by Duff McKagan
When we arrived in Seattle and went to baggage claim, the thought crossed my mind to invite him over to my house. I had a real sense that he was lonely and alone that night. I felt the same way. There was a mad rush of people there in public. I was in a big rock band. He was in a big rock band. We were standing next to each other. Lots of people stopped to gawk. I lost my train of thought for a minute, and Kurt said good-bye and left to his waiting town car. His new house was right down the street from my new house. A few days later, I received a call from my manager, who told me that Kurt had committed suicide.
After the game, I thought about my daughters, my beautiful wife, my friends, and my bandmates. My life was overflowing with gifts. At thirty, my doctors didn’t think I’d make it to thirty-one. I wasn’t supposed to.
But, here I was, twenty years later, with friends, celebrating victory for our Seahawks, and being ever more grateful that we’d been given a second chance.
22
CHAPTER
DON’T DIE YOUNG, YOU’LL MISS OUT ON BEING FIFTY
IN THE LATE ’80S AND ’90S, THERE WAS A MESS OF drug-addled youth in their twenties in and around rock-and-roll music who bought into the “Live Fast, Die Young” mantra and all its accompanying rot. My friends and I were squarely among this misguided camp who believed it. It’s amazing that, even today, after everything we’ve been through, after all of the obituaries and unfinished business, you still read about artists admirably described as being “elegantly wasted.”
My time as a teenage musician in Seattle coincided with an influx of wave upon wave of heroin in the port city we called home. The person who personifies the era best to me was a young man with a hopeful glint in his eye and so much more. He was one of the funniest and most charming guys I’ve ever met. His name was Chris Harvey, but everyone called him Slats.
Slats and I did not have a boat. But he had a car.
On the southern border of the University of Washington campus lies its school of aquatic and fishery sciences and its salmon hatchery. Slats thought it a brilliant idea for us to hop the fence with a bucket and scoop up salmon so we could clean ’em, freeze ’em, and eat ’em for weeks. Everything worked according to plan, and we had a bunch of flopping salmon in a big bucket when the floodlights went on and the night watchman came chasing after us.
I told Slats to just drop the bucket, but he was having none of it. He managed to scale the fence with that damn thing in his hand. One of the funniest memories I will ever have is of him driving the car back to my apartment with his left hand on the wheel while punching the flopping salmon with his right. He had a running commentary with those fish all the way home, saying they almost got us into big trouble and now they would pay the ultimate price.
I loved that guy like a brother, once upon a time, back when the playing field of youth was even and green and soft and we were just opening our eyes to what was possible in life. He was the one the rest of us wanted to be like. He had the good looks and charm that all the girls fawned over. He never gloated or preened in his status as the coolest guy in the room, and that very thing made him even cooler.
I’m not sure how or when I initially met Slats, but it must have been sometime in 1980, when we were both either in bands or trying to start one. After we met, though, we became fast and all-of-the-time friends. We started our first band, the Zipdads, together with Andy Freeze from the Vains and Scott Dittman from the Cheaters.
The Zipdads were really more a lifestyle than a musical statement. Sure, we played a bunch of shows in Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, but it was the fun we had together that really set us apart and was the thing other people and bands wanted to be a part of. Slats was always the instigator at the center of the fun.
His mom, too, was so supportive of her son and would regularly have us all over for dinner at their home. We would pick up his Gibson SG and Fender amp, and he would always speak highly of his mom even after we left the house. Most teenage boys would find SOMETHING to gripe on their parents about, but not Slats. I always admired that.
When we went out, he always had the smoothest of smooth one-liners for girls. I had no idea where he accumulated his vast repertoire—maybe he just made that shit up on the spot—but girls fell for it hook, line, and sinker (he was a fisherman after all, right?).
Slats never was one of the most skilled guitar players, but he crafted his own sound back in our day. When he formed the Silly Killers in 1982, his sound and sense of songwriting were really starting to take shape. Their 7-inch single, “Knife Manual,” is a classic. I don’t think it was too much later that he started to dabble with heroin. He never found his musical form again, and that is sad. Slats died a couple years ago, of complications due to a broken hip. Unfortunately, the drugs claimed him long before, and he never broke free.
I had seen him around at Loaded shows and elsewhere over the past ten years but always tried to avoid him because our paths had grown too far apart. Frankly, I was dubious and protective of my life. I wasn’t being a good friend. To be honest, I don’t know what we would have had to talk about. But I could have tried. I should have tried.
Turning fifty years of age is a milestone. For many, it’s terrifying, an “oh, shit!” moment that one dreads. Me, I was rather relieved and more than a little elated. Guys like me were not supposed to get here. But here I am, on the healthy side of life. A little wiser, I suppose. My left ankle hurts in the morning. But my inner thoughts and aspirations remain the same as when I was nine years old. When the body have walked as many miles as you do when you’ve been on this planet for this long, it doesn’t mean your mind and outlook really change. Mine didn’t.
