It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [70]
As showtime approached, Axl wasn’t there and everyone—us, the Stones’ people—was sweating and frantic. But he made it at the last minute, the first concert went off without a hitch, and I didn’t slip on the metal stage. Sure, the guys were smacked out of their minds, but I had family and good friends around me, and I did not really pay much attention to what was going on with those guys backstage. I knew that we should have had a band sit-down before the gigs to get everything out on the table, but things had been moving too fast in the run-up to the shows.
Then came the second night.
Before we played our first note, Axl suddenly announced to the 80,000 people in attendance that “if certain people in Guns N’ Roses didn’t stop dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” this would be our last show.
The crowd became absolutely quiet. People in the audience looked at one another; they seemed as confused as we were. They really had no idea what Axl was talking about.
I shrank. I was so fucking embarrassed. And I was so fucking mad that Axl felt he could do this to me. I would have been supportive if he was sufficiently pissed off at certain guys to want to confront them for what was going on—I was with him, the situation was bad. But he needed to talk about that shit in private! Not out here. Never out here.
Once Axl took his concerns public, the times of being a gang—us against the world—were over. We played the rest of the show, but it was a halfhearted effort at best. Afterward, and really for the remainder of our career, we just went our separate ways. That night officially rang the bell for the end of an era in GN’R.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We should have had a band meeting to talk things out after the Rolling Stones gigs. But we didn’t. I never even told Axl how upset I was. Other things came up, and when not putting out those fires we all just retreated back into our separate lives.
By the end of 1989, there was no longer any way around the fact that my marriage to Mandy was falling apart. Somehow, making our relationship legal had added a level of seriousness that neither of us foresaw. Before we’d gotten married, we never had arguments; we also never saw any reason to look deeper into long-term expectations. Neither of us cheated or lied to the other as things unraveled, but we were both sort of crestfallen that our passion for each other was somehow waning. She had started to take some things out on me, and I was in turn taking things out on her. I think we both hated ourselves for doing it, but it continued to happen. Mandy and I were both extremely young—I was twenty-five at this point—and naive and vodka-filled. It was a match made for friendship but in no way for marriage and children.
The problems in our relationship also seemed more real now that my mom had seen the full magnitude of them. With no more shows on the horizon and both of us constantly together in the house on Laurel Terrace, things came to a head.
Living down the street, Steven had the best vantage point on our relationship. He knew Mandy and I had sought marriage counseling, and he could see I was in a lot of pain even afterward. He was the one who finally confronted me about things—on Christmas Eve.
“Dude, if you don’t have her stuff out by tomorrow, I’m going to do it,” he told me. “That’ll be ugly. You don’t want me coming in there, because I will.”
He was right. It was over. I had to admit it. And I had to act. On Christmas Day, 1989, I gave Mandy the Halliburton luggage Aerosmith had given me and asked her to get out. I was adamant. And I was keeping the dog. Merry fucking Christmas.
I felt completely lost and heartbroken. I thought I had let my mom and family down. I thought I had been caught living a lie. Or rather, lies, those little lies you tell yourself to help make your life fit a more idealized image. Now they had all suddenly been laid bare. For me it all boiled down to one simple thing: Just like my dad, I thought—in whose footsteps I had tried so hard