It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [58]
Back in the halcyon days of GN’R, when everyone in L.A. thought we were the most badass hard-drinking and hard-drugging motherfuckers around (and maybe we thought so, too), we quickly found out we were in the minor league compared to Mötley Crüe. After their shows, we often ended up partying together, learning their code names for different drugs, even flying on their private jet a few times. Our peek into their world was a look into an abyss. They’d found a way of skating around the edge of that abyss while perfecting the dark art of drinking and drugging for a while there back in the 1980s.
My brother Bruce, the one who first got me started playing bass, now worked for a music management company. He tracked the pop charts as part of his job. And he tracked Guns because of me. He kept all the weekly Billboard magazines. He watched Appetite for Destruction creep from the high hundreds up to 110. He called me when we cracked the top 100.
“Brother, you’re ninety-five!”
After a quick interview on MTV’s weekly late-night metal show, Headbangers Ball, the video for “Welcome to the Jungle” was finally getting some plays on MTV, and audiences on the Crüe tour were receptive to our sound. In December, we joined Alice Cooper’s tour as the opening band for the opening band: the bill went us, Megadeth, then Alice. That meant going through the Midwest in a bus playing in front of two bands’ gear. We finished the year with four homecoming shows at Perkins Palace in Pasadena.
Whew, what a year. Our first album, our first taste of national and international touring, CBGB’s, and the fucking Hammersmith Odeon. It had all been very exciting—in my case, the fulfillment of dreams I’d had since I started playing in bands at fifteen. But I had also found that flying triggered panic attacks. Sometimes the attacks were so bad that I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I would sweat profusely. I wanted to take off my clothes because everything felt like it was binding me, but at the same time I was freezing because my breathing was so shallow. It felt like I was going to suffocate. People around me—the guys in the band, friends—could see the frantic look on my face, but there was nothing they could do to help me. I began to drink heavily prior to our increasingly frequent flights. The trick was to be able to walk straight during boarding but pass out as soon as they sealed the aircraft doors.
Yeah, what a year. I’d lost dear friends; in fact practically every triumph had been tempered by a deep sense of loss.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We spent most of the first few months of 1988 back home, right up until we shot the video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” in early April. We also did an acoustic recording session to lay down tracks we figured would be good for B-sides or whatever.
Among those tracks were “Patience,” and a song Axl brought in lyrics for called “One in a Million.” When he first showed them to us, I cringed at some of the words—especially niggers. It wasn’t that I thought Axl held racist views—there was never any question on that front. I realized Axl’s lyrics represented a third-person observation about what Reagan-era America had become: a nation of name-callers, a land of fear. It was just