It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [96]
Suddenly 50,000 people started shouting what must have been obscenities.
Then Axl arrived. There would be no riot.
When we finally took the stage for that last show in Argentina, I peered out at the crowd.
This could be it.
Remember this moment, remember this scene, this stadium, these fans.
We limped back to L.A. and quickly went our separate ways. Back into our private lairs to lick our wounds. Except me. For me it was straight off to rehearsals. Geffen had released Believe in Me while Guns were still in Europe, and now I was off on my first solo tour.
That’s when Axl called me, telling me I was crazy to go back out.
“It’s what I do, Axl.”
Besides, I wasn’t going to sit still.
Keep moving, keep moving.
After the incident a few months before with my coke dealer and his pregnant wife, I had quit coke. For the most part that had stuck so far. It would be easier to stick with it on the road. I just had too many drug connections in L.A., and my life there was intertwined with coke. Keep moving.
The tour started with three showcase appearances in clubs in L.A., San Francisco, and New York. And it started badly. I had switched from vodka to wine, but immediately found myself drinking about a case a day. Wine, wine, wine. And blood.
Blood in San Francisco when my wife, Linda, got into a scrap backstage and traded punches with another woman until teeth started rattling to the floor. Blood in New York as fistfights broke out in the audience. Then we flew to Europe to join the Scorpions’ tour. A fistfight broke out between a couple band members in an airport. Blood. Our lead guitar player pulled a knife on the bus driver in England. Talk of more blood. Blood, blood, blood. And wine. I often had to travel alone to get to the next town early to do publicity. I showed up at a record signing in Sweden swilling wine from the bottle. Got skewered in the local press for that—a lot of young kids in line for autographs.
We played some inspired shows, but there were also times when I shouldn’t have been up there playing, times when I let it go too far and my performance suffered. There I was in huge venues, playing with my own band, under my own name, not bringing my A-game.
What’s your excuse now?
At the end of that leg, I needed another guitar player. Couldn’t keep the guy who stabbed our driver. I called Paul Solger, my old bandmate from Ten Minute Warning back in Seattle. I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years. He was sober. Want to tour with my band? He said yes.
On to Japan we went. Bottles and bottles of wine each day. My innards burned. Tums, I need Tums. Sloppy onstage again. What the fuck are you doing?
Home to LAX, a long, long commercial flight. Oh, fuck.
We had a break before heading back across the Pacific for a tour of Australia.
I just can’t do this anymore.
I felt sick, really sick, the worst flu I’d ever had.
Are you going to be that guy—a quitter?
I picked up the phone and dialed the tour manager.
I’m out. I can’t do it anymore.
I was that guy now.
No tour, fine. But I needed to keep moving.
Seattle.
Seattle.
I have a house there. That’s where I’ll go.
March 31, 1994, at LAX, there was Kurt Cobain, looking as lost in the lonely, jagged maze of his mind as I was in mine. Then he was gone. Man, I really wish I’d asked you to come over to my house that night when we landed. I’m sorry.
May 10, the paralyzing pain. The unbearable pain. The pain, the pain.
I’m going to die. Here. Alone.
Andy.
Please let him come upstairs. I don’t want to die alone.
Dr. Thomas.
Demerol. Nothing. Demerol. Nothing. Sheer panic.
Emergency room.
“Kill me.”
I begged over and over.
“Please, kill me. Just kill me. Kill me. Please.”
PART FIVE
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As I was pleading with the ER doctors to kill me, they brought in an ultrasound scanner