How to Be a Man

by Duff McKagan

  Like I said, I wasn’t very conscious at the time, but I remember going to a recording studio in the San Fernando Valley to do voice-over sound bites for the game (the “oh, dude!” when you lose a ball is me . . . I think). McBob laid down an introduction for the game the same way he ushered us onstage every night: “Of all the bands in the world, this is definitely one of them!” McBob has a huge, deep voice and can sound exactly like the guy on one of those monster truck radio commercials. McBob also has a very dry sense of humor and would change up his intros of the band to fit certain opportunities. For example, when we were late to take the stage, McBob would announce us as “the band that put the punk in punctuality.”

  Slash worked hard on the design of the game and was rightfully proud of the finished product. I was blown away when the machine showed up at my house (we each got one for free). I still have it, and it has a little plaque in the bottom right-hand corner with my name on it.

  The game was designed after Izzy Stradlin left the band and Gilby started playing with us. It’s obvious that it was a forgone conclusion that Gilby would be in the band for keeps, as his picture was included on the big mural of the band on the game. Ah, but rock bands can be a fickle bitch, and Gilby, in a flash of confusion and a hiccup of GN’R growing pains, suddenly wasn’t in the band anymore.

  Gilby, pissed off for sure, sued us for using his likeness on the machine. I remember thinking back then that this was a point when Gilby rightfully could have written me off (for life) for not standing up for him, and I could have just carried on without him in my life ever again as well. I think we both did that for a while.

  There was a lot going on. My drinking began to drive Matt Sorum and Slash away from me. After the Use Your Illusion tour, even though Gilby was out of GN’R, he kept on playing live with Matt and Slash for a project they had all just finished (Slash’s Snakepit). I guess I could have resented that, and they could have just kept resenting me.

  In the US, we are all told that at eighteen years of age, you are an adult. For me, real adulthood didn’t come until I was thirty-one. I had no idea how to take responsibility for my actions before then. I’m still trying to figure it out.

  It came to me all at once, up onstage at the Avalon: “I like these guys!” I thought. No, I love these guys. I’ve passed some of life’s most momentous mile markers with Slash, and Gilby is a good guy and great friend. Matt and I sometimes fight like cats and dogs, but at the bottom of it all, we have sincere respect for each other. We can all be motherfuckers from time to time, but that’s life. When I became an adult, I made a concerted effort to repair my friendships with these guys.

  Resentment is a brutal thing. In the first year or two after I got sober, I found myself swimming in a dense, black swamp of resentment and regret. I heard stories about myself in which I was the punch line. I started to recognize what alcoholism had kept me from doing, from experiencing. My peculiar life path at the time, though, led me to a martial arts discipline that dealt with taking responsibility for your own actions and bettering yourself for yourself.

  Self-discipline and self-respect were completely new ideas to me. I was desperate for a new way of living, and because I was (and still am) is such awe of how much at peace my martial arts teacher was, I followed his instruction to the extreme. I wanted just a little part of that peace. Working past regret and resentment was key to me actually liking myself. The more I liked and trusted myself, the less I blamed others. I stopped thinking about what could have been and focused on the things I could do now.

  But that was just my own personal story, and these three guys had found their own way past some of the resentments and regret. We all eventually became friends again, played in bands together, and found ourselves in faraway places playing great rock songs together, in front of a ton of people—with Billy Ray Cyrus in support.

  4

  CHAPTER

  STAY HUMBLE

  “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

  —J. D. SALINGER, Catcher in the Rye

  DESPITE THE WOES FACING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, IF your band is a large draw, there will still be a red carpet and moist towelette waiting. After a while, you get used to it.

  Kings of Chaos draw a large audience, and our accommodations are top of the line. Not only do we get to stay in fine hotels and drink expensive nonalcoholic beverages, we get to lie down during our flights (not like that, guys). Flying in lie-down business-class seats is part of the art of arriving fit, rested, and ready for a gig.

