It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [76]
In the autumn of 1990, we booked our first gigs in more than a year. An eternity. We were going to headline two nights at the Rock in Rio festival in January 1991. When I was growing up, I never dreamed that I might one day have the opportunity to visit such exotic and far-flung places as a result of my music. Bakersfield maybe, but not Brazil. Those gigs now functioned like a lighthouse for me—a reassuring beacon twinkling on the horizon, something fixed and steady to steer toward through churning seas.
We also went into the studio that fall to record the songs for Use Your Illusion. When producer Mike Clink and I had pieced together the drum track for “Civil War” earlier that year, it was clear Steven was not going to be able to perform with us if he didn’t turn things around. When we had played a couple songs to a huge crowd at Farm Aid in April, he was a mess onstage. After that, we thought we would scare him straight. We told him we were auditioning drummers and figured he’d snap out of it as soon as he heard that. When that didn’t work, we hired a professional sober coach, Bob Timmons, who had helped Aerosmith get clean, to talk to him.
Bob took along Sly Stone—who had gotten sober—to Steven’s house. Steven had met Sly at my apartment on El Cerrito.
“You know, man,” Sly told Steven, “your band is worried about you. You’ve got to pull it together, Stevie.”
Slash and I served as the voice of the band during Steven’s last days with GN’R. But no matter what we said to him, nothing changed. We told him we were getting ready to enter the studio. Still no change. Finally, we suggested he get a lawyer. It was meant to scare him, but it proved convenient for Slash, Axl, Izzy, and me. In the end, we had our lawyer tell his lawyer that he was permanently out.
It sounded ironic to a lot of people for us to kick someone out of such a notoriously debauched band for drugs. The truth is we didn’t care what drugs people did or how much they did. We cared only about our work and our ability to keep the band moving forward now that we finally had songs to record and shows to play. We didn’t give a shit about cause, just effect. Drugs? Sure. But it could just as easily have been something else. Lack of motivation. Jail time. Death. For me, I always thought death and death alone could ever push me across that line when it came to this band. (I was wrong.) For Steven, coke and heroin proved enough to nudge him across.
It was heartbreaking, especially for me and Slash, but we had to find a replacement drummer.
When we booked Rock in Rio, we thought we would have plenty of time to find a new drummer. After all, the trip was months away, and we had lots of songs to record, too; we assumed that between rehearsing and recording, the new rhythm section could gel in plenty of time for those gigs. But the studio time kept getting pushed back further and further as we cast about for someone acceptable. The same thing that had made Steven an important part of our sound also made it difficult to replace him—his sense of groove. We tried out drummer after drummer. Things started to look a bit grim. Shit, maybe this would be the end of the band. Like Hanoi Rocks. Like Led Zeppelin. For those bands, losing their drummers signaled the end of the road.
Thankfully, at the very last moment we found Matt Sorum, who had been playing with the Cult. We had twenty-seven songs to record, and some of them—like “November Rain,” “Coma,” and “Locomotive”—were epic in length. Matt had to learn all the songs in rehearsals and make charts of them for the recording sessions. At the same time, he started to try to keep up with me and Slash on the drinking front. We recorded the first twenty-four songs fast. But between the volume of work, the volume of booze, and the pressure of recording with a band that was being treated as the biggest thing in town, Matt hit a wall. With three songs to go, he disappeared. I left messages begging him to come in and finish the last three songs. No answer. I told him I’d buy him drugs out of my own pocket. No answer.
He was