It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [63]
All the guys in Guns came out of humble, working-class families. Money was never a thing any of us understood—at all—because we didn’t have any. We had long been comfortable with subsistence living. Now we had a hit record. I remember the first check I received from that: we each got $80,000. It was an incomprehensible amount of money. It might as well have been a billion dollars.
The check made me think once again about all the stories we now knew about Aerosmith getting fleeced and about guys from the Alice Cooper band having to hock their guitars. I thought about seeing guys in Hollywood—like Sly Stone—and thinking, Wow, you’d think they had some money, but they’re living in some shitty apartment.
I was always fearful of somebody ripping me off. With no knowledge of how to act or what to do to avoid that happening, I reverted to street smarts, something we all had in spades. I went to each of our accountants, including the head CPA, and demanded their home addresses: “I want to know where you live.”
Right or wrong, that’s what I did.
When we got that $80,000, the accountants said there was a lot more money coming down the pike. They said we should start thinking about what to do with it. They suggested we should each buy a house. I didn’t know what interest rates were, what a mortgage meant. I was kind of freaking out. But we got another check about three weeks later and I thought, Okay, I guess I can get a house.
I started working with a real-estate agent and we looked all over the area. We looked in Hollywood at first, but I decided I wanted to get out of there. When we got back to L.A. after Appetite had gotten so big, everybody there was suddenly dressed like us, in bandannas, and trying to sound like us. It was suffocating. So I wanted to be away from that. I ended up buying a nice little place in Studio City, two bedrooms with a little pool. It was as close as you could be to Hollywood without being in it—just over the other side of the hills. I bought it at the height of the real-estate market, but I didn’t know what that meant. We all bought houses at the height of the market right after we finished the Aerosmith tour. The five of us all ended up buying in the same area, dotting Laurel Canyon. We all bought right on the main road or just off it. Obviously, in thinking accessibility would be a plus, we failed to recognize the way our lives were about to change. We’d soon want to be out of this fishbowl.
I bought a brand-new car for the first time in my life—a Corvette. Soon afterward, my brother Jon came down to L.A. to visit.
“Oh, you bought a Corvette,” he said, eyebrow raised. “You sure? Don’t get used to this or your money’s going to be gone.”
We McKagans had grown up with the idea that you didn’t live beyond your means. None of my brothers or sisters went out and bought cars or houses they couldn’t afford. I was the first one of us—the last kid, ironically—who started making real money, big money, money none of us had ever thought about. And my brother checked me.
By this point, I thought my life had already gotten strange. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened one day in November 1988, when I went to a Ralph’s grocery store on Laurel Canyon to buy a pack of smokes. People started staring, and audibly whispering, “Holy shit!” People were freaking out.
Then a couple people came running up from the magazine aisle, clutching stacks of magazines, saying, “Hang on, please, hang on, please wait for us to buy these so you can autograph them!”
They put the magazines down in front of me at the cashier. Guns N’ Roses was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I vaguely remembered being interviewed for a Rolling Stone article during the Aerosmith tour, and someone probably told me the magazine had changed its mind and decided to put us on the cover instead of Aerosmith, which had been the original plan. But somewhere along the line, I must have forgotten.
Being out in public meant hysteria from then on.
Once Appetite topped the charts, the label packaged the acoustic tracks we had recorded along with our old