2019.05.23 - WTF with Marc Maron - Interview with Duff

Duff McKagan weathered the storm of rock and roll excess and now finds himself with a loving family, sobriety, a reunited band, and a new solo album. Duff takes Marc back to the days when he first met Axl Rose, when Guns N’ Roses became one of the biggest bands in the world, and when heroin decimated his entire scene and nearly ended his life. Duff also talks about the lesson he learned from Joe Strummer that still guides him today, why Slash still blows his mind, and how he keeps himself grounded by being out in the world talking with people.



https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1021-duff-mckagan

Transcript of relevant parts:


13:33
No, is that alright? Yeah I think so, just yes, if you get up on that mic. I hate the sound of my voice. You do? Yeah. Come on. I do. Well how the fuck do you record a record? I, I, what, singing and all that, I don't really have cans on. Really? Yeah. Huh. I'll sing, I'll get a key and I'll sing. Oh, and that's it? And then you listen to playback or no? Yeah, yeah. You just tell Shooter like, all right, just you decide, I'm outta here. No, well, I mean, sort of. Yeah. Now, we'll go, he's really quick at comping vocals. He's like comping as I'm doing a vocal. What does that mean, comping? Well, so I'll do, I'll sing a pass through the song. I'll do another pass. Right. Maybe a third pass. Right. And he's already, so he'll take a, a line from the first verse, he likes the first pass I did, and then he'll take a second line from me. I get it, I get it. So he's cutting it up, he's making notes. As we're going. That's smart. Yeah, so by the time I walk in the room, he's got it comped. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the record, the new record, I don't generally, these aren't really plug-generated interviews, but you know, this is what you're out there talking about, and I listen to it, and it feels like, you know, it feels like a record you had to make.

14:51
Like, you know, that things were kind of working up inside you. You're at an age now where you can process shit and write shit down and have some wisdom and some reflection. There are things bothering you. There are things that were painful in your life. And this is the record, a grown up record. The record. You know, I really did, Mark. I've written two books. I was a columnist for Seattle for five years. I wrote columns for Playboy and ESPN.

15:20
and I got used to articulating my thoughts on the written word. Yeah. I found a voice. Yeah. And so on this two and a half year tour that Guns did, it was amazing. The last one. This last tour we did, this huge tour we just did. It was amazing that we were back together. Yeah. And there was this sense of ease in my life. Yeah. Because we had talked things out. You had, all of you.

15:49
Yeah, and that was really important, more than anything else. Was Gilby on it? Who was on the guitar? It was Slash. No, Slash and Axl. So the three of us are the ones who ended the thing. Izzy had left back in 91. Steven didn't. Yeah, before that. And so the last year and a half, two years of the Illusions Tour in the 90s, it was just the three of us. So we ended it like that.

16:19
and we got back together like that. And my point to that is there was a lot of kind of dirty water under the bridge between those, the end and the beginning. And we addressed those things as like grown up motherfuckers, you know. And, And it worked. And so also the point of that is, you know, I was at this sort of intellectual or psychic ease. And

16:48
coinciding with this ease and our band's spectacle. We're playing really amazingly huge shows everywhere you go. You're like playing country. It's like the entire country comes. In Estonia it was kind of that. It was, you know, there was kind of shows that was actually that. But I am, I'm a stoop guy. I've traveled since I was in punk rock bands.

17:17
15 years old. I left high school because I was touring. Yeah, you wanted to be in the rock life. Yeah, and I went to like alternative school where you didn't have to show up. Sure. And Kim from the Fastback, she was 18, and she was my high school counselor because she was 18. She would sign off on work I did. So they didn't even know you dropped out for a year. No, I went to this alternative school, which is called NOVA, it was like the hippies that started it. Doesn't matter. My...

17:45
My point is I've traveled a lot, especially maybe since I got sober and kind of went through this whole martial arts thing that I did and still do and became self-aware and self-responsible and started writing columns where I became a kind of observationalist over time. I wasn't like...

18:12
checking people out. I wasn't like coming to your house and checking you out and writing a column on it. It wasn't like that. But looking outside at the world and having some thoughts on it. Yes. Yeah. And inarguably, the two and a half years that we were on this tour were some of the most interesting political times, not just in America, but around the world. Sure, the enclosing authoritarianism. That you and I have seen in our life.

18:40
Yeah, we didn't think we would, but it seems to be happening. Yeah, these are the things that we were raised in school to recognize as bad. And shouldn't happen again. Right. We've seen, the problem is I read so much history. Yeah. And I'm an armchair historian. Right. I have been since I was 30. I read. So in other words, you're freaked out. Mm. A little.

19:07
But no, I'm not. But you know the precedent. I know the precedent, for sure, and there's many of them. Even just in America, this has happened before. Right. But this is where you were compelled to write the songs. So I wasn't compelled to write songs originally. I was gonna maybe write my third book, and it was gonna be observations on my travels. Right, yeah.

19:34
in getting out and talking to people, we play every third day because it's a huge stage and we're playing the stadiums and one stage goes to the next city and it takes two days to build this thing. So we play every third day. And how are you guys playing? Good? Oh, yeah, thanks. We are kicking fucking asses. Yeah, we're playing really good, better than we've ever played, thank you. That's great. Yeah, yeah, no, that is all good. I gotta tell you, that is all good. We are all.

20:04
Way better musicians and we've all. Most of you are sober? Yeah. Yeah, I talked to Slash, it was great. We had a great conversation. Oh, Slash is this, yeah, I mean, he's sober and all he does is, it's funny, you know, as you go along in your life as a musician, I think we're lucky at, maybe it's the time we came up, I don't know, but we were so invested in our instruments and becoming better and.

20:33
and I don't think that'll ever stop. I think what I learned maybe from punk rock, you know, early days of punk rock, was just be real and truthful, and if you're gonna do something, do it 110%, you know? Even if it kills you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, almost did. But... I never knew he was such a, like I always heard that he was such a monster on guitar, but like even when I listened to the earlier Gunn stuff,

20:59
The way they were mixed, they didn't put the leads way up front. I kind of had to pick them out a little bit. I could hear the riffs, but I never got a true sense of what he could really do until I was going to interview him. So I went to see his last band, the newest band. What's it called? Who's that guy he works with? Miles Kennedy. Yeah. I saw them at the Troubadour, I think. So this little tiny place. And it was the first time I'd seen Slash. I never saw Guns Live. And that guy, I was just sort of like, what the fuck is happening? Yeah.

21:29
I mean, he does that to me now. And he really? Yeah, he really does. He, I mean, I met him, I moved down here in 84. He had an ad in the recycler, right? This guy named Slash. So I thought he was like this punk rock dude. And it said Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and fear. Yeah, okay, fear I get. The punkers in 84 were looking, we were gonna invent the new thing. What was it gonna be? Yeah.

21:57
But I went and met him at Cantor's, him and Steven Adler, and we went to his mom's basement, and he started playing acoustic guitar, and he played at 19, like he does now. No. And I played with some really cool guitar players up to that point. I'd been in a bunch of bands. Never seen anything like this. He just locks in, man. He loses himself. Jesus. He loses himself to a point sometimes on stage where I have to...

22:21
tap him because his eyes are closed. And I've had to do this for years, like come over and tap him with my foot. Time to get on with the song, man. Oh, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But your point being that you were going to all these different places in the world and you had three days to get out in the world. I have two days off and I'm a guy who's always liked to get out and see stuff. Sure. And I'll go to museums. That's good. I'll go to, depends on where we're at. Sure. On the planet, I'll go to the.

22:50
do a tour of Normandy with a guide. Or I'll go to Auschwitz. But I get out and when you get out, the thing is about that, you talk to people. And I go to cafes. In America I go out and I'll do side trips in my bus. I'll go to Little Bighorn. I'll go to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. I'll go to World War I Museum in Kansas City. We're not even playing Kansas City, but it's on the way from Denver to Little Rock. Let's stop there.

23:19
That's great. And you talk to people. And what I saw was, in this two and a half years, I would watch news in America, right? And I would get on Twitter, and I'd get, I was getting, you know, I'd get freaked out. Getting freaked out. Every day. Before you get out of bed, you can get freaked out. You can get freaked out. But I'd go out, and I would talk to, then I would go to places, and I'm like, I'm not seeing this divide that they're talking about.

23:49
I'm in the South and I'm in the places and I'm in quote unquote red places or blue places. I'm like this place isn't red. Number one, it's not red, it's just a place where the humans live and coincide and work together and do stuff. They don't become monsters until they get online. Pretty much. But then we would go to like South America, let's say. The next leg would be, we'd go from, you know, return to the States, go from Texas down to South America.

