It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [93]
Half an hour after Linda and I left the dinner, Axl was throwing chairs in the lobby of the hotel and trying to fistfight some guy.
We started 1993 in Asia, then came back to the States for yet another leg. I was using so much coke by this point that I needed more and more things to counteract it when it was time to take the edge off a coke high. One night when I couldn’t get my hands on any pills and someone had some China white—powdered heroin—I snorted that instead. It did the trick: edge dulled. I found that smoking the brown tarlike heroin on tinfoil—as I had tried once in Amsterdam with Izzy and Slash—also did the trick. I never lost my fear of smack enough to shoot it with a syringe, but I soon started smoking enough of it to get twinges of withdrawal. It didn’t take much, that was for sure. Fortunately I never came to enjoy the effect of heroin for its own sake, but floating away on a silk pillow was infinitely nicer than grinding my teeth in a drunken, paranoid stupor at the end of a coke binge.
Sorum suddenly got sober. I don’t know what happened, but there was a moment that changed things for him, an epiphany of some sort. That left just me and Slash from the toxic trio. Then Slash and I kind of separated, each spending more time with our own little groups. We were tired of manning each other’s line, which at this point—especially now that I, too, was dabbling in heroin—meant checking to make sure the other one was still breathing.
On the American leg of the tour, I went looking for trouble with Dizzy or Gilby. I remember landing in Fargo for a show in late March 1993, at the Fargo Dome. We got into town, looked around, and thought, Oh, god.
Dizzy and I hopped in a limo and decided to cause a stir. We drove to the local rock radio station and went inside unannounced. We went on the air and people started showing up at the station’s office. Then we went to the local mall, looking for drugs or action of any kind.
Onstage in Sacramento on April 3, a bottle came flying out of the top tier. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It hit Matt’s floor tom and careened off. Then everything went black.
The bottle had hit me right in the temple and knocked me out. The show ground to a halt. I was rushed to the emergency room. From the hospital I returned to our hotel in Lake Tahoe—the next night we had a show in Reno and our managers deemed the Four Seasons in Tahoe the only hotel in the region worthy of our business.
Gilby and I had arranged for our dads to attend the show in Reno. Despite all my dad’s fuckups, I figured he was still my dad. And he had bailed our asses out in Colombia. Maybe I was also thinking about my mortality, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. I flew him to Tahoe, where he saw all the chicks swarming us at the fancy hotel. We all drove together from there to Reno for the concert.
Gilby’s dad was a retired fireman, too, and he tried to engage my dad about fireman’s shit. My dad never told stories about saving this or narrowly avoiding that. I’m sure house fires were harrowing to witness, and he never talked about them.
Gilby’s dad went on talking, reliving his glory days in the hopes of engaging my dad in conversation.
Finally he said, “You know, Mac, I always say if I had it to do all over again, I’d do it exactly the same. Wouldn’t you?”
My dad looked at him. “Hell no,” he said. “I’d do what this kid did here.”
He had never supported my music career until I started making money. This was his way of showing approval, I guess, though he never apologized for not supporting me earlier.
At a gig in Mexico City later that April, we called a band meeting. Slash, Gilby, and Matt agreed we had to confront Axl about the lateness. Somebody had to start the conversation.
“Listen,” I said to Axl when everyone was assembled, “we’re drinking ourselves into oblivion, waiting three hours listening to our fans