2024.08.19 - Irish Examiner - Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses: 'I was studying the gospels, and I got into martial arts'

Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses: 'I was studying the gospels, and I got into martial arts'

In advance of his solo show in Dublin, Duff McKagan talks GNR, his own output, and whether his old band will make new music together  

By Richard Purden

Guns N' Roses emerged in the mid-1980s as a breath of fresh air, blowing away the over-produced hair-metal pop of the time with a a blast of punk, hard-rock and the New York Dolls essence of gritty dirt behind the fingernails glam. The five original members documented their hard-living existence in Ronald Reagan's recession-hit America with Appetite For Destruction.

Bass player Duff McKagan now 60 is for many the beating punk rock heart of the group. He returns to Dublin for a solo show on the back of a string of solo albums: Tenderness (2019), Lighthouse (2023) and the recent Tenderness Live In Los Angeles.

On Zoom he is the picture of health, sporting a black vest and a large black trucker cap, his blond locks tucked behind his ears. He speaks fondly of an early UK tour that helped break the band in 1987. They appeared on the cover of rock magazine Kerrang, played at The Marquee in London, and released Appetite For Destruction - all in June of that year.

At 6 foot 3 inches, McKagan loomed large over his bandmates with long blond hair, black streaks, a black bike jacket, a Harley Davidson t-shirt, cowboy boots and sunglasses. The band's image and attitude already lived up to the opening track on their 1986 EP LiveLike a Suicide.

"We broke the UK first with the three nights at The Marquee with all its notoriety, and played to 280 people in this small club over three nights. For us it was the coolest thing in the world," recalls Duff.

His estimate is probably modest with many more cramming into the sweat-drenched Soho nightspot. With stories of singer Axl Rose giving the middle finger to the audience on the first night after bottles flew towards the stage, and later collapsing after the show, these legendary events are now part of rock’n'roll folklore, lighting the touch-paper of the band's explosive rise.

"We'd gotten semi-big," explains Duff of the first of five UK dates in the following autumn that kicked off in Newcastle. "We were able to come back and do theatres. I remember we got hotel rooms, like 'this is cool'."

The band had been mostly living together at the ‘Hell House’ in West Hollywood, basically a large garage where they wrote and rehearsed what would end up on their debut. "There was this cool bar with Newcastle Brown Ale, you know the accent, I had to get the guy to repeat what he was saying, he's like ‘It's so thick it's got twigs in it’.”

One of the key ingredients that gifted Appetite For Destruction its power was the creative alchemy among the five original members, and the democratic process of the songwriting.

Duff ‘Rose’ McKagan, as he was billed on the sleeve, played a vital part in co-writing and the song-craft that delivered ‘Paradise City’, ‘Nightrain’ and ‘Welcome To The Jungle’. Whether it was the driving punk intro to ‘It's So Easy’ (essentially his song that he co-wrote with former flatmate West Arkeen), the melodic notes on ‘Sweet Child O'Mine’, or McKagan playing slightly behind the beat to great effect alongside Steven Adler on ‘Rocket Queen’, his spirit is all over the record.

"One of the great things about Guns N' Roses is we found out how to be a songwriting band and that's not always the way it goes. Everybody would listen to everyone else's ideas and if your idea didn't work it wasn't like 'You suck'; no one took offence… well maybe a little bit - 'Fuck you; you don't know' - but it didn't break up the band and in the process. We would have this killer song like 'fuck, this worked'.

“It was everybody's input and then taking shit out. It's just like now, you put a bunch of lyrics down and you edit crap out. Chop, chop and chop, we were really good at that."

The 'live-fast die young' character of the band almost became a reality for McKagan after a near-death experience in 1994 when he suffered acute alcohol-induced pancreatitis. It was a life-changer. After being warned he’d be dead within a month if didn’t stop drinking, McKagan finally kicked the booze, turning to mountain biking and martial arts as part of his recovery process.

Guns N' Roses had stopped being active and have since not released an album featuring McKagan since 1993. Their mostly punk covers album The Spaghetti Incident, along with Duff's solo debut Believe In Me, were released within months of each other. He would officially quit in 1997.

At 30 years of age with Guns N' Roses classic era, and the rock’n'roll lifestyle behind him, McKagan inspected of the band's finances and found several issues. At the same time, he would enrol in a basic finance course to help him comprehend "misleading" contracts.

"I found a new avenue,” he explains. "I wrote a ton of columns [including financial-related regular Duffonomics in Playboy] and wrote a couple of books expressing myself through the written word. I read a lot of great authors like Cormac McCarthy - he cuts through all the fat in five words, he will tell you the whole story and rip your heart out. If you are going to do something you have to have high benchmarks and this (a return to songwriting) took the place of my columns."

McKagan had always kept one foot in Seattle, and he was one of the last people to see Kurt Cobain alive. During our conversation he adds that Mike McCready from Pearl Jam is on his way over. When writing a new song the first person he will run it past is Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains.

After re-settling in the hometown where he was raised in a working-class Irish Catholic family, the youngest of eight children, he attended Albers School of Business and Economics. His new business leanings sat comfortably with his Catholic roots.

"I went to business and Jesuit school in my early 30s, you have to take a couple of years of theology, as you're doing business; you have to take theology and philosophy. I was studying the gospels, and I got into martial arts."

Are tunes like ‘Holy Water’ a reflection of his Irish Catholic roots (his grandfather John Harrington was from West Cork)? While not religious in the conventional sense, he does have spiritual leanings. "I'm in touch with the maker. I can read the gospels and understand how people spoke like someone rising from a cave; is it a guy rising or is it me overcoming, like Lazarus rising.

"’Holy Water’ and ‘God On 10th Street’ were about the disappointment factor, like preachers here in America stealing money and doing bad stuff."

His new folk ballad style is part of a songwriting evolution, he explains. "I've always written on acoustic guitar but it's just in last ten years that I hold the acoustic against my chest cavity and it tells you where to sing, like don't scream, the guitar is telling you where to sing and it's my new kind of trick."

McKagan is now celebrating 30 years of sobriety and enjoying a prolific solo run. At the same time, Guns N' Roses’ studio output has been sparse. In 2016 he reunited with the band, joining Axl Rose and Slash performing together as Guns N' Roses for the first time since the summer of 1993.

While the band have remained a going concern on the live circuit, no studio album has emerged. Will we get one? "Who’s to say? We haven't been in the studio," McKagan says with a wry smile.

It does sound like he wouldn’t be averse to making new music. "I love recording, I love the creative process, I love playing live shows but that 'a-ha' thing [in the studio] with Slash's line - he always finds the right thing. that guy - and Axl is a fucking master."

We live in hope.

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