It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [65]
At first I didn’t know how to deal with that—I simply lived a public life. It never occurred to me to try to distinguish between a private life and a public one. I didn’t know how to do both. I was all public all the time. Still, the sense of being in a fishbowl was unnerving. If I’d had any wits about me, I would have bought a house back in Seattle and just maintained an apartment in L.A. That would have been common sense, but no. It was about our band, it was about our gang; we had to go out and conquer and kill it every night. Even in our town. We had houses in the hills now but lived like we were still crashing in the alleyway off Gardner, still fighting to keep our fingernails dug into the bottom rung of society’s ladder. If that meant scrapes and bar fights, so be it. If that meant using my cast as a weapon, so be it. That’s just the way we were.
In my wife, I thought I had a tether to a more normal life. I looked to my older brothers and sisters’ stable marriages as examples. I had always held a very romantic and idealized vision of what love and marriage should look and feel like, right down to smiling children and a white picket fence. Mandy and I set up the new house for the perfect domestic life we anticipated. We bought a dog named Chloe, a gentle yellow Lab. We even put in a picture-perfect brick walkway in front of the house to give it a more idyllic look. I laid it myself.
But what should have been a source of stability didn’t work out that way. In fact, it was almost as though the moment we got married our relationship completely changed. Once I was home, it quickly spiraled downward. I suppose if I’d been more coldly analytical about it, I could have seen the marriage wasn’t going to last. But I couldn’t believe it could turn so sour so quickly. For now I clung to her, to us—or rather to what we had been for the year prior to our wedding.
Anyway, not to worry, I always had my band to fall back on. Guns N’ Roses was still the most important thing in the lives of us five members. At least in my mind I chose to see it that way. Somehow, though, while we were off the road in 1989, we began splitting at the seams.
Our new houses provided sanctuaries away from the other members of the band—something we had never known in the four years since we had started rocking, writing, and reveling together. We had a bit of money now and ample and easy access to any and all types of vice. With Izzy and Slash, smack returned with a vengeance. And it turned out Steven hadn’t been joking about wanting nothing more in life than a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack—except now, with more than enough money to realize his dream, he added heroin to the mix. At the same time word was getting back to me that people were whispering in Axl’s ear, saying all the ass-kissing clichés: You’re the guy, you’re the basis of the band’s success. That’s a cancer for any band.
Still, I never doubted our bonds would hold. Sure, Slash started jamming with Dave Mustaine from Megadeth and there were rumors that they were talking about starting a new and separate band. I, for one, recognized this as an expression of his frustration with the directionless path that GN’R was on. Nothing more. Slash just wanted Guns to get back to being a gang of dudes who hung out together all the time. As equals. With no bullshit. But there was no communication.
I went up to Axl’s condo on a few occasions and the two of us discussed how worried we were about our comrades.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
I had no answer. We talked, but all we could do was hope they would find it in themselves to pull back and get into the swing of things as far as the band was concerned. We never thought of rehab or interventions back then.
We wanted to begin