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.
