It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [59]
A few months prior, Axl had also come up with a great idea for “Patience,” seemingly out of nowhere, that had immediately become the story and melody of that song. The whistle part at the beginning was another ballsy and unusual move by Axl; the song just wouldn’t be the same without it. “Patience” quickly became one of my favorite GN’R songs to play live.
When we went out in L.A., which was every night, people at the rock clubs recognized us, but life was still quite similar to the way it had been for the last few years. We had our bars, our clubs, our friends, we were always together, and we were not public figures except when we wanted to be—buying rounds of drinks or hopping up onstage with friends in other bands. We had no idea it would be the last time we would ever be able to walk around L.A. without feeling like we were in a fishbowl, isolated and on display.
One night Slash and I went out to the Rainbow, a restaurant next to the Roxy on Sunset that was famous as a rock-and-roll hangout. They gave us a booth. This was a new level of deference. A booth! At the Rainbow! As we proceeded to get blasted, a really big, drunk guy wandered over to our table. Though he looked like an overgrown hick, he was in fact the guitar player from a band considered quite big just then—much bigger than Guns. He addressed himself to Slash:
“Niggers shouldn’t wear tattoos,” he said.
What? Was this his idea of a joke or something?
He wasn’t laughing.
I stood up.
“What the fuck did you say to my friend?”
“You heard me. Niggers shouldn’t wear tattoos.”
I slugged the guy. Then I slugged him again. And again. He reminded me of the bullies back in Seattle, the meatheads who beat up punks in packs, who called everyone faggots. I’m not sure how many times I hit him—I just completely lost it—but he went down. I found out later that three of his ribs had broken.
We did make a trip east in late January to play at the Ritz again—the show MTV taped for broadcast. Two nights before that show, we decided to play a semi-acoustic surprise show at a venue in Manhattan called the Limelight, a former church. By the time we headed into the sanctuary, everyone in the band was so fucked up that we lost members one by one as the set progressed. Eventually everyone except me and Axl went down. It was a comical gig, but I took something serious away from it. I told myself I would never get so deep into my cups that I wouldn’t be able to play.
Back in L.A., Mandy and I began to plan a big wedding at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. My brother Matt, the trombone player, volunteered to put together a big-band jazz combo for the event. Mandy and I had been living together for ten months at that point, though I’d been away much of the time. Still, we seemed a perfect match; it felt like she was going to be the girl forever.
My brother Bruce called me again in the spring, after MTV aired the Ritz concert.
“This is getting fun,” he said. “Your record is up to number fifty-five.”
Appetite was doing okay at this point. A record company is just a bank: they loan you money to make a record and then they take a cut if you start selling records. We started to pay back our loan and were starting to see a little bit of money—but not much.
We did a swing through the Midwest on our own that spring, then signed on to the Iron Maiden tour, making the same swing across Canada and the West Coast we’d made with the Cult. When our manager broke the news to us, he apologized.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said.
In the 1980s, for a band the size of Maiden, touring Canada was like spring training: you got your show together so everything was ready for the American tour. Places like Toronto and Vancouver were big markets, but most nights you were in Moncton, Moose Jaw, or Red Deer. Not only that, Maiden was straight-up metal. Metal crowds