It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [72]
Slash and I began to hang out a bunch again. I still eyed an imaginary line and I tried to anticipate potential pitfalls—I would ride a bicycle everywhere so I didn’t have to drive home once things got sloppy, for instance. I’d be in shorts and Converse sneakers with a bottle of booze taped to my bike frame. I discovered bike trails in Wilacre Park just above my house and started to detour through there. It was a wild park and pedaling through its arid but tree-covered glens created a sensory effect like sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool: the city suddenly receded, its noise and activity dampened.
Slash’s guitar tech, Adam Day, was living down the road with Steven at the time. I liked biking through Wilacre Park so much that I convinced Adam to ride with me sometimes. I’d call him up and we’d go out for a little exercise, riding on Betty Dearing Trail.
For the most part, though, idle time gave me trouble. Work kept me engaged. Sure, I might start drinking toward the end of rehearsal, but I always showed up and always remained coherent. Steven, on the other hand, was beginning to get erratic. His participation in rehearsals and writing and recording sessions became less frequent, and his ability to perform suffered big-time.
Izzy had gotten sober for good by this stage, and he kept his distance from us. During the songwriting process, he would send us homemade cassette tapes of his songs and ideas. There was no animosity about his reluctance to come to rehearsals, and his songs—like “Pretty Tied Up” and “Double Talkin’ Jive”—were great.
We decided to contribute our first finished song to a charity album, Nobody’s Child, being put together by the wives of the members of the Beatles to benefit Romanian orphans. Early in 1990, we went into the studio to record it. Up to now we had always recorded basic tracks together. Slash, Izzy, Steven, and I played in the studio to get the rhythm tracks on tape. The first thing we wanted was a full fluid drum take. Bass and drums always got done quickly in the early days. I hardly ever had to do bass fixes because Steven and I were so solid as a rhythm section. But when we had tried to lay down the basic tracks for “Civil War,” producer Mike Clink and I had to patch together the drum track from dozens of inadequate takes—by hand, as this was before digital editing made that sort of thing much easier.
This all coincided perfectly with the implosion of what was left of the band morale. Axl had figured out that if he said he wouldn’t do this or he wanted that, ten people would jump. People from the management company, the label, would-be concert promoters, it didn’t seem to matter as long as somebody jumped.
Axl also started to see a psychologist, who seemed to consciously feed his megalomania. It seemed to me that she was almost predatory in the way she handled him. After all, she was trained to recognize people’s quirks. As far as I was concerned, she took advantage of him and milked the situation.
Sometimes he talked to me about the things she told him.
“Come on, man, this is me you’re talking to,” I would say. “She’s blowing smoke up your ass.”
“I know, I know,” he would say. “But listen to this …”
Of course, I was in no position to throw stones. I dealt with my shit with booze; Axl had now found his way to deal with things.
My marriage was shot, and now the other thing I most loved and cherished seemed to be slipping into a dysfunctional state as well. The band was so huge that like any big bureaucratic or corporate entity it had acquired a momentum of its own. There was no stopping some things. Once again, I didn’t know how to deal with it, how to fix it. Instead I fixated on my belief that my time on earth would be fleeting. Better go out swinging, I thought.
And I don’t remember a day of peace from 1990 until 1994.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I decided I needed to start fresh in a new house. I found I could rent out the place on Laurel Terrace and cover the mortgage that