  I never used to think about dealing with jet lag and all of that rot. In your twenties, you can beat the shit out of your body every day and bounce back.

  Don’t get me wrong, I can still bounce back. But now I rely on preparedness, rest, and a fitness of body and mind. In rock bands, you can’t use age as an excuse. There are too many people who will instantly give you shit for an “oh, my back” quip. Out here, nobody cares that you’re about to turn fifty (Lemmy still addresses me as “ya young punk!”). It’s antiaging by peer pressure.

  There are no direct flights from Los Angeles to Asunción, Paraguay, so the flight that Matt, Slash, Gilby, and I were on had a layover in Panama City. The flight was at night, and I assumed the layover would be an hour or two, which would fit in nicely with my rest/fitness/lie-down seat plan for being ready for the gig. I could sleep on this flight after a great workout beforehand and be all set. Except these seats didn’t lie down, and I can’t sleep sitting up.

  Matt sat next to me, and he was having the same problem. I saw Gilby kind of sleeping, and I got jealous. Slash? He is a true craftsman. He has turned sit-sleeping into an art form and long mastered the ability to quickly find the button you have to turn off when traveling. Back in row 4, I sat with envy.

  As we flew the seven-hour trip to Panama, I tossed and turned, and finally gave up. I found some comfort in the fact that I’d be able to sleep after the layover, on the second leg of our journey. When we arrived in Panama City, I learned that our layover was not one but seven hours.

  Even when you travel in fancy mode, travel is still travel, and a seven-hour layover sucks. I’ve learned to mentally check out when I travel. You can’t fight what gets in your way. I’ve waited on tarmacs for upwards of five hours. I’ve had countless weather delays and flight cancellations. A seven-hour layover wasn’t going to kill me.

  So I looked on the bright side: this is the sort of tour that affords me the opportunity to fly my family out. Since we’d be touring through Thanksgiving, Susan and our girls—Grace and Mae—were going to meet us in Mexico City, where we were to enjoy a Mexican version of Thanksgiving dinner. Plus, the current travel day would end in a very nice hotel in Asunción with a killer gym. I wasn’t about to complain—especially not in front of Matt, Gilby, and Slash (not that he’d be awake to hear it).

  It occurred to me during our flight that this was the Use Your Illusion version of GN’R (with one obvious exception). As we sat in Panama City, I realized that this was the first time the four of us had traveled together to South America since our last GN’R gigs in 1993. The fans in Paraguay remain attached to the thought of GN’R and what we did back then. In fact, I think the lore has grown a bit.

  When we got off the plane is Asunción, the police met us at customs. They explained that there were a thousand kids waiting out at baggage and they were very emotional. Our local security guys would guide us through a police line that was set up at the last minute. Our vans would be waiting right outside the doors, and security would get our luggage for us. They weren’t sure how long they could hold the kids back, so we were instructed to go directly to the vans. They seemed very serious. Shit. OK. Got it. Head down and go forward. Don’t stop. Straight to the vans.

  When we came out through the sliding smoked-glass doors of the customs area, chaos ensued. We clutched our backpacks as kids broke through the police line. None of
us were expecting to get our hair and clothes pulled at. Apparently the Use Your Illusion–era GN’R guys have still got some pull down south.

  We got to the vans and hurried to our hotel. I called Susan, but these are the things that I try not to tell her too much about. I don’t want her to worry, so I just say, “OK, babe. So, I made it here alright . . . and I love you and miss you already.”

  I love to play music and am fortunate to have a fierceness for rock and roll deep in my cellar, festering and needing the light from time to time. I love playing in a band, and I’ve been really fortunate with the gentlemen that I have gotten to share a stage or a rehearsal room with. All the other stuff—the screaming fans, the complimentary Perrier—doesn’t really matter when it comes to what I do this for.

  I haven’t always felt this way.