24:19
Yeah, Brazil, Argentina, we go everywhere. Yeah. Central America, Mexico, but you don't have the three news stations because there's nothing, you don't watch TV. And I found myself really getting, I'd post something on Twitter like sound check, a picture, you know, and I wouldn't look. Yeah. And I never look at comments as it is, but I would just stop looking at Twitter. And I noticed like in one week, quality of my life became.

24:46
so much better and I started writing about that. I'm like, I wonder what that is. How much input, I was doing like a self study of like input on media to my brain. Yeah man, because like you are shattering your brain. I mean you're dumping more information in there than you need and you're having an over, like too many human reactions to them. You're gonna have emotional reactions. So like a speed ball. Every bit, you're just kind of frying your fucking mind.

25:16
And then all of a sudden, I guess you find you're actually thinking and acting and feeling compulsive at the same speed that you can get information. Right? So you're not just hanging out at a cafe. You probably have some withdrawals. Sort of like, there's probably a couple of days when you're not on Twitter going like, oh God, I gotta check or, you know.

25:38
And then I didn't have a withdrawal, and I kind of started thinking, I'm a little long on the tooth to be checking Twitter. I read too many books for this. I'm not an intellectual or whatever, but it's funny how quick you will. I had a...

25:58
coffee with my buddy in Seattle. It was during one of the breaks of the tour. And he's been through, if you knew this guy, he's my age, he's been through, nothing's been handed to him. He was a junkie and a fuck up and all of this. And he got sober and he started this working building house, he's a pound and nails. And he built himself up to a point now where he owns the company. But nothing was handed to him. But we're having coffee, if you knew this guy's past. And we're in Seattle.

26:28
And we're having a coffee, and we're talking about some political stuff and labels. I mean, lefties, elites, and he goes, Duff, you and I, we're the elites they're talking about. I'm like, what do you mean? You don't know my story, you know what handed me anything? He goes, no, no, no, it doesn't matter. Hollywood. You make over 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year, you live on the West Coast, you live in LA and Seattle.

26:57
You're one of the elites, I am. He goes, I'm one of the elites, I own a company. I live in Seattle, and it's just how quickly label people are redneck, or a lefty, or extreme right. Some woman wrote a book about that. Just recently I saw her interviewed on Bill Marshall, the boxing in through labeling. How it degrades the nature of the person and a culture. Once you start naming people, it immediately puts them in a box and denies.

27:26
other identification in the dialogue. Sure, and in truth, we're just, so I'm traveling during this, all this stuff's going on, I'm getting this information, my friend in Seattle, the elites, and I'm like, I realize like, okay, man, we're just throwing labels around. I don't remember Lefty being there like three years ago. It was around. It was around, but it now it's- It replaced Commie in the late 60s. Yeah, my oldest, I have the youngest eight kids, I have seven older.

27:55
You grew up with eight kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was hippies, you know, like my older brothers and sisters were hippies. Two of my brothers were in Vietnam War. Really? Yeah, and so I grew up, my mom took me on a march, brought me out of kindergarten. She was a Catholic woman. The Catholic women went on a march when Martin Luther King got shot. So I don't know why, I got a black arm band on. I'm asking my mom, what happened? And you're like six? Five, yeah. And...

28:23
And my mom said, well, they shot this man. He was a peaceful man. So why they shouldn't, well, just because. And I never got a better answer. Like, well, they just shot a guy because they killed him. And my brothers are in Vietnam. And I said, why are they in Vietnam? Well, two old men from these countries didn't agree. So they sent their young men to go fight over their disagreement. I've never found a better answer than that.

28:51
that my kindergarten answered to war. My brothers, are they gonna be okay? Did they come back? They both came back, yeah. And how were they? My brother Mark, who just passed, he never talked about it from the time. He was a little withdrawn, for sure. You remember him before and after? I don't remember him before, but he was very withdrawn.

29:15
Never would talk about, even I went to this, I read a lot, I went to this whole Vietnam phase of reading the things they carried and all these amazing Vietnam books. And I would try to talk to him. And all those movies were coming up, Platoon and all that stuff. And I tried to talk to Mark and he said the one movie, one thing he said to me, he goes, the movie Hamburger Hill, that's what it was like. Oh. Senseless, taking Hill number.

29:44
you know, whatever that was, 62. Yeah. And for no, in the bottle, a lot of guys were killed and then you get the objective and you just move on. Wouldn't keep the objective, just move on. So that was the most information I got from him about his experience. What about the other one? John was fine, my oldest brother, he was, he flew kind of, I guess, I guess.

30:11
spy missions, they would fly over and take photos, and he was fine, you know. So your other brother was in the shit, and my other brother was in the shit. And one was in the air. Yeah. Yeah. And, but growing up with all those experiences, and you know, I remember the commies, and I remember lefties back then. Sure. Just all this stuff, and pinkos, and you know.

30:32
That's weird, because you grew up in it. You and I are like exactly the same age. I'm 55. Me too. And like, you know, I remember very early on, like I didn't have brothers. Were you the youngest? Yeah, I'm the youngest. Really, of eight? So how many boys, how many girls? My parents are, I grew up with depression era values. My parents grew up in the- In Catholic values, clearly. My mom went south of the Catholic church when it was the Vatican II came in. It got really conservative.

31:01
I just remember us going to Catholic Church where the nuns didn't wear habits. So more liberal Catholic thinking. She went that way and then she, yeah, she kind of left the Catholic Church. So my older siblings grew up more in the Catholic indoctrination and Catholic schools. And she shifted in the 60s? I went to public schools. Oh, you got lucky. My next oldest brother and I went to public schools. You got the street education. Yeah. But how many girls, how many boys? Three sisters, five boys.

31:30
That's insane. But I remember, I didn't have proximity like you did, which must have been helpful in a lot of ways. But I remember when I was very young and the Vietnam War was going on and I saw the hippies, I instantly wanted to be that. They'd show them on TV and shit with the clothes they were wearing, and I was like, dad, those are them. That's what I wanna be. Look at them smoking and hanging out, growing their hair long. I remember having a profound effect on me.

31:57
And I wanted nothing more than to be that kind of, I wanted that rock and roll kind of hippie thing. Yeah, I had an older brother, Bruce, still do, who played in a band then. In the 60s? In the 60s, and the Sonics were a big thing in Seattle. Yeah, I have a reissue of one of their records. I think Jack White reissued some Sonics record. I mean, it's classic garage rock. Yeah, yeah, sure. So they were around? We had the Sonics record. It was a...

32:24
Dayglow Orange. And I was, being a little kid, that's the record you wanna put on. It's Dayglow Orange. Yeah, it's cool. And they had a song called The Witch. You know, I thought it was about a real witch like on a broom. Yeah. But I guess. Did you make your, isn't your new record coming out in Dayglow something? Or is it gold or? There's no Dayglow. Oh, there's a yellow and red vinyl. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Could've went with Dayglow, just a little nostalgia. Yeah, maybe. I guess.

32:50
So you had that music in the house when you were very young, like you had all this influence. You had brothers with record collections and you had like long hair and weed and stuff and you saw all that shit. There was weed, a lot of weed, yeah. I smoked my first weed when, it's funny because I have girls who are 18 and 21 now and raising them up too. I smoked weed in the fourth grade and I'm looking at my girls in the fourth grade and I'm like, that's really, really young. 18 and 21, so.

33:20
So they never knew you fucked up? Nope. Wow, good for you. But there's plenty of YouTube, you know. I had to. They could find it. Yeah, I had to do a search on Duff fucked up and they can see it. Probably. Yeah, I've never done that because I don't want to. But they know my story because I've told them my story. And I've told them, look guys, you have like half of my genes in you. And we gotta be careful.

33:49
You got it genetically, you think? It goes back, you're old man, and where's the alcoholism? Where's the... It's kind of everywhere. My family, my mom's brother's family, he got sober, he was a doctor, my mom's brother. He was the one who...

34:10
that they put all the family resources into? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. In the 40s. We got one. Yeah, let's go. We're gonna deliver this one all the way through. It's either gonna be a priest or a doctor, and let's go. So there was, yeah, alcoholism for sure. So you knew sober alcoholics. You knew that there was people in your family that no longer drank because it was bad for them. Those are the ones you hid from. Yeah. You didn't wanna hear it? You didn't wanna hear it. Oh no, you don't wanna be judged. Do you just do it with your own system, or you do the thing?

34:40
I got sober. Cause I'm coming up on 20 and I do the thing. You do the thing. Yeah. I like the thing. Yeah. And I have a lot of friends and I like going to those fellowship groupings. Yeah. Secret meetings, secret society. It's a secret society. Yeah, yeah. We have a handshake and all of that. Handshake, we got...

35:02
things that we do together. We wear hats. Yeah, really, where's that one? Are you going, hey, hey, hey, hey, I wanna go to the hat meeting. But I got sober in a really, for me it was profound. It had to be because my body took a leptin at 30 and my pancreas burst. Well, let's work up to that. Like, let's go back to.

