Read Online It's So Easy: And Other Lies by Duff McKagan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Duff McKagan
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Genres & Styles, Rich & Famous, Composers & Musicians, Heavy Metal
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wheel of my “new” car, a 1971 Ford Maverick I had picked up for three hundred dollars. As I rolled down my window, copper penny in my mouth to throw off the Breathalyzer, I said to the cop, “But officer, we were only speeding because we can’t miss Billy Idol on Carson!” Eddy was snickering in the passenger seat and I was stifling laughter myself. The rock gods were with us that night, and the cop let us go.
Soon I could see less and less work getting done at the house. Ed was also coming out of his bedroom less frequently. The good times were coming to an end. In Ed’s case, once he started doing heroin, it took away his willpower, stripped it absolutely clean. I watched helplessly as my friend slowly sank deeper and deeper into a pit. It seemed I had lost him and didn’t have the means to do anything about it—another casualty to heroin in my innermost circle.
CHAPTER NINE
Not too long after I got laid off from the Black Angus I found a steady job again at an office in a back alley near where Hollywood Boulevard crossed the freeway. The company ostensibly sold office supplies, but the specifics of my work made me wonder. A day’s work typically consisted of a pistol-packing guy in a tracksuit with a difficult-to-pinpoint East European accent telling me to drive an unmarked truck or panel van between two random, anonymous addresses in the city. Scratch that—to call the hidden alleyways, abandoned lots, and remote underpasses where I found and left trucks “addresses” would be a stretch. I never asked what was being transported. It didn’t seem like a safe question, I guess.
With all that driving around town, I began to see how segregated L.A. was. A lot of my colleagues would refuse to make “deliveries” to Watts. That blew me away. In Seattle, there just weren’t places people refused to go. Seattle had a “black area”—the Central District—but things weren’t delineated nearly as starkly as they were in L.A. I went to school in the Central District. In L.A., people who lived in Hollywood didn’t leave Hollywood, people in the Jewish enclave of Fairfax didn’t leave Fairfax, people in Watts didn’t leave Watts and didn’t even seem to know where Hollywood was. Fear swathed the city.
One day in February 1985, as I was coming home from work, I ran into Izzy. He told me he was starting a new band with a couple guys from L.A. Guns, the band Slash had taken me to see back in October. Axl Rose, the vocalist from the version of L.A. Guns I had seen, had grown up with Izzy in Indiana, and had followed him out to L.A. Axl had just moved into a place on our low-rent high-crime block of Orchid Street, this buzzing hive of prostitution and drug dealing. Izzy’s new band also featured Tracii Guns on lead guitar. They were calling the new group Guns N’ Roses.
Almost immediately the new group parted ways with their first bass player. Izzy came to me at that point.
“Don’t you play bass?” he asked me.
“I own a bass,” I said. I was getting comfortable playing four strings by then, but I had not come close to developing my own style yet. Fortunately, one of the advantages of being young—I had just turned twenty-one—was fearlessness and unbridled confidence. Not to mention the fact that I no longer had a guitar. At this point it was bass or nothing.
When I showed up at my first GN’R rehearsal in late March, 1985, Axl and I said hi to each other and started joking around about this and that. I liked him right away. Whoever was running the sound then asked Axl to test out the microphone. Axl let out one of his screams, and it was like nothing I had ever heard. There were two voices coming out at once! There’s a name for that in musicology, but all I knew in that instant was that this dude was different and powerful and fucking serious. He hadn’t yet entirely harnessed his voice—he was more unique than great at that point—but it was clear he hadn’t moved out to
Soon I could see less and less work getting done at the house. Ed was also coming out of his bedroom less frequently. The good times were coming to an end. In Ed’s case, once he started doing heroin, it took away his willpower, stripped it absolutely clean. I watched helplessly as my friend slowly sank deeper and deeper into a pit. It seemed I had lost him and didn’t have the means to do anything about it—another casualty to heroin in my innermost circle.
CHAPTER NINE
Not too long after I got laid off from the Black Angus I found a steady job again at an office in a back alley near where Hollywood Boulevard crossed the freeway. The company ostensibly sold office supplies, but the specifics of my work made me wonder. A day’s work typically consisted of a pistol-packing guy in a tracksuit with a difficult-to-pinpoint East European accent telling me to drive an unmarked truck or panel van between two random, anonymous addresses in the city. Scratch that—to call the hidden alleyways, abandoned lots, and remote underpasses where I found and left trucks “addresses” would be a stretch. I never asked what was being transported. It didn’t seem like a safe question, I guess.
With all that driving around town, I began to see how segregated L.A. was. A lot of my colleagues would refuse to make “deliveries” to Watts. That blew me away. In Seattle, there just weren’t places people refused to go. Seattle had a “black area”—the Central District—but things weren’t delineated nearly as starkly as they were in L.A. I went to school in the Central District. In L.A., people who lived in Hollywood didn’t leave Hollywood, people in the Jewish enclave of Fairfax didn’t leave Fairfax, people in Watts didn’t leave Watts and didn’t even seem to know where Hollywood was. Fear swathed the city.
One day in February 1985, as I was coming home from work, I ran into Izzy. He told me he was starting a new band with a couple guys from L.A. Guns, the band Slash had taken me to see back in October. Axl Rose, the vocalist from the version of L.A. Guns I had seen, had grown up with Izzy in Indiana, and had followed him out to L.A. Axl had just moved into a place on our low-rent high-crime block of Orchid Street, this buzzing hive of prostitution and drug dealing. Izzy’s new band also featured Tracii Guns on lead guitar. They were calling the new group Guns N’ Roses.
Almost immediately the new group parted ways with their first bass player. Izzy came to me at that point.
“Don’t you play bass?” he asked me.
“I own a bass,” I said. I was getting comfortable playing four strings by then, but I had not come close to developing my own style yet. Fortunately, one of the advantages of being young—I had just turned twenty-one—was fearlessness and unbridled confidence. Not to mention the fact that I no longer had a guitar. At this point it was bass or nothing.
When I showed up at my first GN’R rehearsal in late March, 1985, Axl and I said hi to each other and started joking around about this and that. I liked him right away. Whoever was running the sound then asked Axl to test out the microphone. Axl let out one of his screams, and it was like nothing I had ever heard. There were two voices coming out at once! There’s a name for that in musicology, but all I knew in that instant was that this dude was different and powerful and fucking serious. He hadn’t yet entirely harnessed his voice—he was more unique than great at that point—but it was clear he hadn’t moved out to
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