  For six months after the first GN’R record, Appetite For Destruction, finally took off, I really thought that I was a little better looking and funnier than I had previously been given credit for. People were laughing at all my jokes! The opposite sex was suddenly all up in my business. I was the “it” guy. People finally understood how cool I was. It was about time!

  Then, one of my older brothers came down to visit me in LA. After witnessing this buffoonery for a couple days, he sat me down and gave me the “you-know-these-people-just-want-to-hitch-themselves-to-you-and-your-band-and-could-really-give-a-damn-about-you” talk. I woke up. I had been drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s easy to do. Especially for rock-and-roll bands.

  One of my favorite “deep thoughts” on the topic occurred when one of my other bands, Loaded, was opening for Alice Cooper a number of years back. After one particularly successful show, we got to talking about Bon Jovi. In the song “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” the claim is made that “I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.” All? Let’s ponder.

  I have no doubt that Bon Jovi had played to a million people by the time “Dead or Alive” was released on Slippery When Wet in 1986. But did they rock them all? Couldn’t it be that some dudes brought their girlfriends to the show and weren’t necessarily into their music? What about some parents? Or maybe some people just didn’t get rocked? Hey, it’s happened to me. I’ve gone to gigs properly prepared to get rocked and it just didn’t happen.

  I carried this conversation forward to one of Seattle’s illustrious and beloved indie-rock front men, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. He said his band had actually had this very same Bon Jovi discussion. The Death Cab guys even wondered if they had maybe played to “a million faces.” There was one thing they were sure about: they hadn’t rocked them all.

  But how could they even be sure? They had played a bunch of festivals, and you KNOW that not everyone was there to see their band. They had probably converted some of those people into new fans, but rocking them all would be a huge overstatement.

  And what about me? I mean, in my whole career, I have certainly played to a ton of faces (I’ll let you do the math), but, hell, I was hammered for a couple of those years and probably wasn’t concentrating on faces at all. Besides, how can you see all of the faces that you play to, hammered or not? Lights are in your eyes! It’s dark! You have shades on!

  When you headline a smaller venue with, say, 850 people, you can actually see all of the faces in the room. But even if all of those people are there to see your band and have spent their hard-earned money to come and spend the evening with you, isn’t it possible a few of those people were disappointed? I guess “I’ve seen 48,000 faces, and I rocked close to 41,000 of them” (a good damn percentage, by the way) is not so poetic.

  Of course, this isn’t meant to be a slight to Bon Jovi, and the same question could be asked about things I’ve stated in song. I mean, in the GN’R song “It’s So Easy,” was everybody really trying to please me? Or was it just the people I was personally coming across at that time?

  You see what I’m getting at here? I don’t care what your business is. You may have seen a million faces, but it’s important to remember that you didn’t rock them all.

  5

  CHAPTER

  GIVE THANKS

  THE SHOW IN PARAGUAY WAS AT A RACETRACK CALLED the Jockey Club. We all got to the venue a few hours early to warm up. We wanted to be on the top of our game for each other. The talent level in this band is world-class, and no one wants to be the guy who fucks up a song. Sitting backstage, we started to hear a rainstorm. It turned torrential.

  Since it’s a racetrack, the grounds are primarily dirt, which quickly turned to mud. The crew covered all the gear onstage, and we braced ourselves for the certainty that no one would show up in this weather. We were totally wrong. Tropical storms don’t phase South American rock fans, and when we opened the set with Deep Purple’s “Highway Star,” more than 18,000 fans were there to dance along.

  Paraguay has a very young audience for rock and roll, and you could see teenagers’ eyes getting huge as we came out. There were banners and tears and very loud cheering between songs—all the things you want to see when you’re up onstage.

  The set list was stacked with hits from GN’R to Deep Purple, Billy Idol, Collective Soul (during rehearsals for the tour, I was pleasantly reacquainted with all of the great songs that Collective Soul had put out), Def Leppard, Velvet Revolver, and Stone Sour. It’s really fun to put together a set of songs where you kind of look forward to playing the next song more than the last. The singers chose some other songs outside of our own groups to do, too, which is how we got to do Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” and Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” and “Immigration Song.”