35:24
to the Sonics record and your brothers from Vietnam and the records in the house. Cause we were downstairs talking about records and you said you had a relationship with a record player. I had a relationship, well we had a, man we had a reel to reel. It was a while before we got the Technics or Techniques turntable. Yeah, like a Tiac reel to reel. We had a reel to reel. My brother brought back from Vietnam, receiver and speakers. And just when FM radio started. Yeah.

35:53
Right, and we had reel to reel, so we had James Gang, Sly and the Family Stone. On reel to reel. Reel to reel. The boxes. I knew how to do all that stuff. Had the little leader on it, and if you needed to make a new one, you could tape it on there. James Gang, man, Joe Walsh. Really cool tapes, and then we got, and then there was FM Radio in Seattle. They would just play, I think they would just play records. The whole side, yeah. Yeah. And so there was a lot of, you know, there was stuff I did.

36:22
didn't like, because I'm a little kid, right? So your tastes go to more Sly and the Family Stone, like wow, there's a lot going on. There's all these voices. Or Sgt. Pepper's because of the cover of the record. But you know, Bob Dylan or Iron Butterfly, just like was too, like Dylan as a little kid, it was like just this guy talking over and over again. I was like, I can't do that. But you had a lot in the house and you had a lot going on and you had the.

36:50
you know, like siblings who are actually engaged in what was happening in the world, and a mother who was engaged in what was happening in the world, and you saw it from an early age, so it's like it makes sense that you're kind of compelled now or in the last decade or two whenever to sort of go out into the world and educate yourself and see what's up. Because there is a sentiment on this record of wanting social change, observing,

37:20
you know, how we're losing our grasp of what's good. Yeah, and I think, you know, not to sound like, I'll just say it. Yeah. The America that I know, and I'll just talk about America, because I'm American, right? I could talk about other countries, but that's way more observational, and I've traveled to these countries a lot in the last 30-something years.

37:50
I can't, over, I mean, Germany, before the wall went down, I've been there, you know, when the wall was going down, after it went down. Touring. I could tell you a lot about what I observed there, but I'm not German. Right. As an American, we grew up with eight kids, my dad was a fireman, you do the math, how much money we had, right? He's a fireman, huh? So we had to feed all these kids, right? Everyone's wearing each other's clothes. That's it. Yeah. And big bags of Cheerios, and you don't know any better, who cares, you know? You're eating breakfast.

38:19
You're eating breakfast, man. It's Cheerios every day, but you just assume that's what everybody else has, too. Yeah, until some guy, you go to your friend's house for breakfast and you're like, what's this? Well, it was like in middle school. Man, I can tell you so many interesting things. As an adult, I can look back and go, that was so interesting. I started public school the year that we started integration and busing in Seattle. Yeah.

38:46
My family is mixed. My oldest sister, Carol, married a black man in 1962. It was not, you know, that was, it was illegal in some states, in a lot of states, because my oldest two nephews and niece are mixed. And they're about my age. Anyhow, so there was a kid on our block, he was a Caucasian kid, but he had white blotches on his skin. It was a pigment thing, so I thought there was just like,

39:16
And then there was a Filipino family that lived across the street. So there was people that, there was polka dotted kids. And there was mixed kids. That was one of the races you thought, the polka dotted kids. With white swatches. We all played together, right? And so it's definitely a learned behavior to have something against somebody with a different color, for sure. Because we just played together.

39:45
And yeah, there's an innocent questioning, like, you know, what's that? How come you're different, but not like, you know, fuck you, you're different. No, it would last maybe about 30 seconds and then you'd move on because you gotta pick teams for, for, you know. You gotta run around. Yeah, throwing dirt clouds at each other, right? So an interesting way to grow up. I don't think Seattle really, there wasn't a, that I knew of a racist, there was the central district, the CD we called it. Where'd you grow up? And the central district was where,

40:15
you know, was African American. Yeah, my ex-wife, my first ex-wife grew up in Seattle and her dad is married to an African American woman and she kind of grew up. In the city? Yeah, I think so, I'm not sure which part, but she wrote a book about it, about growing up with a dad who was basically a white guy who was encultured black. You know, he was that trip, it's called I'm Down. And. Yeah, if you read like the Quincy Jones book, Q, where he, you know.

40:45
It's talking about Seattle and the jazz scene, and Ray Charles moved there when he was 15. There was quite a black jazz scene in the 40s, and it was pretty open, I think. It seemed like it was a pretty fertile music scene of all kinds, right? It proves to be, there's something about the air up there and the dope that... I saw the dope come into that town. The black dope, right?

41:13
I saw it coming in 81 and 82, when it really first came in, and it decimated my whole scene. That's why I moved to LA. I mean, that was like the final. When did you start playing out? So you saw the creation of what became the grunge scene, but as a kid you knew the sonics were there, but all throughout your childhood, there was music, rock music, happening in Seattle. So when did you become

41:42
part of the scene that was evolving. Okay, because I'm from a family of eight kids, you got nothing of your own. So you might have like, this baseball bat is mine. Right? And that's, it's mine. It's not ours, it's mine. And I saw punk rock flyers on the telephone poles, the mentors and the Lude and DOA. Yeah.

42:08
I just started kind of, my brother, older brother, showed me three chords on the guitar. I started playing bass. There was a drum kit next door at the neighbors. I would play that. It's made to keep time. How old are you?

42:23
Fifth grade, sixth grade, when I'm keeping time and I'm playing, you play these three chords and don't fuck up, you know, and play, today's your birthday on a, na na na na na na, okay. That's what I realized later, that's the major blues scale. Sure, yeah. I didn't have to learn much more than that. Yeah, three chords, a pentatonic scale and keep time. And there's the notes in there. I didn't learn much more than that until I started taking bass lessons in my 40s.

42:51
Didn't need to, you know, it's all ear. And so anyhow, I see these punk rock posters and I'm like, that's something that could be my own. And I was so intrigued by it. And I saw there was a kid with a pink mohawk that would walk through a neighborhood. And then finally I talked to him and he's like, hey, I'm starting a band, man. You wanna play in my band? And I was 13. And my buddy, Andy, my best friend, like him and I, he played drums. I play bass, if that's what it took.

43:21
I got a Gibson EBO to this guy. I had a paper route. I bought it for 125 bucks. I'm sure it was hot. Yeah. But it was 125 bucks. I could save up for my paper route. Got that bass. Put a, you know, eventually I put a black flag stick. I don't know what happened to this bass, by the way. Anybody out there listening? Sees this bass? I lost it in like 85.

43:43
in LA, if somebody found it. I'll do you a solid, no questions asked, Gibson EBO. Anyhow, we started this band called The Veins, and all I knew what to do was write a song.

44:03
whatever that meant. Right. And I wasn't good enough to write a song like The Witch. I mean, that's like a real song. Sonic's tunes. So we would just, the Sonic song, or our Beatle song, so you would just write, I got turned on to the Pistols. Yeah. And I got turned on to The Sweet. Yeah. And I got turned on, D.O.A. was on Hard Kiss. Yeah. And The Avengers, and The Clash, and I got turned on to 999 and UK subs, and all of this stuff came flying in.

44:32
and the Slade and then somebody said, well, you know, this came from the Stooges, you know? And I'm like, oh, and I'm like, all of a sudden the Stooges, oh my God, I'm going crazy because all of this great music is dropping into my lap. I'm dropping and we're writing songs. We don't know how to write songs. And, but we just, the thing is we got a gig in a week. So we got to write the songs and you just go out and play them. And we, I remember we,

45:00
Andy and I, we were little thieves, man, and we stole all these milk cartons, plastic ones, out of the back of a grocery store. The crates? The crates. Yeah. And then we stole some lumber and we built a stage, but suddenly, like, we had our own stage. We could play anywhere. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. And so you would rent these. We had it in like two pieces, this dumb stage, and we'd rent like union halls. Right. And you'd have to put on a front.

45:30
Yeah, it was like you'd have to call a dance, you'd have to hire an off-duty cop for like 30 bucks, I think. It was a dollar to get in, so you just had to make enough money to pay for the place and the cop. Sometimes you charge two dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But. And you're selling tickets? I don't know. Yeah, people are coming, you're playing for somebody. Somebody's doing it.

45:56
and we just put on shows and little clubs would pop up and close down. But never knew how to really write a song, just riffs and like an idea of like, it's all middle school stuff. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I wrote this song called The Fake, it was the first song I ever wrote. It's on a single, you can find it. Oh really? The Veil single from 1979. Yeah. My voice hadn't changed yet. Oh, yeah. And I'm singing the song and it's actually

46:25
Part of it's like, you'll recognize the jungle riff in there, the verse riff. Yeah. It's down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, this fake song. Yeah. My voice hadn't changed. It was about this girl in middle school who was just being a fake, man. Yeah, a fake. But you know, you go back to, yeah. Yeah. It's just fake. Yeah, good one. Yeah, thank you. You got a single? Do you have any of those records? You have any? I don't, I...