I keep hearing that fifty is the new thirty, thanks to modern medicine. Some say it’s because our diet and water have gotten better, that we’ve become more health conscious. We moisturize our skin, use sunscreen, and look after ourselves better than our parents did. We have more sex. There are more gyms. More ways to keep the body and mind healthy and satisfied.
I’m not buying any of it.
I believe we’re staying young longer because of rock and roll. Because of the generation that decided they weren’t going to die before they got old. Instead of dying young, they just didn’t get old. Fifty is the new thirty—or, twenty-nine, really—because the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Iggy, and Motörhead keep touring. They provide a template for the rest of us. They show us how good, how seasoned we get as we age. They show us how many good times can be had after our forties.
The trick to staying young in any era—and in any profession and relationship—is to have something to strive for. I’ve seen Aerosmith many times since the Rocks tour, and every time you can just tell that they are pushing themselves to play that perfect show.
We all have our down moments. We all have that thing in the middle of the night that my mom used to call the “3 a.m. blues.” You can’t always kick ass. I’d be a liar if I said I was batting anywhere close to a thousand. But you have to try. You have to recognize the times when you’re falling down and pick yourself back up. For me, that means going to see Motörhead, Iggy, and Aerosmith—guys who have saved my butt time and again.
Aerosmith have somehow kept themselves current and relevant through countless fads and eras in rock and pop music, and they do it by constantly writing songs. They definitely have that “thing” to strive for, and they are, at seventeen or more years older than me, ageless.
The Stones are almost a generation older (in age, that is) than the boys in Aerosmith. But they were still filming high-definition concert films during their 50th Anniversary Tour. We in the audience can see the creases, scars, warts, and all. They don’t give a fuck, and they are a quarter of a century older than I am. I’d be an asshole at this point to think fifty was anywhere close to old. The Stones have single-handedly raised the worldwide bar of how we, as men, think about ourselves in terms of age.
I met a guy the other day, and we immediately began to talk about our kids (of cour
se). When we both figured out that our kids were basically the same age, I almost said to him: “Wow, you must have had your kids when you were in your late forties!” I’m so glad I didn’t. This fella not only looked to be sixty-six or older, but he acted as if he had given up on life. You could tell that he told himself, every day, that he was old. I was shocked when he told me he was fifty-two.
That moment was a quick one, but it scared me. It reminded me of what can happen when a man gives up, when he doesn’t have something to shoot for, when he continues to pine for his twenty-third birthday. I saw what could happen if a guy just gives up. Later that night, I went and saw Aerosmith, and I was once again saved not only by their music but by the guys playing it. They shook me free of that experience earlier in the day.
And Iggy, Lemmy? These fellas run nonstop. I know for a fact that Lemmy enjoys touring today as much as he ever has. Motörhead keeps putting out bigger and better records, and Iggy reinvigorated the Stooges after taking, oh, thirty years away from it to focus on a solo career that personified striving for something new and different and musically challenging. All of these people are straight-up living, and striving, looking aggressively beyond fifty. (And I haven’t even started talking about Prince!)
I love being fifty. It’s a wonderful gift. On my birthday, I thought about my daughters, my wife, and the friends who have walked me through the hard times and been with me during the good times when we could act like kids and cry for our Seahawks.
I thought about Kurt, I thought about the actor in the West Village, and I thought about Slats. I was so sad that they weren’t going to know what it felt like to be fifty, to see their team win and their daughters grown, and to become the men that they were capable of becoming.
There’s nothing elegant about being wasted. There isn’t nobility in dying before you get old.
23
CHAPTER
INNOVATE AND MODERNIZE. THEN GET UP AND DO IT AGAIN
FINALLY FIFTY AND HOME FROM THE SUPER BOWL, I took the opportunity to have a look at the Walking Papers’ receipts for 2013. We’d spent the year touring, promoting our self-titled debut record. We’d been all across the United States and through Europe twice and driven more miles than I care to count (and still had a few dates in Australia on the horizon). Through it all, we sold 20,000 copies of our album. Roughly 15,000 of those were sold by a member of the band at our merch table, where we shook hands, took selfies, and thanked fans for supporting us.
We worked with a record label, but, as you can see, we sold most of our records on our own. That counts for something. We went most of the year in the red, sure, but we landed a nice New Year’s Eve gig in Seattle that pushed us into the black. Running at breakeven means the band is going to be able to make another record. And now that we’ve shown we can move units and draw crowds, labels with more power and exposure to broader markets are knocking on our door. We’re also getting offers for serious headlining dates in Europe.
While 20,000 units may not seem like much, by today’s standards, it’s more than respectable.
When I toured Europe with GN’R in the early ’90s, we could afford to lose money on the road and use the shows as a loss leader to sell records. It was a traveling advertisement to sell a stationary product in record stores.
It’s not like that anymore. No one is selling records like they used to. In the United States, 785 million albums were sold in 2000, and the best-selling album of the year, N’Sync’s No Strings Attached, moved 9.9 million units. In 2013, 415 million albums were sold. The best-selling album, former N’Sync front man Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, moved 3 million units. (If you think album sales are down because of quality, are you really going to try and argue that Strings is better than 20/20? I didn’t think so.)
