“Niggers shouldn’t wear tattoos,” he said.
What? Was this his idea of a joke or something?
He wasn’t laughing.
I stood up.
“What the fuck did you say to my friend?”
“You heard me. Niggers shouldn’t wear tattoos.”
I slugged the guy. Then I slugged him again. And again. He reminded me of the bullies back in Seattle, the meatheads who beat up punks in packs, who called everyone faggots. I’m not sure how many times I hit him—I just completely lost it—but he went down. I found out later that three of his ribs had broken.
We did make a trip east in late January to play at the Ritz again—the show MTV taped for broadcast. Two nights before that show, we decided to play a semi-acoustic surprise show at a venue in Manhattan called the Limelight, a former church. By the time we headed into the sanctuary, everyone in the band was so fucked up that we lost members one by one as the set progressed. Eventually everyone except me and Axl went down. It was a comical gig, but I took something serious away from it. I told myself I would never get so deep into my cups that I wouldn’t be able to play.
Back in L.A., Mandy and I began to plan a big wedding at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. My brother Matt, the trombone player, volunteered to put together a big-band jazz combo for the event. Mandy and I had been living together for ten months at that point, though I’d been away much of the time. Still, we seemed a perfect match; it felt like she was going to be the girl forever.
My brother Bruce called me again in the spring, after MTV aired the Ritz concert.
“This is getting fun,” he said. “Your record is up to number fifty-five.”
Appetite was doing okay at this point. A record company is just a bank: they loan you money to make a record and then they take a cut if you start selling records. We started to pay back our loan and were starting to see a little bit of money—but not much.
We did a swing through the Midwest on our own that spring, then signed on to the Iron Maiden tour, making the same swing across Canada and the West Coast we’d made with the Cult. When our manager broke the news to us, he apologized.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said.
In the 1980s, for a band the size of Maiden, touring Canada was like spring training: you got your show together so everything was ready for the American tour. Places like Toronto and Vancouver were big markets, but most nights you were in Moncton, Moose Jaw, or Red Deer. Not only that, Maiden was straight-up metal. Metal crowds could be pretty narrow-minded back then. If you were a little weird and you were opening for Maiden, they called you “faggots” and “punks”—and “punk” was meant as an insult. It meant you couldn’t play your instruments.
To be fair to the audiences, what they were picking up was correct: much as I respect metal, we didn’t fit the bill musically. We wanted to be different. After all, Steven had only one bass drum. And while Axl sang in a high voice much of the time, he wasn’t operatic. His howl was pure, unadulterated rage and anguish, not a vocal exercise; clearly, the first time that sound came out of him, it had come from the pit of his stomach. Oh, and also we didn’t write songs about elves and demons and shit—unless, of course, you considered Mr. Brownstone a demon.
All five of us were still sleeping in one tour bus, and we salaried ourselves $125 a week. Most of that went back to L.A. to pay rent; I probably had $20 a week for walking-around money. It felt like a step backward in some ways. Our reward for succeeding—for building an audience, creating excitement in L.A.—was to go out and play to a sprinkling of people who didn’t give a shit about us. Well, that was on the good nights. Some nights the silent treatment gave way to name-calling. But despite that, and the occasional beer bottles that came flying our way, we didn’t care. Shit, a couple years prior we were hitchhiking to a gig with no gear. Now we were on a fucking tour bus. We could eat for free at a catered backstage buffet. Life was good.
And anyway, we knew it was all part of the process. We’d been to England and gotten a good reaction there on our own. We had won over New York. Our music was starting to catch fire in some corners of the world. Certain areas just took more work. We would work. We loved to work. For us, work was quite literally play. What the people hurling glass and invective at us didn’t realize was that for Guns N’ Roses, this was fun. Bring it on.
In May 1988, I flew home from Canada for my wedding. The prospect of a long flight was not welcome, never was, but a short respite from all the boozing wasn’t the worst thing ever—especially when it allowed me to wrap my arms around the girl who would be my foundation from then on. I would like to have had my band at the wedding, but I understood better than anyone that the band came first, and that if anyone was missing, it was me from the band and not the band from my wedding. A guy named Haggis filled in on bass for the show I had to miss—he had been with the Cult when we opened for them. It wouldn’t be the last time we found a replacement player from among the frequently changing personnel of that band.
I returned after a couple of days, but the Maiden tour was soon cut short when Axl had some throat problems. We went back to L.A. for a month just as the video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” was released. As the video picked up steam, people began to recognize us on the street for the first time.
Kim from the Fastbacks called me from New Orleans one day: “I just heard you on the radio!”
We assembled an accomplished crew in preparation for our next engagement, joining Aerosmith for their national summer tour. These crew guys were the first outsiders to join our gang—not friends or even friends of friends, but bona fide professionals. Slash’s guitar tech, Adam Day, had been working with George Lynch of Dokken; he ended up staying with us for years. McBob handled my bass and Izzy’s guitar; he stayed with me for twenty years. His brother Tom Mayhue came aboard as the drum tech and also remained for years. We became a close-knit bunch almost immediately.
