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Days of Drugs and Debauchery
In bass player Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses has found its drug memoirist.
Duff McKagan shared a sleazy Hollywood apartment with his girlfriend years before Guns N’ Roses became the world’s biggest rock band. Pimps, prostitutes, and junkies surrounded. Upstairs lived a cautionary tale. A once-famous neighbor befriended the soon-to-be-famous bass player. He shared demo tapes with the younger musician and then without invitation started sharing his bathroom. “I watched the illusions I had about one of my idols evaporate before my eyes,” Duff McKagan writes in It’s So Easy (and Other Lies). “Was the great Sly Stone living the good life, jamming in a home studio tucked away somewhere in his sprawling mansion? Nope, he was sneaking past my girlfriend to smoke crack in my bathroom.”
It’s hard not to see the strung-out Sly Stone as an unlikely angel sent from God: warning, iceberg ahead! But McKagan, like Stone and the Titanic, imagined himself too big to fail. The biggest stars, as McKagan’s new autobiography demonstrates, turn out to be just everyday people.
It’s So Easy (and Other Lies) is less a band history than a drug memoir. Given that one of Duff’s most enduring pop-culture legacies involves alcohol rather than music — Simpsons’ creators appropriately appropriated his nickname for their cartoon beer — McKagan’s book focuses on what was once his focus. His story would be a rock ‘n’ roll cliché if not for it ending in redemption rather than death.
Ironically emerging from the same Seattle music scene that supplanted Guns N’ Roses, McKagan details a Pacific Northwest childhood of dropping acid in sixth grade, getting the clap in ninth grade, habitually stealing automobiles before getting his license, and dropping out of a high school that that required but fortnightly attendance.
Like magnets, the druggies and dropouts that would comprise Guns N’ Roses came together in mid-'80s Los Angeles. Duff quotes pre-fame band-mate Steven Adler: “You know, all I want in life is to make enough money one day so I can have a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack around — all the time.” Anyone who has stumbled across Adler on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab knows that the drummer wasn’t kidding. Drummer Adler becomes the first fired gun, and then, one by one, the gunners fired themselves — unable to stomach Axl Rose’s chronic concert tardiness, temper tantrums, and megalomania. Surrounding oneself with junkies will have that effect on a man. With the singer’s seemingly psychotic outbursts, and the band’s constant drug stupor, one can’t help but think that if Duff, Slash, Steven, and Izzy had shared their pharmaceuticals with Axl everybody would have been better off.
The climax of McKagan’s book is the low point of his life. Coming off the two-year-plus Use Your Illusions tour that witnessed the performance degenerate as the degenerate performers’ chemical intake increased, the bloated bassist’s pancreas exploded. Vodka’s a helluva drug. The medical emergency resulted in third-degree internal burns and a close-encounter with death. The event proved a sobering experience.
McKagan replaces his band by becoming a third-time’s-a-charm husband with two beautiful daughters. He leaves Hollywood for home. The high-school dropout enrolls in college, reads great books, pens columns for ESPN.com and Seattle Weekly, and launches a financial consulting firm for the rich and stupid. Whereas he once put his body through hell via drugs and alcohol, he now does so through karate, mountain biking, and climbing. At the point Duff’s life gets better Duff’s book gets worse. It’s not just that intermittent lines of cocaine to prolong a four-day vodka binge is more interesting than running a marathon in three hours and forty-five minutes, it a more remarkable feat of human endurance.
A good life makes a bad story. Spectators sadly want the spectacle.
Prior to reading the autobiography, GNR fans may ask: “Why did they ever break up?” Concluding it, they wonder: “How did they ever stick together?”
Two decades after their commercial peak, and six months before their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Guns N’ Roses reunion is in demand now more than ever. But the mythical band may be better than a reunited version. The group’s appeal in the late 1980s revolved around danger, energy, and authenticity. Seeing the detoxed, fortysomething millionaires today in hopes of recapturing that street-urchin edginess would be like going to a Bill Haley and the Comets show in the 1980s and expecting a Blackboard Jungle-riot to break out.
The times have changed. As It’s So Easy (and Other Lies) explains, so have the people.
About the Author
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. He blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (20) | Leave a comment
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Franco| 10.21.11 @ 9:19AM
'Duff Beer for me, Duff Beer for you;
You have a Duff--I'll have one, too!"
Eh. Good lives make for booooooring stories. Right about that.
"Appetite for Destruction" is an excellent album, though. I was exposed to it through a friend who made a copy of it for me in 1990 when I was visitng Israel and there was this guy who lived nearby whose mother worked in an ammunition factory and supplied us all with bullets....boring story, right.
POST American| 10.21.11 @ 9:50AM
----You ever do a tab on just how many
of the rockers came from the families
of the Globalist military industrial complex?
A REAL eye opener.
Meanwhile, as western culture is surely
reaching the very dregs of degradation
---the 'Big Boys' get their rock n' roll
kicks with tsunamis, meltdowns and
depop ops ---a la FUKISHIMA.
-----Keep a goin' kiddies!
