It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [80]
Each stateroom had a door, curtains, a fold-out bed, a dresser with a mirror, and a TV. As the plane taxied out onto the runway for our first flight, Slash and I repaired to one of the staterooms and smoked crack. I remember watching the smoke curl up into the air vent and thinking this just seemed logical. Of course we can smoke on here, it’s our plane.
I looked at myself in the mirror in the midst of a rock-fueled rush: This is going to be awesome.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At Alpine Valley Amphitheatre in Wisconsin, my sense of anticipation for the first gig of the tour was overwhelming. Our intro music came on: the theme song from The Godfather.
The crowd roared.
Here we go.
My game face came on. I felt we represented something, something primal and animalistic. I felt that fire and anger—I was ready to kick someone in the head. All the background noise of life began to recede. We rushed the stage and I played the first few bass notes for “It’s So Easy.”
Total fucking bedlam. Tens of thousands of people absolutely losing their shit. I could see the first few rows of people. I could see how far back the masses of bodies went. Everyone was on their feet and the roar was almost louder than the band.
Again I thought: This is going to be awesome.
During the first month, we flew to amphitheatres and racetracks and basketball stadiums across the Midwest and Northeast. I did not have one panic attack aboard the MGM 727. It must have hinged on the fact that I had some level of control. With our own private jetliner, I knew I could go to the pilot and say, “Land, now.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that I also had ready access to as much booze and as many pills as I wanted, at any time.
But I soon realized this was not going to be awesome.
I’m not sure exactly which gig it was when Axl first showed up late to the venue, but it was very early in the tour. Don’t get me wrong, I had never been a taskmaster about start times. I was as anti-establishment as the best of them, and going onstage right at the exact contractually obligated time wasn’t on the top of my list of things to do each day. But as the fans became more and more upset about the late starts, it dawned on me that they were upset because they had to go to work or school the next day or had a babysitter at home watching their kids. Sometimes we came on so late that a significant percentage of the crowd had gone home.
A headlining band usually went on about 9 p.m. When we had opened for other bands in 1987 and 1988 and there had been any nervousness about us starting on time, the tour managers—the headliners’ tour managers, that is—used to say, “I don’t know when you’re going on, but I know when you’re going off.” That was because most venues had 11 p.m. curfews and the headliners had to get their sets in by then. Curfews existed for any number of reasons: the venue might have a deal with its union workers or legal compromises with the surrounding residential neighborhoods; there were noise ordinances; the local public-transport schedule might play a role. Broken curfews often entailed a fine for the performer. Sometimes it was a set fee, other times it could be $1,000 per minute in overtime fees. In the most financially extreme cases, the band was on the hook for a huge fine and all the additional double-time wages for union stagehands and police and security. Obviously, unless you just loved to piss away your hard-earned money, you tried to wrap your show up within curfew times.
We kept going on later and later, and the crowds became restless and angry after our opener, Skid Row, finished and we failed to appear. Slash, Matt, and I ended up pushing our drinking and drug use to the extreme as the tour went on and things got worse and worse. Under normal circumstances,