At one time singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry from Aerosmith had been such big users that they had the nickname the Toxic Twins. But all the guys in Aerosmith had recently gotten sober. And though that was the last thing we were interested in for ourselves, we didn’t want to see these guys—legends whose music we all loved—falter. All through the tour we made a real effort to keep our drugs and alcohol hidden from them as much as possible.
The video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” was on MTV when we set off in July, but on the first few dates we still got a tepid reaction from the crowd—polite applause. Soon, however, the song became a phenomenon, much to all of our surprise, to be honest. We had not even seen it as a potential single when we put it together.
We found ourselves in a novel position: we idolized the band we were on tour with, but crowds were coming to see us now. The amphitheaters we played were packed by the time we went on for our abbreviated opening-band set. The less-than-ideal elements of being an opening band—cramped positioning of our gear onstage, second-class-citizen status at the venues, and so forth—remained, but the feeling that we had been banished from our fans when we left L.A. to play those other opening slots quickly evaporated. Suddenly we had fans in force all over the country.
In early August 1988, we were sitting backstage one day when some people from our record label came in with a sheet cake from the local grocery store.
“Congratulations,” they said, “you’re number one!”
I remember thinking, Uh, wow, cool … a cake.
And then, What does this mean?
Shit was crazy.
Shit was great.
I was hammered.
But after a little while I remember going back out to the bus and thinking about the whole thing.
Really?
I knew somebody was making real money as a result of our record reaching the top of the charts. It certainly didn’t seem to be us. There was a party back at the record label in L.A., I was pretty sure. Limos out front of the Geffen office to take people to celebratory dinners. Champagne all ar
ound. But was anybody from the label there when our friends died? Did anyone from the record label send flowers to their parents? Hang on a minute now, was it anybody at Geffen’s responsibility to do that? This was a business, after all. Maybe I shouldn’t have expected anything different.
I didn’t know what to think. I was a dumb motherfucker.
Our album had reached the top of the chart almost exactly one year after its release. My brother later told me this was a very unusual feat—albums typically reached their peak chart position within the first few weeks after they came out. Still, I never really celebrated Appetite reaching number one. Maybe I still haven’t.
Lots of people think it was an upward trajectory from there. But for me, it was the opposite. About a week after the sheet-cake ceremony, we flew to England again to play the outdoor Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. This was the kind of thing you heard about other bands playing—big bands, household names, not grubby kids a year or two removed from living in a back-alley storage space and treating their venereal diseases with fucking fish food.
Looking out at the sea of faces on August 20, 1988, I realized I’d never even seen a crowd that size, much less stood in front of one. The festival had been going for a few years, but this was the biggest one so far—107,000 in attendance. It was stormy, and the lawn—the infield of a racetrack—was thick with mud. Wind swirled. The PA had problems and a giant video screen blew over.
We were near the bottom of the bill and played early in the day. When we started playing, tens of thousands of people surged forward.
Shit almighty, people really want to see us. This is fucking crazy.
As fans swarmed toward the stage, I could see people getting pushed around, losing their footing.
“Back up!” Axl screamed at the crowd.
Security stopped the show during the third song to fish a few people out of the scrum. But they were also occupied dealing with the video screen that had collapsed in the wind. People refused to get out from under it—it was still showing the video feed.
We continued playing after getting the okay from security.
When we played “Paradise City” the crowd surged forward again, a writhing mass of bodies, singing, screaming, nodding.
Suddenly I could see kids piled on top of other kids, horizontal in the mud. It looked like some kids might be getting hurt.
Should I jump in and try to do something?
I was too scared.
We stopped playing again.
“Don’t fucking kill each other,” Axl said to the crowd.
This pause lasted about twenty minutes. Dozens of people were pulled out of the mud by security. Then once again we were told we could resume playing and finish our set. Only later did we hear the news: two fans had died, suffocated beneath other fans in the mud.
Oh, fuck, no, no, no.
Those two fans, Alan Dick and Landon Siggers, had just come to see a rock concert. They had tried see us, to sing along with us. And now they were dead. All I could think about were their final moments of anguish, the horror they must have faced as they struggled to breathe in the knee-deep mud and other fans fell on top of them. Oh, God, no. I wish we’d never played this fucking show. I wanted to apologize to their families.
The tragedy woke me to the sheer power of a crowd and the way things could turn on a dime—those casualties happened in an instant.
Adulation comes with a dark side. Never forget that. Never.
This is supposed to be fun for everyone—and ESPECIALLY for the people who come out to support us.
No more casualties. No more blood on your hands.
The next day we returned to the States with heavy hearts to finish the Aerosmith tour.
Geffen had officially released “Sweet Child” as a single in the United States the day we’d flown to England for Donington. By the time the Aerosmith tour wrapped up about three weeks later, in mid-September, the song had hit number one on the singles chart.
