2011.03.17 - Toronto Star - Duff McKagan On Money: Appetite For Instruction

Duff McKagan on money: appetite for instruction

By Ben Rayner
Special to the Star

AUSTIN, TEX.—Duff McKagan almost literally staggered into his parallel career as a financial adviser to his fellow rock 'n' rollers.

The former Guns N' Roses bassist was recovering from a burst pancreas brought on by years of heroic booze and drug abuse in 1994 when, realizing he had no idea what his handlers had been doing with his money throughout that band's meteoric rise, he enrolled first in a basic finance course at Santa Monica Community College, then a full-time program at Seattle's Albers School of Business.

Since then, he's spent his downtime from playing in the supergroup Velvet Revolver and his own Sunset Strip-teased outfit, Duff McKagan's Loaded — which will be debuting its new album, The Taking, at the South by Southwest festival on Friday night — by counselling other musicians on how to manage and, more importantly, keep their money.

So much so that he just launched his own financial-planning firm, Meridian Rock, specifically tailored to rock stars.

The affable McKagan was, thus, asked to deliver a lecture at the SXSW conference Thursday entitled "Duff McKagan is Your Financial Adviser."

The Star spoke to him just before he took to the podium.

What wisdom are you going to impart to the rock 'n' roll masses today?

I have no f---ing idea. I don't have anything prepared, and I'm not that kinda guy — I'm not here to sell anything. But when I wrote my financial column for Playboy for a year, I really found that people could connect to the way I talked about stuff.

So today I'm gonna talk about myself, why I'm up here.

I'll talk about me ending up in a hospital with tubes running out of my arms and finally coming out and shaking because I couldn't drink or I was going to die and I didn't know what to do.

I had a filing cabinet full of financial statements from the last six years of GN'R. So I thought "Okay, well I'll f---in' figure this out." I couldn't even start to understand those things.

Money matters are beyond most music folk, I suspect.

Probably beyond 98 per cent of the population. And what was I doing with two filing cabinets full of it?

Why didn't anybody, from the time I was 21 until I was 30, sit down with me and go: "Look, you're a principal owner in this thing."

Basically, I paid people to educate me and nobody did. Nobody told me, "This is what a tour budget means. Gross, net: here's the difference."

And no manager was going to tell me "Dude, your career may be only three years long, so you'd better put money away and invest."

Because if a manager says that to an artist, he's f---ing fired. "What do you mean my career's only gonna be three years long? You're f---ing fired." I'm not blaming anybody at all, but at 30, I was sober and embarrassed.

Did you get ripped off?

Not ripped off. I think we scared enough people. If somebody blatantly ripped us off and we found out, they knew we were street dudes. We would burn down their house or some sh--. And they knew it.

That was the only way we could really rule: by fear. But that's no way to do business in the long run. So I went to school.

Doesn't the classic music-industry model kinda bank on an artist's ignorance?

Look, my band — or GNR, Inc. — has had to do six audits of Geffen over the years because you know you sold this many records and they tell you you've only sold this many. Why don't you just pay us for the f---ing records? Well, that's not the way it works. They make it cost-prohibitive to sue.

The first time I became aware of it was 1994. There was a discrepancy of four million f---ing records.

They were like "You can sue us, but it'll cost you five million dollars and you might get half of that, so why don't we just settle for a quarter?" That's the way business is done. And we're on our sixth audit. That didn't just happen once.

I like that you don't romanticize the rock 'n' roll lifestyle by ignoring the business side of it.

Those days are gone, man. I mean, I went to Queens of the Stone Age last night and I was backstage, sitting with a lot of my peers — guys you would know, in big bands — and we were all talking about the business.

We're not snorting coke and going "F---in rock 'n' roll!"