It's So Easy

It is a song West Arkeen and I wrote. It's an account of a time that all of us were going through. We didn't have money, but we had a lot of hangers on and girls that we could basically live off of. Things were just too easy. There was an emptiness; it's so easy.

Well, me and West had a special time in our lives when we were really inspired by tequila and he was teaching me a different kind of tuning of the guitars and we were sitting around, and at this point in time it was, like, we had just got signed, and, ah, before we got signed, people, and girls, and this and that, wouldn't give you the time of day. All of a sudden we got signed...[…] So girls were bringing over, you know, we were going to get booze, and they'd fuck you and suck your dick, you know, and all this and that, and it was ridiculous.

I guess the song that most represents me on the album is 'It's So Easy.' It has a lot to do with my roots, musically. I wrote it at a point when that kind of stuff was going down in my life.

I moved into this apartment building and my next-door neighbor was West Arkeen, this crazy little guitar-player guy, this little freak. He went to the Guitar Institute a couple blocks from our house, and he came out of the Institute, and there was some guy selling an Alesis drum machine and a four-track cassette recorder. It was apparently Sheila E.’s bus driver. Somehow he got stiffed and he’s like, “Fuck it, I’m selling this shit.” So West comes home with this drum machine, [and] we figured out how to use the stuff. The demo of “It’s So Easy” was pretty great. West at this exact same time had taught me how to tune the guitar to open E. We used like, every feature on the drum machine: cowbell, woodblock, and everything on this demo. I sang it, tuned the guitars, put the drum track on, and it was just this cool little lazy summertime hit. West and I would recall all these “summertime hits,” we’d call them. I had an apartment and West had an apartment before we had a rehearsal space, and it became an encampment for about two months for the band. “It’s So Easy,” “Yesterdays,” and I think “14 Years,” a lot of songs were recorded on West’s four-track. I think “You’re Crazy” came out on the West four-track. Sitting in an apartment, we’d play a lot of acoustic guitars, so I think “Easy” was recorded on acoustic guitar. Thing about our songs, we played ’em all on acoustic guitar. “Night Train,” we wrote on acoustic guitar. Because we’d write them in little cramped apartments.

It's So Easy is a song I recorded on four track, a version of it. I learned open E tuning on guitar from West, my next door neighbor, and, you know, when you were learning new tuning on guitar you write like 19 songs in 25 minutes, like, "Wow! This new tuning open up a whole new world." So It's So Easy was a thing I recorded and Axl loved it.

West also showed me open-E tuning, an alternative way of tuning a guitar so it plays E-major chord when strummed with no fingers on the frets. That's why he got a songwriting credit on 'It's So Easy' - without open-E tuning, that song wouldn't have happened. I didn't know alternative tunings existed.

It’s So Easy is about where our apartment where we… it wasn’t even an apartment, it was a room we lived, and around the corner was a place where we’d get this Nightrain wine, and it was $1.29 a bottle. And It’s So Easy is just about, like, us making a buy, and kind of doing what we wanted, and saying “fuck you” to everything.

It’s So Easy is a fucking pisstake. There was a sense of humour to the ’80s and there was a sense of humour to Guns N’ Roses. It’s So Easy was written at a time when we had, like, three fans. One of those was my next-door neighbour, and one of those was someone’s girlfriend. And it was this grandiose song about how ‘we make the fire but miss the firefight’. It was basically a pisstake.

I mean... [long pause] I guess it can be used in the right way, in the way that my daughters use it. Also, I’ve never used it in the wrong context. I’ve never called my wife that, for example, or my girls.

When we used this song as the opener for our live sets, it definitely set a tone and drew a line in the sand.