The last show was near L.A., at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Orange County. The place had lawn seating back then and could hold almost 20,000 people. It was sold out. It seemed as if much of the crowd that night was there to welcome us home after a momentous year during which we had become conquering local heroes but barely played the L.A. area at all.
Prior to the last gig, Aerosmith presented each of us with a set of Halliburton luggage as a thank-you gift. I think they felt sorry for us: despite the chart success of Appetite and “Sweet Child,” we were living out of duffel bags held together with duct tape—still just urchins living under the street.
The byproduct of us keeping drugs and alcohol on the down-low during the tour was that we were also a little less extreme even when behind closed doors. But at this last show, everyone we knew came down to congratulate us on our success and to revel in a victory for street-level rock. Half of L.A. suddenly wanted to be our friends, and a lot of them brought drugs in order to ingratiate themselves. After we played our set and came offstage to party, I was handed an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. I was still not a cocaine guy, and with my panic disorder, anything with an “up” scared me. But hell, I had some Valium and plenty of vodka to counter any effects. We were number one. We were home.
Okay, I thought to myself after a few more drinks, I’ll do some cocaine.
A little while later I was invited up onstage with Aerosmith to play along with the final song of the tour. I froze. They wanted me to play “Mama Kin,” a song Guns had covered on Live! Like a Suicide, a song I had loved my whole life.
Fuck, I am so fucking high on coke!
Okay, quick: drink a huge cup of vodka and take a pill.
When I hit the stage with Aerosmith, I was experiencing that toxic mix of uppers and downers for one of the first of what would become countless times in the future. Little did I know it would become my secret potion and cure-all for the next six years. I did it when I was happy. I did it when I was sad. I would do it until I was almost brain-dead, hopeless, and left for dead.
In hindsight, I can see that night as the moment I started the transformation from a guy who had spirit and soul and who looked at the cup as half full into a blackened shadow of my former self.
PART THREE
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Sweet Child” was bumped from number one by “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but Appetite climbed back to the top of the album charts and stayed there for a few weeks that fall. Our lives began to change irrevocably.
All the guys in Guns came out of humble, working-class families. Money was never a thing any of us understood—at all—because we didn’t have any. We had long been comfortable with subsistence living. Now we had a hit record. I remember the first check I received from that: we each got $80,000. It was an incomprehensible amount of money. It might as well have been a billion dollars.
The check made me think once again about all the stories we now knew about Aerosmith getting fleeced and about guys from the Alice Cooper band having to hock their guitars. I thought about seeing guys in Hollywood—like Sly Stone—and thinking, Wow, you’d think they had some money, but they’re living in some shitty apartment.
I was always fearful of somebody ripping me off. With no knowledge of how to act or what to do to avoid that happening, I reverted to street smarts, something we all had in spades. I went to each of our accountants, including the head CPA, and demanded their home addresses: “I want to know where you live.”
Right or wrong, that’s what I did.
When we got that $80,000, the accountants said there was a lot more money coming down the pike. They said we should start thinking about what to do with it. They suggested we should each buy a house. I didn’t know what interest rates were, what a mortgage meant. I was kind of freaking out. But we got another check about three weeks later and I thought, Okay, I guess I can get a house.
I started working with a real-estate agent and we looked all over the area. We looked in Hollywood
at first, but I decided I wanted to get out of there. When we got back to L.A. after Appetite had gotten so big, everybody there was suddenly dressed like us, in bandannas, and trying to sound like us. It was suffocating. So I wanted to be away from that. I ended up buying a nice little place in Studio City, two bedrooms with a little pool. It was as close as you could be to Hollywood without being in it—just over the other side of the hills. I bought it at the height of the real-estate market, but I didn’t know what that meant. We all bought houses at the height of the market right after we finished the Aerosmith tour. The five of us all ended up buying in the same area, dotting Laurel Canyon. We all bought right on the main road or just off it. Obviously, in thinking accessibility would be a plus, we failed to recognize the way our lives were about to change. We’d soon want to be out of this fishbowl.
I bought a brand-new car for the first time in my life—a Corvette. Soon afterward, my brother Jon came down to L.A. to visit.
“Oh, you bought a Corvette,” he said, eyebrow raised. “You sure? Don’t get used to this or your money’s going to be gone.”
We McKagans had grown up with the idea that you didn’t live beyond your means. None of my brothers or sisters went out and bought cars or houses they couldn’t afford. I was the first one of us—the last kid, ironically—who started making real money, big money, money none of us had ever thought about. And my brother checked me.
By this point, I thought my life had already gotten strange. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened one day in November 1988, when I went to a Ralph’s grocery store on Laurel Canyon to buy a pack of smokes. People started staring, and audibly whispering, “Holy shit!” People were freaking out.
Then a couple people came running up from the magazine aisle, clutching stacks of magazines, saying, “Hang on, please, hang on, please wait for us to buy these so you can autograph them!”