It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [94]
I paused and looked around for support. The other guys looked away and shrank down in their seats a little.
That was it.
Later, at the show itself, I was too fucked up—and I knew it. I could hear myself babbling incoherently backstage, the guttural sounds spilling from my mouth between gulps of vodka and cranberry barely resembling words. Then we took the stage. I finally stumbled across the line I had always held sacred: I found myself falling behind.
Stay in the pocket. Stay in the pocket.
Just play.
You can always play.
Always.
Just stay with Matt.
I tried to hold it together. I stared at Sorum banging the drums and tried to stay with him, concentrating. He exaggerated his strokes to help me. He nodded. His shoulders rose with the beat. Come on, man.
Still not getting the fingers on my left hand to the right spots in time.
Still not moving the pick fast enough.
Pick it up.
Pick-me-up.
We had hidden rooms below the stage, so I staggered into one at the first chance to get more coke to sober up. Not happening. I could barely bend over to snort without tipping over. I righted myself. No time. Back out onstage.
Struggling.
To stay.
In sync.
With.
Sorum.
Pick it up.
Can’t quite.
Come on.
You fuck.
Fuck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
In the middle of May 1993, we headed back out for another summer swing through Europe.
For the first five nights—in Israel, Turkey, Greece, and at two shows in England—Izzy rejoined the band to fill in for Gilby, who’d broken his hand in a motorcycle accident just before we left. Crowds stopped the show for minutes on end to chant Izzy’s name. It was great. Greek teenagers seemed to understand something we had lost track of to some extent: this was—or had been—first and foremost a band of friends who believed in our music and in one another.
Izzy and I had started out as neighbors who would take a city bus to get to a gig where we were the fourth band on a bill of four bands, just happy to be playing a gig with a band we believed in with everything we had. And we saw it through. Now I looked at Izzy and recognized the clarity he had, the sense of purpose behind his decisions. Izzy had his feet beneath him and could walk away—which he did again after those five shows. My feet felt stuck in cement. Or quicksand. I wanted what he had, but had no idea how to get it. Though I guess I didn’t want sobriety badly enough to go to Izzy and ask him for help. That would have put me in a situation where I would have had to either follow through or fail.
With Izzy gone and Gilby recuperated, we worked our way through soccer stadiums in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and France. Izzy’s departure triggered a realization: perhaps the simplest explanation for what was going on with Guns N’ Roses was that the band members had stopped needing one another. Sure, we wanted to continue to make a living playing music, and these record sales weren’t going to go on forever. But we no longer needed one another to write ourselves out of poverty through our songs. Guns didn’t start out about money, but once we all had houses and cars, we just needed one another less. The layers of infrastructure and the assistants, bodyguards, and drivers were fine: we could afford not to deal directly with one another anymore. Pissed off? No problem, I have my own hotel room, my own home. Not working on new songs as a band? No problem, I’ll rent a studio on my own. Shit, we had a management team: Oh, we’ll take care of this, we’ll take care of that.
On this last European leg of the tour, we sometimes weren’t all together in the same city except for the performance itself. On a few occasions, we weren’t even in the same country. Our plane could drop some of us here and others there.
On July 5, 1993, we all rendezvoused in Barcelona for a huge outdoor show at the Olympic Stadium. Axl came in from Venice. I returned from a visit with Linda to the Spanish island of Ibiza. Slash was already in Barcelona.