It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [57]
We had decided to add “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” to our set as a tribute to Todd, who had loved it so much the first time we played it back in England. When we played it onstage the first night of the tour, the song’s sentiments were further magnified by our decision to use it as a way of publicly acknowledging the death of our friend.
We had filmed a video for “Welcome to the Jungle” just before we left on the Cult tour, but MTV refused to air it. So nobody knew who we were. In fact, the Canadian release date for Appetite was six weeks later than the U.S. release date for some reason—so our record wasn’t even available until halfway through the tour. We continued to play to empty rooms because nobody turned up for the opening act. After our set each night, I would go out into the audience and bum Canadian quarters to call home on the venue’s pay phone. Mandy, my mom, my friends back in Seattle—they all got to hear about the strange mix of elation and tragedy that accompanied me across Canada.
From Canada we swung down the West Coast of the United States. When we played the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, I got a bunch of my friends in for free. Seeing Kurt and Kim and Donner and Andy and Brian again put me somewhat at ease, though Eddy was still strung out. Andy Wood came and brought Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament—they were in the process of putting together Mother Love Bone. Jerry Cantrell and Sean Kinney from Alice in Chains came, too. And I got a chance to stop by my mom’s the day after the show. The next tour stop where any people came early enough to see Guns play our set was at the Long Beach Arena; it was a homecoming show for us after not playing there much that year. But the rest of the tour—which then went east to New Orleans via Arizona and Texas—nobody knew us and nobody cared.
A few days after the Cult tour wrapped in mid-September, we went as a headlining act to Germany and Holland and then back to the UK. I was sick as a dog in Amsterdam with the flu. I was sharing a room with Izzy and Slash and they got hold of some heroin and smoked it. For some reason, despite Jim and Todd’s deaths just months before, when they offered me the tinfoil contraption they were using to smoke it, I accepted. When I inhaled, it felt as if I floated away on a silk pillow. It was the perfect antidote to the flu, but I was still a drinker, not a junkie, and I wouldn’t touch heroin again for quite a few years.
In Britain we played in Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol. Returning to London on October 8, three months after our first visit, we had a date at the Hammersmith Odeon. This was a huge step up. It was a legendary theater—both the Clash and Motörhead had written songs about the place. When I found out we would be playing the Hammersmith Odeon, I thought to myself, Whoa, that’s it, we’ve made it.
When we came back to the States we played our first ever East Coast gigs, headlining a small-scale tour in places like Allentown and Albany. It was a bare-bones operation: one bus and a Ryder truck for our gear. In clubs, the lights and sound were already installed and you got what you got. Good or bad, you couldn’t do anything about it. We just hoped the places had a shower we could use. We played the Ritz in New York City for the first time. The buzz about us seemed finally to be building in New York—we played another show at the famous Brooklyn hardcore club L’Amour billed only as “mystery guests.” Rumors that it would be us were enough to fill the place. And we did an acoustic set at CBGB on October 30, 1987, where we debuted “Patience.”
Next we nabbed a