46:50
No, and I guess I think those singles are like $1,000 if you find an original one. Someone give Duff his record. And then kind of matriculating through the punk rock scene and realizing, well, you go see a lot of the bands. You go see every band that came through town. It's like a community. Yeah, there's about 100 of us. Right, and then people would come into town and you have to find out from somebody because the punk scene was all about people hearing things and where like small. Record store. Oh, our record store, no. But Scott.

47:19
McCoy who went on to play in the Young Fresh Fellows and REM was our record store guy and He would he worked at the counter and he knew all the stuff you could look at Magazines NME, you know, yeah, sure New York. What was that? You're a rocker, right? Yeah, and punk magazine came out. Yeah, and I think the first Zine may have been maximum rock and roll. There was there was flipside and slash. Yeah

47:49
But we were open to everything. ACDC at first was like a punk rock band. It was accepted first in punk rock. Oh yeah. And they went and opened for, they played The Coliseum in Seattle, which is now the key arena. They opened, it was ACDC, Cheap Trick, and Kiss. I saw ACDC with Journey. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, and I was there to see Journey. Okay. And you were probably like, what is this punk rock band? I was like, what is this going? It was with Bond and it was crazy.

48:19
And we were just so open, and we got to see so many great shows. Damn Kennedys, and soon enough, I was in bands that were getting more serious, and hardcore was kinda coming in. I was in this band, it was a hardcore band called The Farts, and I played drums super fast, and the singer of that band was- The Farts? The Farts. Yeah. Was way more politically astute. We were so young, I don't know how-

48:47
like happy apathy. It was all political. Reagan was coming in, like all this stuff was going on. And he was writing about it. And he turned me on to Tank, and he turned me on, it must have been 1980, to Motorhead. Ace of Spades had just come out like, oh, this encompasses everything, right? This is everything. Then we went down that. Metal and punk and rock.

49:13
Yeah, Tank, there was a band Tank, but this guy also turned me on to Blue Cheer. And you know, your world's just exploding, your mind's exploding with all this great music. And these bands that we'd come and see play, even The Clash, I saw them pre-London Calling at the Paramount. And again, there's those 100 of us there. And this one, before it was even Slamdance, it was Pogoing still. Sure, sure, yeah. And the security there at the Paramount.

49:42
They were used to more straight shows, I guess, or whatever, and plays and stuff. And they see these kids jumping up and down and a big yellow-coated guy in the front punched a guy. Of course, I knew the guy he punched because I knew every punker in town. Broke his nose during the class show because he thought we were fighting, I guess. And Strummer stopped the show. And Paul Simonon came out with an ax from the side, like a firefighting ax, to chop down the wooden barrier.

50:11
And he said, Strummer said, there's no difference between us and you. We're in this thing together. And he dressed down in security, like we're in this, we're human beings, you know? This guy's just dancing and he broke his nose. And you know, and stopped the show. And I realized, man, these guys are so exotic. This is the Clash. They're singing about London's burning. I have no idea what that means, you know? But.

50:37
but he stopped the show to say that we're all in this together, that there's no difference between them and us. And that stuck with you. To this day. Yeah. When I play shows, you know, I've met so many fans, going back to me going out and meeting people and talking to people, I've met so many fans and I've been over the years, you know, even, and now, and when you assume you're the most interesting person in the room, I always find myself to be.

51:05
so wrong and so full of my fucking self. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's people that are coming to our shows that have so many stories and there might be somebody, wife might have just died of cancer and they bring in their little girl. Because Sweet Child of Mine was this song that they had in common with their mom. That happened? They came to seven shows in a row and they're crying when we play that song. What's going on there?

51:34
and I met them on the street in New Orleans. I was out with my wife, and it was this guy and his little girl. I got daughters, man. I'm like, I see you guys at the shows, and then we were walking, and they said, we don't wanna bother you guys. We're just, no, you're not bothering us. We're just walking in New Orleans. And they were so sweet, and I gave the little girl a pic, and she started crying. I had a good heart, picks it in my pocket. And the...

52:02
the dad, he started telling me the story, you know, of the mom that she passed away, and then Sweet Child of Mine was the song. And I'm like, that's why you guys are, he brings her up front to these huge shows, and so many stories like that, that these aren't just punters coming to our show, you know what I mean? And it goes back to Joe Strummer, like I was an interesting person at that Clash show, I had a story, we all had stories in the Clash, had the stories, but together, we're stronger together.

52:32
And also you've been around now in this band in one form or another, whether it was on record and even when you weren't in the band, to where there's multi-generations. Like you have- There is multi, like three. Yeah, so you got grandparents, parents and grandparents turning grandkids on and parents turning kids on to this music, which is pretty timeless. You know, we say we're 55 years old because we are.

53:02
But we're really not like, I still see, because there's the Stones and there's like Sabbath and Aerosmith, couple, I mean, these are the bands I was listening to as a kid. They're in their 70s, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you see the fans of the Stones coming. Sure.

53:18
And those are like the grandparents, I guess, right? Sure, I mean, I go, you know, when I went to the Stone Show, I was like, I'm not the oldest guy here, man. I mean, some of these cats have been with them since the beginning, so they're the same age, or in the late 60s, 70s. Yeah, and the people, the parents, I guess, are like my age, or some of the people my age are grandparents, for sure. So you'll see a whole collection of people together.

53:44
you recognize that's a family. And it's like, I think initially, like, you know, if you go back to your younger self, you would think that would deny the menace of the music. But, you know, as you get older and you realize that this is part of the American song book in a way, and it's a global phenomenon, and that it stays, you know, music stays around forever. You know, you're not up there going like, you know, fuck you old people. You know, you know, you're now it's sort of like, yeah, we play this music because we love it, we made it, and it's for everybody. And it's sort of sweet.

54:12
to see several generations of people. Yeah, I mean, if they're into, it's so easy as a song or coma, which is about a guy looking for a way to suicide. You know, like, cool. You want your kid to hear that good. And they're rocking out to coma. You know, like, what a brutal song. So when you were coming up, like, you know, when.

54:36
So you were in Seattle when Alice in Chains and Nirvana and Soundgarden, or had you already left? I left in 84. So that was before? Yeah, so I knew Chris, Cornell, Kim Thale. They hadn't started Soundgarden yet. But you guys were hanging around, they were part of the punk scene, some of them? Yeah. And you saw the dope come in? Ben Shepard from Soundgarden, those guys were all part of the early punk scene. And you saw the dope come in? I saw the dope come in to Seattle.

55:03
1981, late 1981. Yeah. And there were some people, some of the older people doing, they're shooting heroin in their arms, like okay. Now had you been aware of that with your brother's generation? I mean, because a lot of those guys came back kinda fucked up. Yeah, my brother didn't come back fucked up on drugs. That's good. Yeah, so I didn't see heroin in Seattle until it came into my scene. And it came in,

55:34
it seemed like there was just this huge influx of heroines suddenly. There was, yeah. Yeah, and. It's a new market, a new kind of dope. Yeah, and. It was that black dope, right, the tar? It was tar. Yeah, so that was a whole new thing. Yeah, and it suddenly, everybody in my scene, the scene had gotten bigger by 82, there was people, there was the, you know, there was the suburban kids coming in, and they thought Slamdance was.

56:01
fighting and you know, I could comment on just that. The shift from the pogo to the slam dance. To the slam dance too, then you see like some kids coming from the, all of a sudden like white power shit and like whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys got this all wrong. Yeah, yeah. This isn't about that. They come in from Idaho or whatever. Eastern Washington or whatever. Yeah. It came in and really decimated. I had a job, I had a band that was doing really well. We got signed to Jell-O's label, Alternative Tentacles. Oh yeah.

56:30
This band, the Farts had morphed into this band called 10 Minute Warning. We went on tour with Black Flag, we went on tour with Dead Kennedys. We were maybe the, we were the first band to slow things down, and we were playing like these long, slowed down, psychedelic, crazy songs. And we got signed to Jell-O's thing. We could have been like, we were gonna be the thing. This band was serious, but then heroin came into the band. Yeah.

56:58
just decimated this band we just got. Oh man, our band, not our band. And my roommate I lived with, he got strung out. Who was my, these are all my friends there, my best friends. And you just see him turn into those zombies. Yeah, and then it happened to my girlfriend. And just seemingly everyone around me. And by this time I'm 19. And you didn't get involved with it then? No, I was, I did, dude, I did so many drugs by the time I was.

