It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [66]
In the summer of 1989, it was decided the band would relocate to Chicago to start writing our follow-up record. Part of the idea was to recapture the hothouse effect the Gardner space had provided as the songs for Appetite had come together. There, we were always together in close proximity, for hours, even days, at a time. Now that we all had houses and cars and separate lives, that aspect of the process was impossible to re-create in L.A. Moving in together in Chicago was an attempt to re-create it, though I didn’t like the idea of going away. I had already pulled up roots once with my move from Seattle a few years earlier, and I had just bought my first house and even had a dog and something that resembled a home life in L.A. But I didn’t voice any opposition. Chicago was Axl’s idea. He wanted to be closer to his roots in Lafayette, Indiana. It was the last vestige of a romantic notion he had of going back to Indiana and leading a normal life. In the spirit of band unity, we bowed to Axl’s wishes.
I knew absolutely no one in Chicago.
This would be interesting.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Slash, Steven, and I arrived in Chicago first. Our work ethic always pushed us to get things rolling. We wanted to be sure everything was up and running. I assumed Axl would follow after us shortly—after all, we were here at his insistence. The likelihood of Izzy’s participation in our heartland experiment was less clear. He had recently been arrested for, um, disrupting a flight. By pissing in the galley. So he was taking a stab at getting sober. And, yeah, well, there were also the urine tests he had to take as a result of the arrest. It was understandable at the time that he might not want to be around the rest of us too much.
The first thing we had to do was find a place for the whole band and a couple of our techs to live. We also had a security guy—in our management’s eyes, it was probably to protect the public from our antics and not the other way around. Then we had to find a place where we could rehearse and write.
We found two apartments above an Italian restaurant across the street from a church off Clark Street. For our rehearsal spot, we rented an empty old theater—Top Note Theater—above the rock club Metro. Unbeknownst to me then, some regulars at the Metro were also tightly linked into the city’s drug chain.
After two weeks in Chicago, Axl was still a no-show. Slash, Steven, and I started to get a little resentful. I mean, what the fuck? Here we were in a city in which we had no interest, no friends—and no singer. We were fucking pissed off. I started to drink harder.
One night I was so fucked up that somebody pulled me aside and said, “Here, do a little coke and you’ll sober right up.” And there you go, that was the secret potion. I had been looking at coke the wrong way. I never wanted to be that guy—the asshole coke guy. But now I realized coke wasn’t an end in itself, or didn’t have to be; it was a means to an end, a tool. I didn’t have to become a coke guy to make use of it. Coke just allowed me to pursue my favored mind-altering regimen—vodka—harder and for longer periods of time. That guy I could be. I started to drink more and more, and now I, too, tapped into the drug connection available to us via the club downstairs.
On top of that, a Chicago newspaper did a piece about the band living there in town, writing songs for a record, and even revealed the street where we were living and the location where