It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [79]
“She’s always fucking talking about you,” he said, “and I want to let you know that I’m the guy now.”
I didn’t have a problem with that, I told him.
He confronted me a second time another night. Finally, the third time, at Spice club, I was drunk and pissed off that he kept doing this, so I said, “Okay, dude, you want to do something about it?”
We went outside through a side door. He had his friends and I had mine. He took a swing at me and I ducked. I got lucky—he missed. As I came up I swung and broke his nose. He went straight down.
I felt bad the next day. Someone called me and said he’d been taken to the hospital. I asked them to give him my phone number.
He called and said, “Hey, I can’t afford this hospital bill.”
“Listen, man, I’m real sorry about decking you,” I said. “How much is the bill?”
“Four hundred and fifty bucks,” he said.
“Well, I can help you out,” I said. “How about I pay half?”
“That would be great, man, thanks,” he said.
Then he added, “That was a great shot you put on me, by the way.”
I told him to come up to my house to pick up the money, but warned him not to come with his dudes. Come alone. It took him a few days to swing by, but finally he showed up. I could see his mom in the car. Cool. I went out to the front gate and handed him an envelope with $225. At the same time he handed me an envelope and started running back down the street. Huh? I opened it. He had served me. He was going to try to sue me. For $1.25 million.
I had given my word that I would pay half his bill, I had apologized, and that’s what I got. It pissed me off. I was paranoid, as usual, from all the cocaine. I called management and told them. In the end it went to arbitration and we settled for a few thousand dollars. From then on, I wanted to kill anyone who crossed me at any club or concert. In my mind I was still fighting for righteous reasons—not just to hurt people but to protect, to make bullies stop doing bad things. But it’s pretty clear in retrospect that I was taking out aggression about the situation with the band. I would find offense in the stupidest little things and then I’d just flip and go street. Management quickly set up a security detail to follow me around all the time. Even so, out every night and for days on end, I managed to get into a few more scraps between Rio and the start of what would be our first-ever headlining tour.
As the first tour dates approached, Slash and I would periodically drive down to an industrial area in Compton to check on the construction of the massive stage set that would be our home for the next two and a half years. When it was complete, the set was moved to an airplane hangar over in Burbank where we commenced our full-production, full-set rehearsals. Lights. Monitors. Full PA. Full crew. All the additional musicians.
In May 1991, we had three warm-up shows. We were ready to go, but the tortuous process of mixing the Illusion records was still dragging on. We were forced to start the tour—a tour meant to support these albums—several months before there was even a release date for the records. Though I am sure it would have been better for our fans to know some of the songs we were playing, I found myself feeling that it was a very GN’R move. The old GN’R. Fuck expectations. Fuck doing things by the book.
It put us back in the position of having to win audiences over. And that played to our strength. That would draw us together, make us a team again.
We leased a 727 jet from the MGM casino to use for the entire length of the tour. Prior to setting off, we got to pick out our flight attendants from a sort of catalogue. We certainly had a nice-looking crew as a result. Stellar, in fact. The first thing I noticed upon entering the MGM Grand jet was a fully stocked bar that stretched from the door back toward the middle of the plane. Cream-colored chairs and bolted-down tables fanned out from the bar, creating the party room. To the