57:28
16, did I went straight edge for a year and a half. Like I'd done, QALYS, Valium, Cocaine. Acid? Acid, yes. Man, we could walk home from school and pick mushroom. We knew, by seventh grade, I knew how to discern a Liberty Cap from anything else. Okay? So yeah, very young.

57:54
I'd given up, that was for hippies, by the time I'm like ninth grade, you know? And got into some harder drugs, didn't get into heroin because it hadn't hit by the time ninth grade, I don't think, but I was, at the same time, I was getting very serious about music. By my 10th grade, I was, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna stop doing crime, I'm gonna stop stealing cars, I'm gonna stop doing drugs. Did you get busted for that shit? My friend got busted.

58:24
for Grand Theft Auto, my best friend. It's a high speed chase. And that's when I was like, okay, we're done. You weren't in the car that night. I was not, no, no, lucky. I had gotten arrested in the eighth grade for throwing rocks at a cop car, blah, blah, blah. But that was about as drastic as it went. So all this dope comes in, you see people dying.

58:50
People died. Yeah, and that's when you decided to leave? People, oh man, man, people, like, there was a drug house. All my friends, their house turned into a drug house where you go get a score. And like a Mexican gang came in, tied them all up, had machine guns, masks.

59:12
one of the girls got sexually molested, they pistol whipped a guy. Like it was getting very, very serious. Where's the dope, where's the money? Beating the fuck out of the guy. This kind of dark stuff started happening all over the place. In the mid-80s. It's 83. 83, and I'm playing music, my band signed the jello label, my band's falling apart. My friend comes to me, who's a junkie, and he says, man, if you don't get out now, like you're our hope.

59:41
You know, you're our hope. He knew he was lost. Yeah, and he's still alive, that guy, but he still is lost. But I'll never, can't take him enough for like pulling me aside and going, you gotta something. Yeah, I happened to meet with that one time and the drug dealer told me, I gotta get out of town. And I was like, okay, if you're telling me that. Right. Yeah, yeah. So in 84, so I had a job, I worked at this bakery.

01:00:11
being a baker's hard work, but I knew how to buy this, but I worked there a year and a half. By the end of that, I was an actual pastry chef. I started as a dishwasher, ended as a pastry chef. So you can cook a cake? I can cook, I can bake anything. As a pastry chef, yeah, like everything from sourdough bread. Do you still do it? I don't, my wife, I mean, once in a while, I'll make like.

01:00:34
But it's been so long, like I'll fuck it up. I'll try to make this lattice topped, you know, raspberry torte with, you know. And it looks awful. You're a little out of shape with the. Yeah, I'm out of, that's a thing with repetition. You're out of pie shape. I'm out of pie shape, yeah. But my wife, of course, is like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. You are the best baker. No, I'm not. Not anymore. That was like 40 years ago.

01:00:59
But thank you, honey. So you got that skill when you go to Los Angeles? So I have a resume, I had 360 bucks. No, by the time I'm 19, I toured in punk rock tours and done stuff, a lot of West Coast stuff. So I have 360 bucks, I sell my drum kit, which is a piece of shit, I sell it for like 100 bucks. I had what I'd saved up, which was like $215, and I had my $300 car, and I put,

01:01:28
Guitar amp, bass amp, I had a bass and a guitar, and I headed south. And little did I know, the guitar that I got in Seattle, that I traded for, it was stolen from LA five years prior from a guitar store in the Valley. So I come down, I finally get a job right away, because I have a resume. I think Northridge is LA. When you've been driving 24 hours, you see all those lights, okay, I'm in here in LA.

01:01:58
Forgetting where the Cathay de Grande is, the Cathay, Hollywood's further. But I was just done, I'm like done driving, I need a good job now. So I got a job at Black Angus in Northridge. Had a resume, they were hiring right away for a cook. Boom, there I was, I was working. And after that night of work, I asked an older guy, he was like a chef there, and I said, where's Hollywood? He's like, Hollywood's.

01:02:26
25 miles away, man. Yeah. Oh crap. Yeah, I'm close though. So I didn't have enough money to get an apartment. I stayed in my car for the first couple weeks, washed at work, got my first paycheck, got an apartment on IVAR. Yeah. And this is right when the Olympics had left LA. There was the Summer Olympics in 84. So I guess they had cleaned up Hollywood for the Olympics. Yeah.

01:02:56
The cops just left. So it was the Wild West, man. And if I was escaping heroin in Seattle, boy did I move into the center of it in Hollywood. And man, right, but at least I reckon, by this point I was thought, okay, well, it's just everywhere. And I'm here, moved to LA, I had to pawn my guitar. It was the most expensive thing I had. Just between paycheck and rent, there was this little lapse and I would have to pawn the guitar for $39, whatever it was.

01:03:27
and now I can make a rant and then I get my paycheck, go get my guitar out of Pond. I did it like five times and after the fifth time, these cops came to my shitty little apartment. I lived with thousands of cockroaches. Because they run the numbers from the pawn shops. Yeah, you have to give your ID. And they said, do you have this guitar? They were plain clothes cops, showed me their badges. I'm like, yeah, I have that guitar you're talking about. We gotta take it. They recognized I was too young.

01:03:56
to have stolen it five years earlier in LA. They saw my IDs from Washington State. They said, well, we have to take that guitar. They're looking at my apartment, I've got nothing. I've got a bass, though. And they take it and they said, we'll try to talk to the guitar store owner and see if you can buy it. But he called me, to his credit, he called me and he said, I can sell you, sorry, man, but it was stolen from me. I can sell you for 500 bucks. I'm like.

01:04:25
I don't have anything close. I'm just making rent into my phone bill. I didn't have car insurance. By this time I'm working at a phone sales place. You know, Bronson and Hollywood. And doing like driving stuff around that I didn't know, but it was okay because it was a bunch of Hungarian guys. And Mikey, my name's, they called me Mikey, right? Mikey doesn't ask questions.

01:04:53
I'm like, okay, it must be something bad in the back. I don't know what it is. Something bad in the back, that's the name of the next record. Right, you know, I think it was like, you know, back then it was fake Jordache jeans and fake. Knockoffs. Knockoffs, I think that's what I was driving around. I'd like to think that's what it was. Were you playing at all? So I, yeah, man, I mean, I came, that's what I came to do. Right. I didn't come. So you got no guitar now, now you got just a bass. So I meet Slash two weeks in. From the ad.

01:05:21
from the ad. What were the three bands? Aerosmith, Fear. Alice Cooper and Fear. And that's weird because that was exactly what you were working towards, right? It's great. It's perfect. His name is Slash, man. And so, yeah, we meet, he and Steven have a band called Road Crew. There's no singer, but at least there was a chance for me to play with Slash and Steven. And Slash was this, you know, I recognize him as like, this kid is like, this guy is like.

01:05:49
The golden child. Yeah. What is the deal? His mom was really nice to me, knew like I was down there by myself and she would call and check up on me and like, you know, you can always come over if you're hungry or something. Very sweet, I felt like I had like a home and Steven Adler was the sweetest guy. Izzy moved across the street from me some time in there the next, in that first couple of months. Just by coincidence, straddling, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I see this Johnny Thunders looking guy at the phone booth. Yeah.

01:06:18
doing what I know is a drug deal for sure. And anyhow, I talked to him afterwards. He's like, man, we kind of recognize each other as kind of like. Kindred spirits. Yeah, yeah. 84, you gotta realize 84. So disciples of punk rock and Johnny Thunders and Steve Jones' guitar playing. Right. Let's be honest, that's what it is. And so as he said, me and.

01:06:47
my friend was starting this band, you play bass, and it was Guns N' Roses, it was Axl. His friend was Axl, and Slash had taken me to see LA Guns when Axl was in LA Guns, right, 84. That must have been something. But I see this guy get up, and I'd seen Rollins like the first, when he first got in Black Flag, my first gig was opening for Black Flag with Ron Ray as a singer, right, before Rollins. And then Dez Kadena came through as a singer,

01:07:18
Dez went to guitar and Rollins, this guy who, I'd read, he'd written a couple things in Maximum Rock and Roll. I knew he was from DC, from SOA, he was this really kinda hardcore dude. Like, he was writing columns, and this guy was serious, and he's gonna be in Black Flag, that's a thing. And he's ready for it, and so my band, 10 Minute Warning, we did like four shows, or five shows with Black Flag with Henry.

01:07:45
His first time in, he was so intense man, and like even a sound check. Like him just getting ready, I would say 50 feet away from him. It was like, he looked like a time bomb about to go off. And he's like 20, right? How old was he? I don't know, yeah, maybe he was 20, but he was like hardcore, man. And the way he approached a show, man, it was all, it was everything. Very focused in charisma.

