It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [88]
At some point along the way, an old lady—a great-aunt or something—pulled me aside and grabbed my cheeks.
“You drink too much,” she rasped. “I’ve seen you on the TV, and you drink too much.”
I looked around. All these fuckers were drinking.
I drink too much compared to these folks? Really?
That would be bad. But it also seemed hard to believe. I only drank so much to get to the same place other people got off on one cocktail. I wasn’t falling down. I’d get too drunk sometimes, sure, and that’s when I would disappear and do a little coke to sober up. No problem.
Maybe she was onto something, though, as a few days later I woke up in Budapest, Hungary, and looked incredulously at my passport. In it was a stamp from the Czech Republic. We had played a gig in Prague. I couldn’t remember having been there at all.
Memory always amounts to a form of negation—you exclude most of what you experience and retain only the sensory impulses that your brain deems important, that help you make sense of the world, that allow you to track the plot of your own story. The situation on tour, however, had become so intolerable that I no longer had anything left after that process of negation—and I made sure of that with booze. There was no way to make sense of a situation in which we traveled the world antagonizing our fans with late starts or shows cut short. Very little else had any importance; the arc of my own story had been reduced to this single, painful plot line: my band was making the people who loved us most, hate us. Or so I thought.
Of course, blacking out also stemmed from fear. When it comes to your values and personality, you are what you do in adverse situations. My inability to alter this plot line did not fit with the way I defined myself. But of course, it defined me. No, I wasn’t “the guy.” I was a mess. The solution was to expunge those moments of fear and self-loathing from the record.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Because of the sheer scale of our stage set and the complexity of juggling open dates in such big venues, there were many weeks when we played only two or three shows. That gave me way too much time to fuck up. As a means to keep myself busy and push back the hard-core drinking for a few hours, I rented studios sporadically during the tour and recorded my own songs. I had a few I knew wouldn’t work stylistically for GN’R, and I figured maybe I could still make a record like Prince, playing all the instruments. Not that I pretended for a second I was anywhere near as gifted as Prince—I would play a sloppy, Johnny Thunders–style version of all the instruments. But still. I had recorded one song, called “The Majority,” just before we left on tour, with Lenny Kravitz on vocals. I had become friends with Lenny before he blew up—I’d had a demo tape of his first album that ill-fated summer in Chicago.
Since I recorded on the road, I was able to get some other guest spots from bands opening for us and from musicians who lived in towns where we played. Sebastian Bach, Snake Sabo, and Rob Affuso from Skid Row played on a few songs, Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains added a guitar track somewhere along the way. Slash, Gilby, and Matt helped me out. On June 6, 1992, GN’R performed a pay-per-view concert in Paris and lined up Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from Aerosmith, Lenny Kravitz, and Jeff Beck to make cameo appearances. In the end, Jeff had to cancel because his ears were damaged during rehearsals, but he offered to play on a couple of my songs. I couldn’t believe it.
After the Paris show, Guns had some days off in London and Jeff and I arranged to enter a studio there. I had invited my mom to meet me in London, too. She had never been to Europe. She had never really been much of anywhere, as she had been too busy and too broke raising eight kids. Mom was a huge Agatha Christie reader and loved all things quaintly English as a result. My mom also loved to be around me when I worked. I arranged for a friend