I am in a unique position to observe all of this change in the music business, for three reasons: (1) I came from a punk rock DIY “fuck the man” beginning. (2) After playing in many punk rock bands, I moved to Los Angeles and formed the ultimate “fuck the man” band that became so successful that I’ve been able to form more “fuck the man” bands. (3) I formed a new band (Velvet Revolver) with former members of my old band, sold a good amount of records, and sold a lot of concert tickets.
With Velvet Revolver, we could see the change in the industry. No one was selling records like they used to, thanks to file sharing.
It can get goofy when I talk about how file sharing has made things difficult for struggling and developing artists. I wrote a fairly open-minded piece for Seattle Weekly a couple of years ago that fetched hundreds of comments, most of them squarely in the “shut up, rock star” vein. It’s alright. I can take it. But it leaves me scratching my head when, in trying to prop up new music and the overall survival of new music as a whole, a guy like me will take critical shots.
People just don’t wanna pay for music anymore. That’s the bottom line. Okay. But if you want to see your favorite band continue to make new music, buy the album. And if you want to see your favorite band continue to tour, at least go out and see the show—and pick up a T-shirt or piece of vinyl so the band can put gas in their van and breakfast in their bellies. Get your friends into the band and bring them along. It has almost gone all the way back to 1980, when we were folding single sleeves in the front living room of a punk-rock house. New rock music is almost all DIY, so as fans we have to step up. As artists, we have to do everything we can to adapt.
With Velvet Revolver, we pared back our touring costs, and I looked deeper than I ever had into T-shirt printing prices and how we could offer other apparel that fans were willing to buy. We started to do VIP ticket packages in 2004 because we knew that if we wanted to survive and even thrive in this new paradigm, we’d have to do things that we never had to do before. As an artist working through these changes, I’ve been at the front lines of adapting to the new realities. Companies that don’t adapt to change and modernization will wither and cease to exist. I’m not about to cease to exist. Hell, I haven’t even started yet.
All a band can really hope for these days is to get their record distributed widely enough to get enough exposure for the band that people will know who they are and maybe then come to one of their shows—and buy a record. This is how you build your business in music these days. And even in this digital age, when everyone’s got iTunes and Spotify, if a band’s CDs don’t arrive, the results can be catastrophic.
A few years ago, Loaded was playing the Sweden Rock Festival in Malmo, promoting a new record for a record company we had just gone into business with. The record company had made assurances that they’d have our product in stores in the cities and towns we’d be touring in and that they’d do some promotion with magazines and websites in those areas as well. Getting these assurances was important, as we had experienced on our previous record a completely botched record-selling campaign in which we’d toured the world and our records were not available anywhere we played. Not one. It was beyond maddening.
The new company was not doing much better, but we had just started with them, and we were in constant communication with them about how they could better their exposure with us out there. Sweden Rock Festival has a really cool setup where they have an actual record store on the premises, with records and CDs available from all seventy artists playing the three-day event. Not only that but each band gets a two-hour signing window at the store. The customer must buy a CD or record to get a signature, and fans in Malmo have never had a problem buying records.
Our record company was on us big time to make the signing. “Of COURSE, we will!” I said. They promised the records would be there the night before. They didn’t show. Then they said they’d be there first thing in the morning, which was fine because our signing wasn’t until 1 p.m. We assumed everything would be cool. Since the band had never been to Sweden, our line was almost a thousand people deep by the time we showed up. We were all pretty damn surprised. That’s a thousand records sold, to say nothing of the friends that
they’d go home and play the record for, and the ancillary sales that would explode from the signing. Of course . . . our records never showed up.
When I was growing up, just putting out a 7-inch single was a massive deal. In those innocent punk-rock days, we’d work two jobs just to pay for some shitty gear and a shitty place to rehearse. One of our friends would design the sleeve for the single. We’d bring it to the printer, print huge glossy sheets of album art, and go home and have a cut-and-paste party. The next day at school, we’d nick the key to the copy room and make a bunch of black-and-white copies of the artwork for the next batch of albums—also created at a cut-and-paste party. Pasting together sleeves for my own single was one of the coolest things I ever got to do, because it meant that I had a record coming out!
I try not to forget those early, halcyon days of my music career. In all of the talk about music being shared, the business side of things has totally changed. But those of us who have been around for a while remember those old days when it was just cool to have something of your own out in the first place.
But it’s not enough just to have a record out anymore. This has become my career. I’m a working dad. I have a family that depends upon my income. This is where things like having no product available—or fans downloading albums without paying for them—can get irksome. I still think punk rock, but these days I have to work a real payday into the equation. We all do.
But, until we find some other model for making and distributing records, this old way of getting physical records distributed to areas an artist is playing struggles on. I’m not pointing my finger at anyone. Most labels are smaller these days and are barely able to survive. The larger labels have, for the most part, had to depend on ultracommercial pop music marketed to young kids (and their parents, who will willingly buy music for their little darlings). The major labels these days can’t afford to take a risk to develop great rock music.
