It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [81]
Tension mounted within the band as we waited for Axl to show up and agree to go on. And because ticket holders also had to wait, tension mounted between the band and the audience. Some nights we would go on forty-five minutes late. Other times, one, two, or even three hours late. The only way I could bear the chants of “bullshit” from crowds of 20,000 people for an hour or two was to guzzle more booze. Inevitably, given the constantly changing amount of time I had to kill and the shifting magnitude of band strife and audience annoyance, I would drink too much. Then I’d have to do some coke to come up off the floor. Then, oops, too much coke, better drink some more. It was a vicious cycle.
I guess I hoped management would handle the lateness so we could avoid intraband strife. That’s what I thought managers did, the very reason we paid them. But Axl had become a dictator before whom everyone—crew, promoters, even management now that Axl had switched us from Alan Niven to Doug Goldstein—quivered in fear. Doug seemed more concerned with the short-term goal of placating Axl than with making things run well for the long term. So I silently fumed at others, building up black resentment.
Izzy’s sobriety functioned only if he traveled separately and stayed in different hotels from us. I had gotten used to not having him around, but it was still a blow to the band. From day one, Izzy and I had shared the right side of the stage. We had seen everything—from our rise through the L.A. clubs to these massive arena shows—from the exact same perspective. The perception in popular culture is that the singer and the lead guitar player are generally the artistic brain trust of any band. In our case, Izzy was probably the most significant force—without his initial vision and his songwriting cues, there would have been no Guns N’ Roses. He and I still had our time together on the right side of the stage. But those moments made me think Izzy was extremely uncomfortable with the way we were treating our fans.
Still, I didn’t have the self-confidence—or whatever—to do anything about it. Mostly because that would have meant looking in the mirror. I couldn’t start calling people out—that guy’s always late, that guy’s always high—without eventually coming back around to my own drinking. So I just threw up my hands. It’s all fucked. The situation made me angry, really angry; I’ve never dealt well with anger.
I began to have panic attacks all the time, bad ones. The attacks felt like being on a merry-go-round just starting up, then going faster and faster until it was too fast; then the ride turned into a Gravitron, where you are spinning so fast you are pinned to the walls and the bottom drops—you’re unable to move, unable to make it stop, unable to get off. I’m trapped. The sugar in alcohol exacerbated panic attacks, as did cocaine. But drinking even more was the only way I knew to combat the attacks. It was a harrowing experience each time I arrived at a concert venue.
There were transcendent moments onstage. Some nights we were so “on” that it was otherworldly. A few nights we got into such a groove that we played three-hour sets. But we never aired what was bothering us about one another. Nobody ever stated outright to Axl how much we resented going on late or having him stop shows. Nobody told me I was drinking too much or doing too much cocaine. We were all kept separate and that is the way we began to like it. We each had our own security guards. We each had our own twenty-four hour limos picking us up planeside and taking us to the hotel and anywhere else we wished to go. We rode separately to and from the gigs. We had separate dressing rooms. A sense of band unity was evident only when we were onstage. Otherwise it was every man for himself.
Then came a gig at the Riverport Amphitheatre outside St. Louis on July 2, 1991.
The show started about an hour late—which by this point