  Since we aren’t a full-time band, Kings of Chaos always feels like it’s in the honeymoon phase of a band relationship, so we just get to enjoy each other.

  Matt Sorum is a wonderful guy and a terrific drummer, but he’ll be the first one to tell you that he has the typical “drummer-who-wants-to-be-a-front-man” bug. Kings of Chaos is an invention and product of Matt’s mind. He worked his ass off to get all these guys together, find promoters in different territories in the world who would buy this thing, and figure out travel and accommodations for all of us precious little artists. Kings of Chaos gives Matt the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies for the night, and his chest puffs out as he comes out in front of his drums, grabs the main microphone, and addresses huge audiences. All of us know Matt has worked hard on these things, and all of us sort of chuckle as we see Matt become the “front guy” he always wanted to be. And he is great at it.

  Joe Elliott is a funny bastard. Great guy, don’t get me wrong. He is one of those singers who never really got a huge ego. But he never starts a conversation with me without first calling me a cunt.

  The word “cunt” is awful sounding to us Americans, of course. But in the UK, it’s almost a term of endearment. Motörhead has a cook on the road named Ritchie. If Ritchie doesn’t address you as “ya caaant” (you cunt), you know you haven’t got in good with him yet.

  Joe has a radio show based out of London, and he is one of those guys who takes pride in his knowledge of the history of rock music. His sense of humor is sharp and always on. Coupled with his intellect, Joe has the ability to constantly bust your balls. But he is also a world-class front man, and watching him own a crowd of 18,000, I never know whether to stand in awe or slap him in his nuts. Yes, these are the things we’re really thinking about as we play along.

  We played an encore of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” followed by, funny enough, “All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople. The whole crew came out to wrap things up as the crowd sang along at the end of an evening that was an enormous success.

  There was a spring in my step the next morning, because I knew that I was a day closer to meeting my girls in Mexico City. Susan and I planned for their flight from LAX to land in Mexico City near the time that Kings of Chaos would be getting into town. Logistics are everything when you’re on tour, and, Mexico City being big and sometimes dangerous, I wanted be there when they l
anded. Plus, I love the anticipation—waiting and searching for the first sight of Susan. At five foot nine with blonde hair, she has a tendency to stand out, especially in a place like Mexico.

  I’ve always had a romantic idea of family life. Even during my times of trial and extreme drug and alcohol use, I held out hope that one day I’d be that guy who was the head of a family—the steady guider, the calm and strong voice. As a consequence, I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to my wife and two daughters. The imagery that has been forever ingrained in my head by It’s a Wonderful Life will never leave. My girls think I am totally corny, but I don’t care. I am who I am. I can get bummed out sometimes when things don’t work out like they did for George Bailey, but waiting for my family at the airport filled me with joy.

  We’d all been looking forward to experiencing Thanksgiving dinner in a foreign land, and now everyone from Kings of Chaos would be joining us. I grabbed my ladies and whisked them off to the hotel.

  Mexico City is absolutely huge, and the St. Regis Hotel was an hour and a half from the airport. But we were in no rush, just happy to be together.

  Sitting in the car, I thought about the fact that after the family’s three-day stay with me in Mexico, I’d have to peel off to Europe for a nineteen-day tour with the Walking Papers, a new(ish) band of mine. The tour weighed heavily on my mind as we rolled through Mexico City in our promoter-provided black Cadillac SUV on Thanksgiving Day. I was thankful to be with them, but I was already dreading having to be away. I wanted to make every minute of this visit count.

  We talked and laughed and joked and saw some incredible city sights on the way in. Our hotel was totally fancy and incredible, and our adjoining suites were world class. Listen: we’d be happy pretty much anywhere as long as we were together, but all this extra-fancy stuff was fuckin’ sweet.