2005.02.17 - The Sydney Morning Herald - Age Against The Machine (Duff, Matt)

Age Against The Machine

By Bernard Zuel

Old rockers never die - they just tour Australia. What's left of Guns N' Roses join the northern hemisphere winter exodus.

Mussolini may have made the trains run on time, but it takes something or someone special to hold a railway station open through the night. Someone like Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose.

The Los Angeles hair rockers were making and spending a lot of money in the 1980s, intent on redefining the term "rock'n'roll excess". But sometimes the biggest debacles had nothing to do with illegal substances, former bass player Duff McKagan ruefully recalls.

"You know, where we lost most money was the charges for making a show four hours late," he says, referring to a habit of Rose, the bandanna-wearing prima donna who rarely went onstage on time.

"For instance, we had to keep a train station open in Switzerland all night. You know how much it cost us to play that gig?"

I didn't know you could keep a train station open.

"I didn't realise it, either, but you can do anything if you've got a lot of money," McKagan says. "We had 80,000 kids at the show and the police didn't want 80,000 drunken kids rolling around all night until the morning train."

McKagan doesn't do that kind of late thing. "I'm a punctual guy," he says primly.

These days, he's also a finance graduate. After dropping out of school at 15 to play in punk bands, he got his degree in the '90s to figure out how to hold on to money. What's more, he doesn't do any of those things he used to do in "the Gunners", such as consume massive amounts of drugs and alcohol.

Having your much-abused pancreas explode and leave you minutes from death tends to clear the mind. McKagan is in a band called Velvet Revolver and they play on time. Sober.

But, whenever he is interviewed, the topic of excess still comes up. It happens when your new band features three former Guns N' Roses members - McKagan, drummer Matt Sorum and guitarist Slash - journeyman guitarist Dave Kushner and former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland, who had a long, long love affair with the needle.

How deep was Weiland's love for heroin? Well, some years ago I was meant to interview him in New York, but his "people" called at noon to say he wouldn't be able to make it. They didn't say why, but the answer came on the news that night, when it was reported that Weiland had been busted entering a dealer's house in the seedy Alphabet City area of New York that morning.

But hey, don't knock Weiland.

"I used to do a lot more drugs than Scott Weiland, I just didn't get caught," Sorum says. "I was drinking for the wrong reason. Now I go out and I do a little social drinking, a good relaxation. And I'm chasing girls still."

Another sign of the ageing - or, if you prefer, maturing - of the band members is that Sorum is the only single man in the group.

"The rest of the band live vicariously through me," he says.

Sorum and McKagan are in Japan as we speak, waiting to go onstage before headliner Marilyn Manson.

They're enjoying the fruits of their second coming in Velvet Revolver, which has sold more than 2 million copies of its debut album, Contraband , in the past year.

OK, it's not the 20 million Guns N' Roses managed, but then most people assumed this band of reformed reprobates would struggle to get onstage, let alone sell out shows and albums.

For Sorum, who talks confidently about the band's 10-year-plan, it's a point of honour that the people buying the album aren't as grizzled as the band members.

"We didn't want to emulate anything or sound like any of our other projects," he says.

"We picked a young producer [Korn and Limp Bizkit producer Josh Abraham]. We didn't go with anything we already knew. We chose to go into new territory and I guess that's what the general public gravitated towards.

"In America, at least, the audience is very young. Not a lot of older, classic-rock people. It's cool. We're branching the rock we love and something that's viable now."

Hip-hop was supposed to have killed rock 'n' roll, so if you're still wondering how this is possible, McKagan has this response: "When you see us live, you'll get it, you'll totally get it. All the nay-sayers are gone, so our middle fingers have grown."

He laughs as only someone sitting in a flash hotel on a world tour, with a healthy bank balance and an even healthier pancreas, liver and kidney, can laugh.

"We have big middle fingers up saying, 'F--- you all.'"