--------O'Reilly's watchin' out for ya'!
-----------Just keep a goin'!
The Clintidote| 10.22.11 @ 7:38PM
YOUR screwed-up life, on the other hand, is also boring.
Nina| 10.21.11 @ 11:06AM
It's not a real surprise to see how the rock and rollers are involved in the drug scene. What is surprising is that some of the bands are able to keep going and be successful. In my experience, those come back tours suck and the illusion of a "great band" is lost in translation. I applaud McKagan for his successful life and for turning it around, but as you stated, a successful life is not what people want to read about. Especially if they were notorious, raunchy, debauched drug addicts in a rock band.
Seek| 10.21.11 @ 1:07PM
GnR's "Use Your Illusion" (1991) could have been shrunk from two CDs to one without much sacrifice, but it was pretty good all the same. That said, the band wasn't up the level of, say, Aerosmith.
As for Duff, he cultivated some evil habits early on, but thankfully wised up. He's in good company. Quite a few musical greats, from Stevie Ray Vaughan (R.I.P.) to Eric Clapton to Al Jourgensen, were seriously screwed up for a long time, got on the wagon, and haven't regretted it since. Some, like Amy Winehouse, never got on the wagon and won't ever get that chance.
Christopher Manion| 10.21.11 @ 1:32PM
Good review. I played in LA in the 70s and somehow missed all that.
Right in beautiful downtown Burbank, surrounded by some of the best musicians in the world. The music scene was a lot bigger than the drug scene -- which I never saw or got "wind" of -- and a lot better, I'm sure. Why would somebody drop acid in sixth grade? Must've been sex education.
Of course, I was fortunate enough to spend my (very few) days off with Harry Jaffa and Eric Voegelin. So I missed out.
Bob Grant| 10.21.11 @ 4:38PM
Eh, how cares about what some drugged-out musician has to say, frankly, about anything.
Just shut up, take your intoxicant, and play your music. Just make sure you don't hurt any innocents along the way.
This includes you Willie Nelson. I'd rather pull some 10 year old out of an Orange Julius line at a mall and listen to their take on politics than listen you yours.
Bob Grant| 10.21.11 @ 4:39PM
That would be WHO cares...
Lexa Kyle| 10.21.11 @ 8:56PM
I agree about Willie putting his politics out there, and I don't like his music. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" is only one of his songs that makes me switch stations.
POST American| 10.22.11 @ 12:21AM
"DO you realize yet? --not only
the FIAT money ----but everything
--EVERYTHING is now 'counter-fit'.
That's your religion ---your relationships
----your culture ---your very notion of a soul.
THIS is the effect of almost a century
of psychopathic USURY at the helm.
You live in their 'SIS--stem' --a psychopathic
system ---run by psychopaths ---appealing
to psychopaths ---for the enrichment of
psychopaths. USURY is a deviant system.
It can NEVER bring forth ANYTHING good,
true and lasting. ---NEVER. Absolutely
NEVER."
-ALAN WATT
(awesome online coverage
of the CON)
------------------------------------------------EVER!
Dean from Ohio| 10.22.11 @ 9:37AM
Psychopath (from Dictionary.com):
1. a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.
2. any mental disease.
I don't know, POST American/Alan, but I would guess you're closer to psychopathy than you realize. Step away from the computer, do something good for someone today, and spend time with real people.
aware| 10.22.11 @ 12:18PM
GnR=gutter trash. Been a Metal Head all my life, didn't get them then and don't get it even now. 1 note from Axel and I have the urge to shoot the radio.
Bums get fawned all over, more for the spectacle than musical talent, while this is "obscure": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....re=related
But these guys are musicians not wastiods, so no spectacle.
The Clintidote| 10.22.11 @ 7:39PM
They did contribute ONE useful thing to entertainment: the opening soundtrack to the Burnout Paradise videogame.
And that's about it.
Seek| 10.24.11 @ 6:09PM
Oh, c'mon. Slash is a fine guitarist. No? Do I hear a "no" from the crowd?
olderndirt | 10.22.11 @ 3:32PM
I don't like these stories. I'm more than glad some get away from drugs but those who become millionairs send the wrong message. That message is, use drugs until it almost kills you, straighten up and become rich. How about a long story on Winehouse?
caitlin| 10.24.11 @ 8:41AM
Is it really a message? I can almost hear a publicist (or friend) telling him to write a book as another way of making a living. It's been done by many before...
POST American| 10.23.11 @ 12:45AM
------------------BOTTOM LINE------------------------
BE MEN --and speak to the issues
engulfing us. . .
Ron| 10.24.11 @ 12:49PM
Axl Rose was a knucklehead back in Indiana in High School...his group started a fight with my High School best friend, but backed down when he realized a bunch of West Lafayette jocks were going to kick his skinny, goofy butt back home...
sean| 10.24.11 @ 4:15PM
Gee Ron, how long have you been telling tht story? Your claim to fame? Do you think the readers here will know how tough you and your bds were in high school? NOBODY CARES.
Pete | 2.15.12 @ 12:28AM
I read Adler's book. Skip it.