It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [86]
Gilby was under less scrutiny—and he was the new guy. I pulled him aside right before we finally went on at Madison Square Garden.
“You have to find me some cocaine.”
Gilby didn’t even do coke. This was typical of the bullshit I was putting people through. But he scored some for me.
I stayed in the pocket onstage. As long as my performances didn’t suffer, I knew nobody would hassle me too much.
These days tours are run with an iron fist. The smallest possible crew, no private plane; the idea is to come out with as much profit as possible. The philosophy was completely different back then. The idea was to promote record sales and make money from the band’s cut of those sales. By the end of the various legs of the Use Your Illusion tour, about seven million fans had come to see us in concert. But even though we were playing stadiums, we weren’t making any money.
The tour staff sometimes approached one hundred people. Not only were we carrying backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist. Each of us had bodyguards and drivers. Money—and this was band money, not individual money—poured into nightly after-show theme parties. There were gambling nights and toga parties; in Indianapolis the theme was car racing. The party staff was part of the paid entourage, too. The parties would go into the early morning hours. The guys in the band didn’t actually go to many of the parties. And neither did much of the crew. But the money was spent whether or not any of us showed up.
In theory, we each absorbed our own costs. Axl’s posse would do things like rent helicopters to fly over this or that city. Fortunately nobody could touch the band’s money for that sort of thing. If anybody brought someone on the road—clairvoyant, porn star, whatever—it was all fine, but we each paid out of our own money, not the band’s. If I wanted a suite at the hotel instead of a room, I paid the difference. Guns was a partnership where people had to sign off on anything above the standard costs. But Axl couldn’t absorb the costs his lateness caused at a place like Madison Square Garden—overtime for cops, vendors, all the union dock loaders. We were going on at 2 a.m., racking up tens of thousands of dollars in overage fees. That came on top of the crew salaries, per diems for the staff, hotel rooms for everybody, and cuts for the agents and managers. The upshot was that we were paying to play MSG. This was not a part of the good ol’ days I longed to revisit. Paying-to-play sucked at the lowliest clubs and it sucked at the world’s most famous arena.
From New York we went to Philadelphia ahead of two shows on December 16 and 17, 1991. I had a jones going by the time we reached the Ritz-Carlton from our plane. I didn’t even bother going into the hotel to check in. Instead I told Truck I was going to the pizza place across the street. In my mind at that point, virtually everyone was doing drugs. Yeah, if I just asked some likely-looking hood at the pizzeria to help me score, I figured I’d surely get lucky. It must have been glaringly obvious that I was one of the guys in Guns N’ Roses—even if someone didn’t recognize me from one of our videos then monopolizing MTV, I had two GN’R tattoos to cement the deal. As luck would have it, I did indeed find a guy at the pizza joint.
Every major city had its shitty high-crime areas. In America, there were areas a white boy like me drew attention—not only from residents but from police patrolling the areas. I was always so fucked up during this era that those societal constraints seemed only for other people. Not for me. When our guy said he could get me some drugs out in West Philly, I didn’t think twice. We got in his car. As we drove farther west, I realized the streets were getting sketchier and the buildings lining them more dilapidated. At red lights, the dude driving merely slowed down for fear of a carjacking. Now, even in my benumbed state,