01:08:11
Everything and that's what he felt that when he saw Axel for the first time So when I said I see this guy come out and he fucking he's the way he's singing I'd never heard anybody sing like that. Yeah, you know, I just met slash who's this guitar player like from Mars Yeah, and I see this singer and he's really serious Yeah, yeah and something pissed him off and he fucking breaks a fucking glass on stage Says he's gonna kick somebody's fucking ass and he's not joking. It's like

01:08:40
He's not joking, right? I knew back away from the stage like Henry. There's some guys, most of them, 99.5%, he's like, shut up. But there was a few dudes, he was one of them, in Brawlens and Axel. Well, I reckon, he's in that mold, man. So we go out.

01:09:07
Izzy takes me out to rehearsal, and there's actually, he's testing out the microphone, and like two voices are coming out of his voice, out of his mouth at once, like a low register and a high register. And he's just doing like a scream on the, checking out the PA, testing the PA. And I'm like, whoa, you know? And the band originally was two other guys, Rob Gardner on drums and Tracy Gunn on guitar. There were some, they had songs, and it was like, okay, we played,

01:09:38
Axl and Izzy were amazing, and Tracy was amazing, and Rob, I don't mean to put them down, but there was something missing, and I've been in enough bands at that point to know there's just something intangible missing. So Izzy and I booked this punk rock tour for that band to do, and we start in Seattle, come down to Portland, I'll play all the punk rock places. And two of the guys, Rob and Tracy, said, well, where are we gonna stay? Like, what do you mean we're gonna go on tour? Like, where are we gonna? And the punk rock tours, you just stay at whoever offers you the place to stay.

01:10:08
There'll be somebody. Or the club owners say, you guys can sleep here. Or you figure it out. But it doesn't matter. We got these gigs. That's what matters. And two of the guys dropped out, and we still wanted to do the tour. So it was just incestuous. Axel had played with Slash, and I believe Steven. And Izzy had played with Steven. Whatever happened. And I played with Slash and Steven. Well, let's get those two guys.

01:10:34
Let's see if they'll do the tour. And they were like, yes, we'll do the tour. But the moment that the five of us were in a room at Nicky Beats rehearsal room in Silver Lake, we knew Nicky and we went and rehearsed, the first three chords we played together, it was like, oh, there's this thing. It's there, it's all there. Okay, and we went and did this tour. We had to hitchhike, our car broke down, our friend's car.

01:11:01
in Bakersfield, as you know, Seattle's quite a ways from Bakersfield. Sure man, yeah. But the five of us hitchhiked. Yeah. All the way to Seattle. Yeah. That's a thousand miles. Right. Doing gigs along the way, that's where you started. No, our gear was left in Bakersfield. So we called the band that we're playing with in Seattle, can we use your gear if we make it to Seattle? Yeah, you can use our gear. But you guys are gonna hitchhike from Bakersfield? Yes, we're gonna make it. And that Odyssey, which it was, dude, it wasn't one ride. Right.

01:11:31
That odyssey of us getting up there. That's five dudes. Oh, starving. No money. We had $37, which we had to give to a trucker to give us a ride up to Medford. So we did have one ride, but we were all in like the cubby, the whatever, the bed, with our guitars, you know, like for, and the guy's all high on crank, his eyes are all black and...

01:11:57
We get to Medford, that's like halfway. Yeah. You know? But we got rides somewhere five miles you know, back of somebody's pickup and then these two girls, these two women, they were probably 34. Yeah. But they were like women. Yeah. They came and picked us up, they had a pickup truck that had a cover in the back. Yeah. And they pulled over, look at us on the road, like we all, like who would pick us up?

01:12:23
And they said, look, we were hippies. So maybe they're older than 34. And we used to hitchhike here, and nobody picked us up because of the way we looked. So we actually passed you guys. Yeah, and they had a discussion. They got off the next, and they came back around, and they picked us up, and they said, are you guys hungry? We said, yeah, we're really hungry. So they got us a six pack of beer and some sandwiches, and they gave us a ride to Portland. Like, we can take you to Portland. And...

01:12:51
And at that where we got sandwiches and beer, I called my friend in Seattle, Collect, I'm like, we're getting a ride to Portland, can you come get us? And that's 180 miles south of Seattle. He came down and got us, and got us to Seattle. We made the show, and we went through that. Like, we just knew if we can go through this together. And we were awful that first gig. But we did it, we made the thing. Three people were there. Now in Seattle, you know.

01:13:20
hundreds of people say they were at that first show. There was three people there and I knew all three of them. So that's the myth, that there were hundreds of people there. Oh yeah, I was at that show. No, you weren't at that show. And that started, that was the history, right? That's what got us started. And then we had a show back at the Troubadour, like on a Monday night. You know, that was supposed to end this tour. We weren't able to do the Portland show, Eugene show, Sacramento, we didn't have a car. Right.

01:13:48
So, and our gear was still in Bakersfield, so we just got a ride all the way, my friends, my friends said, I gotta go to LA, I'll give you guys a ride. So, but you guys bonded and you knew that, you know, you guys could do it. Oh yeah. And you got to know each other and all the insanity and everything else. All of that. And you're all like 20 what, one or two? 20. Yeah. And then you go back and you just lean into it. We leaned into it hard. Yeah. Yeah, we got a little place.

01:14:17
to rehearse and live, had no bathroom. It was behind where Qatar Center is on Sunset. There was an alley and these little storage rooms. And we took one of those and yeah, that's perfect. We leaned into it. And then it becomes history. Appetite comes out in, what, 87 and Adler craps out. But it was him. Not right away, you know. Yeah, there was a lot of drugs. I mean.

01:14:45
I was telling you, I saw this documentary last night about a guy, this famous kind of Hollywood guy. It reminded me of, this is pre-AIDS Hollywood. Kind of. Right? If it was around, I mean, Okay, so I work, The bakery I worked at in Seattle, it was all gay men. Yeah. So I remember when it first came in, the bathtub thing and all of that, right?

01:15:10
So that was 84, 83, 84, and the guys I worked with, when you work in a restaurant, you're very close with the people you work with. And they would tell me all the gory details of everything. And I'm like, okay, that's a lot of information. But this thing started coming around, it was called GRIDS at first. I don't know if you remember that. Gay-related immune, it was called GRIDS at first. I remember this like back in my hand. Gay-related immune deficiency syndrome. So it was just thought of really as

01:15:40
like a gay something was happening somehow. Right, so you're saying that when you guys were starting out, it wasn't, you know, you were just going at it. Everything was shared openly. Everything and everyone. So you got lucky. Yeah, I got lucky. And there was just a lot of drugs and we all fell victim to it for sure. You got strung out? Later. Oh yeah? Because I was still like- Just boozy? I was boozy, just boozy. And I wasn't even that-

01:16:10
fucked up like through the appetite thing and all that. I drank probably more than, way more than the average human being drank. But for us, that was like keeping it even-killed. Right, right. Axl kept it together pretty damn good. We all experimented with stuff, but we did have three guys in the band that were fully strung out. Fully strung out. And it's hard to manage, huh?

01:16:37
It's, you know, okay, we're gonna try to kick together. They got some drug they heard about that you're supposed to make your kick one day. It's just barf and stuff everywhere. And you're trying, we got our band, our thing's happening, you know? You guys are barfing and fucking freaking out and calling the dealer, like, get over here now, man. So, yeah, it's an excellent bit of spice into the series. So you had to deal with that. It's just a different car ride.

01:17:05
It's a different hitchhiking situation. But it put a strain on the thing, right? By the time we'd opened for the Stones, so we'd done the whole Appetite Tour, couldn't afford, I think everybody got their shit together for the Appetite Tour for the most part. You know, maybe copying the heroine once in a while, but not a full on habit. Until we got back off of that tour. And then we got a...

01:17:34
We saw no money on that tour. Our roadies made more, we'd have to borrow money from our roadies to eat, you know? But we got back and our record had started selling. And they said, the money's in the pipeline. What the fuck is a pipeline? Knew nothing about money. I told you about my family I grew up in. So I got a check, man, my first check I got was $80,000.

01:18:01
from nothing. And I was scared of the money. I didn't know what money was. Like what am I supposed to do? Like I'd heard all these stories about the depression from my parents. Like I don't wanna spend it all because you know, the depression. Yeah. But I didn't know what to do. But so drugs were. You could afford them. You could afford the drugs. And by the time we played the show with the Stones. Yeah. We played three shows with them at the Coliseum. I think it was 89. LA Coliseum. LA Coliseum, sorry.

01:18:31
And it was a big deal to do. They had asked us specifically, and we were on the cover of the weekly and stuff, like the Guns N' Roses, the new Rolling Stones, and all of this. Too much pressure. We didn't think we were the new Rolling Stones. We were just us, Guns N' Roses, and we were doing our thing. And Axl was fed up. He was fed up, and he let the band know, or the three guys that were dancing with Mr. Brownstone.

