frantic calls. It was true: Todd was gone. Gone.
To this day, it is hard to talk or even think about it. At the time all I knew was that two of my best friends had suddenly been washed from this earth in quick succession. First Jim and then Todd. I felt as if I had been left to swim upstream in a world that was getting darker and darker all of the time.
I didn’t know where to turn. Eddy was unavailable. Andy was a thousand miles away. My mom was always on the other end of the phone, but I still felt suddenly lost.
I feel so alone.
I had moved in with my girlfriend Mandy a few months before. Now I asked her to marry me. Premature, for sure. But I needed to try to create something solid, to shore up the foundations of my existence. She said yes.
Guns N’ Roses started the Cult tour in Halifax on August 14, with shows almost every night for a little over a month. Halifax is in Nova Scotia, in the easternmost corner of Canada. Despite everything else, it was an exciting prospect. Nobody in my family had ever been out to Nova Scotia—nobody I knew had ever been out there. I was going to be the first. Every time there was a first like that, I used to think to myself that I should savor the moment. It would also be the first time ever that I was part of a highly organized “campaign” behind the release of a record. We had a tour bus! We had a couple of real hotel rooms! And catering! Fuck, yes!
Backstage the first night of the tour, I saw Billy Duffy—the Cult’s guitar player—sitting down to dinner at one of the tables in the catering room. I gave him a sort of half-assed “dude nod” in the hopes that maybe he knew my name—you know, he’s Duffy, I’m Duff—and that we would have a conversation starter. Nope. Didn’t happen. He just saw some tall geezer with a strange tic. He ignored me and went on about the business of eating his fucking dinner. I felt like a complete goof.
Hitting the stage that night was extra special. It did not matter in the slightest