It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [92]
When we arrived in Bogotá, Guns N’ Roses was the lead story in all the local newspapers. When we asked what all the headlines were, someone translated for us. A fourteen-year-old Colombian girl had committed suicide after her father refused to let her attend our upcoming show.
Jesus. Another person whose life we touched … gone.
That night, more news: a coup had been launched in Venezuela. An air-force pilot named Luis Reyes Reyes and his co-conspirators were able to wrest control of most of the country’s air bases by the morning of November 27. Our cargo planes were grounded. McBob and the rest of the crew were stuck.
The next morning a bomb went off near our Bogotá hotel.
Then Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar told the press that we were his friends and that he was supplying us with a bunch of cocaine. He was already in hiding then as a result of American pressure (we never met him), and I guess he was just sticking it to the U.S. government, using us to have some fun. I was already annoyed at the political questions fired at us at press conferences—just because we sold some records didn’t mean people should suddenly care what I thought about Bill Clinton or Boris Yeltsin. Now we had become inadvertent political pawns in a grand international game.
Great.
At some point that next day, I went to leave my hotel room. Outside my room stood a machine-gun-toting soldier. He motioned me back inside. I was—we were—under house arrest.
Oh, shit.
I didn’t know what to do. I spent the day stewing.
What are we going to do now?
At least there was booze.
That evening there was a knock at my door. I opened it. The hallway was dark. The soldier was gone. Instead there was a guy in a suit—also carrying a machine gun.
“Yayo?” he said. I had learned this was slang for coke in South America. “Yayo?”
I slammed the door and locked it.
Shit.
I’m being set up.
I just know it.
I picked up the hotel phone. Who did I know who could help? Who could call somebody? I didn’t want to scare my mom. Then it hit me: my dad. He’d been a fireman. He must know people at city hall in Seattle.
I dialed my dad. It went through.
“Dad, I don’t know who else to call,” I said. “It’s all gone terribly wrong. I’m in a hotel room in Bogotá with an armed guard out front. I don’t know if they’re going to let us out. I don’t know if they’re going to let us play the show—if our planes even get here. And I don’t know what will happen if we don’t play the show. I’m really worried. Is there anyone you can call?”
I have no idea what my dad did, but the U.S. consul soon showed up on the scene. The atmosphere lightened. The armed guards disappeared.
Eventually our planes were allowed out of Caracas after the coup in Venezuela sputtered. The crew arrived and began to feverishly set up for a delayed Bogotá show. Then, after a huge rainfall, pooled water on the roof collapsed the stage. The crew started over with what was left.
The day of the rescheduled show arrived. It rained and rained. It continued to rain during the show. Then, as Axl played the opening chords of “November Rain,” the sun broke through the clouds. Everyone in the audience crossed themselves. After the song, the rain began again.
This was shaping up to be some tour leg.
We had a guy who flew ahead of us and greased customs agents’ palms. I don’t remember customs people ever boarding our plane, though our hotel was raided in Chile. Not that there were any stupid motherfuckers among us—we didn’t smuggle drugs from one country to another. We could always get whatever we needed locally.
Axl tried to reach out to me a few times. One time in São Paolo he called me from his hotel room. Stephanie Seymour was visiting him; Linda was with me.
“Hey,” he said, “why don’t you come down to our room and we’ll have dinner? We’ll just have a nice time.”
We had a relaxed dinner and