01:19:01
during this that they either stop, this is on stage. Oh no, I think I kind of remember. They either stop or there's no more band. I think I kind of remember that. It was pretty genius. It got press, right? I'm sure it did. I kind of remember that. I was living in a little like, my little corner of. Your little bass corner? Well no, not just like, I mean our band got big, you know, and there was no internet, there was no like, there's no how-to manual either. Yeah.

01:19:30
I'm still like this punk rock guy, you know, I'm thinking, man, fuck, I got my punk rock values. I don't wanna be recognized. But we were on the cover of Rolling Stone, you go to Ralph's to get Vodka, you know? Everybody, you're Ralph's, like, you're on the cover of the Rolling Stone right by the cash register, you're that guy. Yeah. Ah! Yeah. All of a sudden, you know, your humor's way funnier than ever was recognized before. Sure, yeah, yeah. I was the funniest guy around, and.

01:19:57
all the girls finally do realize how good-looking. I mean, I knew, I'm squared away, you know? But all the girls finally, I must be coming into my own here, you know? Yeah. Oh, and about six months in, you realize, ah. I'm a rock star. It's because the band is big, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About that point, I was going through a breakup. I got married way too young to this girl that, you know, we were a great boyfriend and girlfriend. I was in...

01:20:22
I needed something, I felt I needed some sort of anchor. Life was crazy. And I'm like, okay, well let's get married. Right? Right, yeah I did that, that'll help. Worst idea ever. Sure. And so we had to break up and it was, I didn't ever want to get married and divorced because I saw my parents go through this thing when I was young, second grade. And I'm like, I never will do that. That's too brutal. Right.

01:20:50
And, but here I was in the middle of it, and I was only like 21. And then I found that cocaine, at that point, you could drink more. And I was like trying to just bury my sorrow. And drinking and some value and things like that, but dampen it down. Man, if you do cocaine, you can do more of that other stuff. Oh yeah, stay up all night and drink. For three days. Yeah, yeah. You know, four. Yeah.

01:21:17
And you crash out for a while, you feel great, you wake up and do it again, here we go. And so I got into that, and that was a danger, that was the beginning of the end for me, what eventually became the end for me. But we went out to Chicago to work on the Illusions records and a lot of cocaine, a lot of alcohol, a lot of, and that's okay, but we knew there was a line you didn't cross like when you played.

01:21:44
when you rehearsed, when you played shows. For Axl or just in general? No, for us, just as musicians. Right. Like, you can get fucked up. Yeah. We're world class at it. Yeah. But just don't let it fuck up recording. The show, yeah, yeah. Or rehearsal or gig. That's the line you can cross. Right. Do whatever you want, just don't cross that line. Right. You know? Yeah. And that line started to get crossed. Yeah. And it was Steven at first and Izzy.

01:22:14
Suddenly, he got busted on a plane doing something. And they'd landed the plane in Phoenix, or he got arrested off of the plane and put in jail. And he slept at Jones in a jail in Phoenix. And he got sober. That was 91. Now suddenly Izzy's a guy like, I'm so happy for him, but I'm staying away from him. Because if you got a sober guy in your midst, you don't wanna be like, oh shit.

01:22:42
You don't wanna hear you gotta get sober. Yeah, yeah. You know, somehow or another, you've managed, as grownups who have been through all this, the long ride, you know, you come back together, you're pros, you know, people are excited to see you, you've somehow managed a détente with, you know, Axel. Yeah. And, you know, you're out there doing big shows. Yeah, flash forward to now, I mean, so much happened. I mean, I got sober at 30. Yeah, what happened? How did that happen? How did we?

01:23:11
I mean, we did the Illusions tour. I'm drinking more and more. There was one gig in Mexico City that I crossed the line. I realized right in the middle of the show, I'm just staring at Matt, by this time, Matt Sorem's kick drum, just trying to lock in. And I realized I was like.

01:23:33
doing everything I could do just to hold on to the show. And I was too fucked up. And that scared me. We finished that tour, I stopped the cocaine, I stopped vodka, I thought, I'll stop drinking, I'm drinking wine. But I was drinking like, you know. Oh man, at least, yeah. Wine, you gotta drink a lot. So I went out and did this tour of my own. I had made this record during the Illusions. We had days off and I had

01:24:02
was writing, I kinda thought demos for the next Guns record. But I played drums on them and I played bass and guitar and sang on these songs. And our guy from Geph and Thomas Zutale came into one of the sessions. He's like, what do you keep doing? You keep going off and recording. Like I gotta do something to keep myself busy. I'll be out looking for the guy to cop. So this record came out right as Illusions ended and I went out.

01:24:32
out on tour, I'm drinking the wine, not doing the cocaine, but how much wine I'm drinking, it has to be a lot because I started having this really bad heartburn. I was in the shower one time and my nose kinda hurt and I'm like trying to blow something out of my nose and like my septum comes out and lands on the floor in the shower. And my body's, my hair's falling out and.

01:24:57
my bottom, my feet are cracking, my hands are cracking, like when I get up to take a piss in the middle of the night, you know, my feet just crack open and it's not going well for me. And I get, we do this European tour, we go out, we open for the Scorpions, you know, in this night. Your band. My band, my own band. And we do all these shows of our own. And it was fun to go out with the Scorpions because we were like, you know, it's like, wow, they're still doing like arenas. Yeah, sure.

01:25:27
and I got the punk rock supergroup is my band. All the guys that I played with younger, in the early 80s, they're now my band. From all these great bands from San Francisco and Canada, they're all in my band and it's cool. I'm drinking wine, man. Those guys in my band are like, yeah dude, you ain't sober. I'm gonna get defensive, I'm just drinking wine, man. And your septum is falling out. My septum had fallen out, yeah. I get back from leg, we were supposed to go to,

01:25:57
that leg and then we did some American dates and we did Japan. I shouldn't have been touring, but we just toured for two and a half years with Guns N' Roses. Two and a half years, now I'm out just doing it. And we do Japan, we get back, I just bought my house in Seattle, I'm finally back home. This is my dream to have a home, a house back home. That's me, I made it. And I bought this house that we like steal, this neighborhood we steal cars from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. High end.

01:26:26
It's not, we didn't grow up in this neighborhood. Right. And I'm in this house. Yeah. And I'm in the bed and my stomach really hurts. Yeah. And I, it starts really hurting. Yeah. And I roll over and then it's hurting like down on my quad muscles and I know something's really wrong. Yeah. And I try to roll over again to get to the phone to call 911. Yeah. Because I know something's wrong. I can't get out of bed.

01:26:55
I can't even move, I can't barely breathe, I'm just, something's wrong. And my friend who's, the guy, the Grand Theft Auto guy, right, who became a real estate agent in between the Grand Theft Auto and now, he found the house for me, and he's my best friend still to this day, since we were three years old to this day. And he would just walk in my house, and he saw my car was in the garage, and my keys while we were downstairs, and I hear him downstairs, like, hey, where are ya? And he...

01:27:25
Where are you, man? He comes upstairs, sees me in bed, and my eyes are open, and he's like, oh, okay, fucking finally happened. Yeah. And he- You broke yourself. Yeah, and he picked me up, and it hurt so bad. I didn't know what was going on. I was scared. And took my, anyhow, he took me into the emergency room, and I was on, I mean, I was on the ground in the emergency room. Could move, and they-

01:27:53
They took me in and they gave me morphine. First they tried a couple shots, like codeine in my ass, nothing, they put intravenous morphine, they gave me an ultrasound, and they were like, my doctor, whose dad had birthed me on all eight kids, now his son was a doctor, he's my doctor, I saw his face go white when he's looking at the ultrasound. And I was in so much pain I wanted to die. I wanted them to kill me. The surgeon came in.

01:28:21
and he said, we're gonna do this and this and the other thing, and I said, that just killed me. I can't take any more morphine. I knew what morphine's supposed to do. And it wasn't working. What was wrong with you? My pancreas had burst. So it's swollen up and it burst, so that's all this stuff that, you know, you digest your food. Now, once it's outside onto your intestines and like quad muscles, it just drips down. And it's, you know, they, what the doctors told me was they usually will open somebody up.

01:28:50
just to let the steam out to alleviate some of the pain before they die. You know, I'm like, this is really real. You know, this is real and I wanted to die, it hurts so bad. But they had to put me on Librium too because I started having shakes from withdrawals of alcohol. Which you can also die from. I'm getting all this great news, you know, wonderful news. Welcome home. So I have morphine in my left arm with the, I'm plunging a button, you know, I got the plunger button, where you can just boom.

01:29:20
and I got the Librium in the right arm, and my mom, who by this time at Parkinson's, she comes in, gets wheeled into the hospital to see me and she's crying. And I was in so much pain and so kind of, I saw myself from above the bed, literally I did, I saw that, and I saw my mom there crying in a wheelchair, I'm the youngest, and I'm like, if I can get through, the order of things is wrong here, I should be taking care of her. Right.

