It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [62]
We stopped playing again.
“Don’t fucking kill each other,” Axl said to the crowd.
This pause lasted about twenty minutes. Dozens of people were pulled out of the mud by security. Then once again we were told we could resume playing and finish our set. Only later did we hear the news: two fans had died, suffocated beneath other fans in the mud.
Oh, fuck, no, no, no.
Those two fans, Alan Dick and Landon Siggers, had just come to see a rock concert. They had tried see us, to sing along with us. And now they were dead. All I could think about were their final moments of anguish, the horror they must have faced as they struggled to breathe in the knee-deep mud and other fans fell on top of them. Oh, God, no. I wish we’d never played this fucking show. I wanted to apologize to their families.
The tragedy woke me to the sheer power of a crowd and the way things could turn on a dime—those casualties happened in an instant.
Adulation comes with a dark side. Never forget that. Never.
This is supposed to be fun for everyone—and ESPECIALLY for the people who come out to support us.
No more casualties. No more blood on your hands.
The next day we returned to the States with heavy hearts to finish the Aerosmith tour.
Geffen had officially released “Sweet Child” as a single in the United States the day we’d flown to England for Donington. By the time the Aerosmith tour wrapped up about three weeks later, in mid-September, the song had hit number one on the singles chart.
The last show was near L.A., at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Orange County. The place had lawn seating back then and could hold almost 20,000 people. It was sold out. It seemed as if much of the crowd that night was there to welcome us home after a momentous year during which we had become conquering local heroes but barely played the L.A. area at all.
Prior to the last gig, Aerosmith presented each of us with a set of Halliburton luggage as a thank-you gift. I think they felt sorry for us: despite the chart success of Appetite and “Sweet Child,” we were living out of duffel bags held together with duct tape—still just urchins living under the street.
The byproduct of us keeping drugs and alcohol on the down-low during the tour was that we were also a little less extreme even when behind closed doors. But at this last show, everyone we knew came down to congratulate us on our success and to revel in a victory for street-level rock. Half of L.A. suddenly wanted to be our friends, and a lot of them brought drugs in order to ingratiate themselves. After we played our set and came offstage to party, I was handed an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. I was still not a cocaine guy, and with my panic disorder, anything with an “up” scared me. But hell, I had some Valium and plenty of vodka to counter any effects. We were number one. We were home.
Okay, I thought to myself after a few more drinks, I’ll do some cocaine.
A little while later I was invited up onstage with Aerosmith to play along with the final song of the tour. I froze. They wanted me to play “Mama Kin,” a song Guns had covered on Live! Like a Suicide, a song I had loved my whole life.
Fuck, I am so fucking high on coke!
Okay, quick: drink a huge cup of vodka and take a pill.
When I hit the stage with Aerosmith, I was experiencing that toxic mix of uppers and downers for one of the first of what would become countless times in the future. Little did I know it would become my secret potion and cure-all for the next six years. I did it when I was happy. I did it when I was sad. I would do it until I was almost brain-dead, hopeless, and left for dead.
In hindsight, I can see that night as the moment I started the transformation from a guy who had spirit and soul and who looked at the cup as half full into a blackened shadow of my former self.
PART THREE
LOADED
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Sweet Child” was bumped from number one by “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but Appetite climbed back to the top of the album charts and stayed there for a few weeks that fall. Our lives began to change irrevocably.