It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [71]
I was so depressed that McBob, my bass tech, quietly slipped into my house one day and removed my shotgun. He later told me he just didn’t want to leave it sitting around given the way I was acting. He stashed it inside one of my bass cases and left it in a band storage space.
A lot of people around me hoped that once the day-to-day pain of the marriage and its immediate aftermath faded, I would be able to pull back a little from my everyday vodka habit. But instead of straightening out, I kind of fell apart. My drinking had taken off as the marriage went sour. When Mandy left the house, I started to add more drugs to the mix.
My first drink of the day slipped forward, from about four in the afternoon to more like one. I also started to score larger amounts of cocaine so that I could drink more for longer periods of time. It proved a diabolical cocktail for me. Now I could drink until I finally had to sleep—and if you’re doing coke, you don’t have to sleep for up to four days in my case. Only then would I start to see trails. The only other time I slowed down was if someone I respected—like my brother Matt—would say, “Slow the fuck down.” I also found that Valium or codeine could help to bring me down when I finally needed to sleep after a multiday binge. In my mind I was simply using modern scientific methods to get me through a tough time, and I figured I would cut back on the drugs and booze at some stage when the heartbreak subsided.
One day early in 1990 the phone rang at my place.
“Yeah, uh, is Duff there?” said the voice on the line.
“This is Duff.”
“Uh, hi, it’s Iggy.”
I knew instantly it wasn’t some knucklehead friend of mine playing a prank. It was Iggy Pop, and he was in L.A. to make a new album. He asked whether I’d be interested in playing on the record.
“Of course!” I said.
Then, trying to sound somewhat cooler than I was, I added, “I mean, yeah sure.”
I had actually met him a little more than a year before. Two days after the end of the Aerosmith tour in September 1988, Guns played a strange festival-type gig at the home of the Dallas Cowboys in Texas. INXS headlined and the opening bands included the Smithereens, Ziggy Marley, and Iggy. I was excited to meet him. After the show, Iggy and I both ended up at a party in the hotel suite of Michael Hutchence, the vocalist for INXS. I was nervous as hell to be in a room with Iggy, a guy who had inspired a dream that stuck with me for the rest of my life—a dream that cemented the direction of my life in many ways. So I commenced to get really fucked up. Michael Hutchence was already as famous for dating models and appearing in paparazzi photos as for singing “Need You Tonight,” and I think Iggy felt as out of place as I did—so he joined me. We got fucked up together.
Now he was asking me to play with him. Slash was also enlisted, and we went into the studio along with the kick-ass Kenny Aronoff on drums. I showed up expecting the sessions to be one big drugging and drinking fest—the absolute perfect way to spend a few weeks, I thought. Folklore would surely be passed down about how we rewrote the book on debauchery. But when we got down to Ocean Way recording studio in Hollywood the first day, producer Don Was informed me that Iggy had recently cleaned up his act. I could almost smell the brake pads burning as my runaway ideas about the sessions came to a screeching halt. Oops. I had a full-on drug and drink habit, and now, out of respect, I would have to keep it somewhat on the down-low while recording.
Iggy was no rookie to such games and soon caught on to the fact that Slash and I kept disappearing to the bathroom for lines of cocaine and gulps of our hidden bottles. Iggy was more than cool about our little indiscretions and never sweated us about it. And in the end, one of my all-time favorite gigs was the record release party we played together later that year for the album, called Brick by Brick. Sobriety had not changed one thing: whether in a studio or on a stage, Iggy flipped a switch when he performed and on came an incandescent,