01:29:49
I failed her, her youngest son, I'm in here in the ICU, hanging on, they're gonna have to take out, I'm gonna be on dialysis at best. But miraculously, through that night, they were gonna do surgery the next day, they didn't because my pancreas started coming down. It was the size of a football and it started coming back down to its normal size, so they held off for a couple days. And my doctor said, man, you've been given a second chance after like two and a half days.

01:30:20
So remember this, you've been given a second chance. Don't, don't fuck it up.

01:30:28
and I got the Librium and I got the morphine buttons and I'm not gonna, okay, I haven't drank for two and a half days, man. And then it was three and a half days and then it was six days and they took the buttons away from me and that sucked. And they, you know, and then I was in there for another seven days and they weaned me off the morphine and the pain, I couldn't still couldn't eat. I was eating like ice cream or ice chips. By the time I got out of the hospital, I was done, that was what I needed. I needed that. I had been trying to stop.

01:30:58
I thought I'll never be able to stop, I'm gonna die young. And seeing my mom like that, crying, really had an effect on me. So how I got sober was that, and I got on my mountain bike when I got home, they gave me a Librium, and I said, take as directed, it was a weaning off thing of Librium. Librium's like a value, but it's for alcohol, like to come off alcohol. So you know what I did? I followed.

01:31:27
medication as directed. All these new things. I smelt fresh cut grass. Reminded me having paper route. I smelled like newspaper print. These first things like when you get sober, all these things come back to you before you started getting fucked up. And I just rode my mountain bike. I didn't know what else to do. I was like I was on acid. Everything was so real. And I had to come back down to LA. We were gonna do some.

01:31:56
guns like startup, third record. Yeah. I come down to LA, I get a mountain bike there. Was it like spaghetti incident? No, it was after that. So it was after that. So we were gonna get something started, right? But I've gotten sober and somebody introduced me to, I was going down, now I'm going to Gold's Gym in Laurel Canyon in North Hollywood. Yeah. And I'm riding my mountain bike, I'm going to this gym. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah. I'm just trying to stay, anything I can do to stay sober.

01:32:26
And there was a kickboxer in the Gold's gym, and he was like hitting bags, and I said something to him. He said, if you wanna introduce you to my sensei. And it was two doors down. I went through the back door, and I met Benny the Jadokitas. I went through the door, and this guy comes up to me, his eyes just pierced through me, and like saw all the way down. And it was a real fighter's gym at that time, in 94. And he saw that I was

01:32:56
I would just kind of come through some stuff and he said, look man, if you want to work in this gym, you have to, I don't want to hear you talk. You have to show me you belong here. So it was just, I did whatever he said and I did two a days and I stayed in there for that next two years. I was doing two a days, I was reading history at home. I was living like a monk. I had like a, I didn't know how to talk to a.

01:33:23
or anything like that. I got a big L on my forehead. But I would just, in that two years, Steve Jones came to me and said, you wanna play in this band with me and John Taylor, Matt, like, Shannon Hoon had just died. We did a benefit show for his wife and child. And I said, Steve, before that, I don't think I can play again. I think me getting sober, that's the end of my music career.

01:33:52
You know, I don't see myself being able to do it. Yeah. And Steve has gotten sober two years prior. He goes, it's okay, man. And it's Steve Jones, my hero. Yeah, yeah. The guy that, you know. He's the character. He's my everything. Like Steve Jones, asking me to play with him. He says, you're gonna, and what he said to me is, you're gonna be fine. Yeah. You're gonna be fine, trust me. And we went and started rehearsing, and we played that first show. I was so scared before the show, and the show, then I realized like I was.

01:34:21
It was easier to play. People said after the show, you've never played that good. I'm like, really? My palms are sweaty, everything. I look so much different than I did at the end of my getting fucked up days, which was only two years prior. But yeah, as soon as you get off the shit, you start rebuilding. Yeah, people thought I'd gotten a facelift and all this stuff. I'm like, now I'm just sober. That's great. Yeah, so that became...

01:34:50
began this really long, cool journey, as you know, it gets much better, right? And it really does. And YukitaCon martial arts is a, what I didn't know until I went to a program meetings thing, it is the 12 steps, the thing, is not invented by a couple of guys in the 30s. These are universal truths. They've gone back in martial arts for 4,000 years, right? So you have to.

01:35:20
I went to the things, the secret meetings we have with the pointy hats and stuff, secret handshake. I'm like, whoa, this is UKITACON. I'm going through the steps and this is my martial art. Kind of astounding. That's great. That's a great story, dude. It's just sort of astounding where you're at. You got two grown kids. You've been sober a long time. You weathered the storm. You and the fellas are back together again.

01:35:46
and it's nowhere near as crazy and the money's as big as ever, and you found time to sort of like, put this album together, now come in full circle. So, where we started this, in terms of the inspiration for the record, was you being out in the world and talking to other people. Yes, talking to other people and kind of realizing, I think I'm gonna write a book about this. Right. Because I don't see this divide.

01:36:13
I see the news and I read the thing and the divide and this and that and Twitter and I'm just not seeing it. Our band goes out and plays these huge shows and music is so universal. We've played all over the world for 159 shows to like five million people, right? And you see a mix of people. We've played in Muslim countries where women with their whole heads covered are just rocking the fuck out and you realize like,

01:36:42
It's about the music and to us it might seem culturally weird but I travel enough to other countries that I don't think it's, I go there without judgment. It's like, they're just rockin' the fuck out. I'm down with that. We played Israel and South America and Asia, totally different cultures. But music is so universal so maybe I'm in, if I'm in any bubble, it's in one of unity. This music is doing this really great thing in a pretty strange time right now.

01:37:12
This country itself has a very interesting history, and if you look at this, you can concentrate on current if you want to. I don't pay it that much attention, man, because I know this too shall pass. That's the way this country rolls. And I choose to see an America as the one that we unite no matter what, and I think that's gonna happen. People are gonna get sick of being serious about crap.

01:37:40
You know, it happened like when disco came in. People were just so sick of the Watergate and the Vietnam War and like, all of a sudden just people just lost their minds in punk rock and disco and all this shit and cocaine. You know, like people just went crazy. You know, it'll have, like that's just our recent history. Oh yeah, well I hope it happens that way and not in the way where people start, you know, picking up arms and organizing militias and cleansing the rest of their state. Yeah, I just, I think humanity is, I,

01:38:09
I haven't seen one, like even, I have a cabin in a place that's, my neighbors have been in a quote unquote red part of a state, okay? Super red. Right. They don't know the cities, they're scared to come to the cities, my neighbors and stuff, and I like talk to them, I joke to them about it. My family's gone to use my cabin to get a call, it's early on, there's some, somebody's using your cabin, like broke in, I'm like, what do you mean? Well, they're black.

01:38:39
I'm like, that's my family, man. You know, like they never see, you know what I mean? This is like 20 years ago, but we've come up together over there in that country where we water-ski together, we go up in the mountains, we do- You're friends with your neighbors. We have barbecues, we're super good friends. And you know what, we just don't talk about politics. So this record you see is a unifying record. I hope it to be. I really hope it to be. I started writing these little vignettes that were gonna be beginnings of chapters. And-

01:39:09
Just of my observations, it's not as bad as you think. And if you go back in history and you see this happen here and this happen there, and this will pass, man. It's how we handle it now. And I do have these daughters, and I want my daughters to know their father. What did you do when? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? What did you do when that happened? And I see the, you know, we see a lot of fucked up shit going on with the school shootings. And you wrote that song called Parkland. I mean, it's very specific. It's pretty specific.

01:39:39
It's kind of made without commentary, it's more of a funeral dirge. Yeah, no, yeah, and I think you picked the right producer, it's got kind of that Roots feel, shooters like when he sets his mind to doing something that sounds American, in a way, it's very accessible. I think it was great, and I wish you luck with it. Oh thanks, Mark, all right. It's great talking to you. Yeah, you too. I'm glad I finally got to go on the show. It was really good, though, thanks, man. Okay, cool.

01:40:11
So that was Duff. What a nice guy, right? It was all coming back to him, it seems, when I was sitting there talking to him. His third album, Tenderness, comes out next Friday, May 31st. Get it wherever you get your music. Alright, I'm going to play some guitar. I'm going to play three chords in a way slightly different than I played them previous. Enjoy. Echo.

01:41:58
lives.

01:42:04
When you imagine an invasion, you see a drama. See if you can find something. Chaos. That someone takes what is yours, invades what you have closest. Find information. What only you and your girlfriend know about. Lots of private pictures. Beautiful. But the truth is that while an invasion is taking place, you notice... Nothing. For the sake of security, we include security services in our subscriptions. Be safer at Telenor NO Security.