After the doomed stint in Chicago, I had to reexamine my steadfast belief in the band. The harsh reality was that the old us-against-the-world mentality had waned this year for sure. Steven was fully strung out and babbling incoherently much of the time. Slash had one foot out of the band as a result of feeling betrayed. Izzy had all but checked out. The techs, I soon found out, were secretly looking for other gigs. And to top it all off, we had an expensive bill to pay for the rehearsal space and apartments, the plane trips back and forth, and all the destruction Axl had inflicted on the apartments. We did have the songs that would make up the more meaty, up-tempo sections of the Illusion records. But the damage was done and all forward progress stopped for quite some time.
I did, however, have one epiphany in Chicago: cocaine was a nice supplement to my drinking. On cocaine, I could now drink twice as much as I had before. Fucking brilliant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Back in L.A. we retreated to our houses. They provided privacy for each of us to pursue his own brand of debauchery. Though things with Mandy continued to get uglier and uglier after I returned home, I pulled back a bit from the extremes of Chicago. I rode a mountain bike here and there in a token effort to be healthy. I would take our dog Chloe for walks. I tried not to drink so much and rarely did coke or took pills.
I would hang out with Slash from time to time, but things were getting dark up there at his house in Laurel Canyon. One day he pulled out a stack of Polaroid pictures he had taken around his house.
“Duff, look at these,” he said. “It’s some of those Martian bugs I was telling you about. They’re infiltrating my house and watching me all the time.”
There was, of course, nothing on these Polaroids. But he kept flipping through the stack and pointing.
“See, there’s another one—right there, in the corner!”
Steven was careening off the deep end, too. He had bought a house just three blocks from mine and as a result I was able to check on him more often; what that amounted to in practical terms was watching helplessly as his crack and heroin use escalated. It got so bad, and he seemed so incapable of reining it in, that at one point I found out where his drug dealer lived and took a shotgun to the guy’s house. Fueled by booze, obviously. I waited for him, intending to threaten the fuck out of this dude to get him to stop supplying Stevie with the things that were going to kill him. It’s lucky this guy never showed up—lucky for him, of course, but also for me.
Then we got an offer to play four shows in October 1989 as the opening act for the Rolling Stones at the L.A. Coliseum. It was a huge shot in the arm for us at the time—though that’s probably a poor choice of idioms given the situation in the run-up to the shows.
Mick Jagger negotiated the terms of our gig himself and took care of all the details. We didn’t deal with a Stones lawyer or agent or somebody like that. We expected to, of course. Nope. It was Mick. We would say, We want this much per gig. And Mick would say, No, you’re going to get this much.
Despite the work we now needed to do to prepare for the Stones shows, Slash and Steven showed no sign of pulling out of their drug habits, and Izzy slipped back into heroin use, too. Sometimes those guys put their drug use in front of band practice. One or the other often showed up late or left early from rehearsal—if they showed up at all. But we never talked about the problem. We were never any good at communication, especially when that meant confrontation. If we could have developed those skills then, the story of GN’R might have been very different.
With the shows looming, the Los Angeles Times ran a big piece about us supposedly staking our claim in rock and dethroning the old guard. There is one thing no band can ever do, and that is dethrone the fucking Rolling Stones. That would have been true regardless of the state of our band. And I was very nervous about the state of our band going in to the shows. The Times article seemed a bad omen to me. Later in life, I would be more apt to listen to that first instinct when committing to various things, but come on, this was a chance to open for the world’s best.
By the time of the actual shows, everything melted into the background because I was so excited. My brother Matt put together the horn section again to play along with a few tunes. He was student-teaching. In the evenings before the shows, he came to the hotel where we were staying, got dressed, hung out in the hospitality room, and drove out to the Coliseum in one of the band’s vans to get ready to play to tens of thousands of people; he told us that during the day he saw kids with GN’R cut into their arms at his school. By this point, the magnitude of our success was weird not only for us, but for people around us as well.
The Stones were great hosts—they hooked all our guests up, and the whole scene was charged. I flew my mom down for the shows. While she was in town, she picked up on the problems between me and Mandy. It was dispiriting to have a relationship I had taken seriously, and had such high hopes for, unraveling—and particularly for that disappointment to take concrete form in front of my mom. But for the moment, Guns was playing with the Stones, a fact that could buoy me in the face of almost any personal setback. Guns was fucking playing with the Stones.
Prior to the first show, Mick Jagger came up to me during sound check. I had on my cowboy boots, as usual, and it was misty and drizzling.
He motioned to my boots and said, “You going to wear those tonight, mate?”
I shrugged and smiled. I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me or what.
“You’re going to slip on our stage.”
This was the Steel Wheels tour, with an all-metal stage set.
“I’ve got some trainers,” he said. “What size do you wear?”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Me, too,” he said. “We must have the same size willy.”
Wow, I thought, Mick Jagger says we have same size willy, and he’s going to let me wear his sneakers. Despite his kind offer, though, I didn’t wear them in the end: Mick was cool, but his spare sneakers, I’m afraid, were not.
As showtime approached, Axl wasn’t there and everyone—us, the Stones’ people—was sweating and frantic. But he made it at the last minute, the first concert went off without a hitch, and I didn’t slip on the metal stage. Sure, the guys were smacked out of their minds, but I had family and good friends around me, and I did not really pay much attention to what was going on with those guys backstage. I knew that we should have had a band sit-down before the gigs to get everything out on the table, but things had been moving too fast in the run-up to the shows.
Then came the second night.
Before we played our first note, Axl suddenly announced to the 80,000 people in attendance that “if certain people in Guns N’ Roses didn’t stop dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” this would be our last show.
The crowd became absolutely quiet. People in the audience looked at one another; they seemed as confused as we were. They really had no idea what Axl was talking about.
I shrank. I was so fucking embarrassed. And I was so fucking mad that Axl felt he could do this to me. I would have been supportive if he was sufficiently pissed off at certain guys to want to confront them for what was going on—I was with him, the situation was bad. But he needed to talk about that shit in private! Not out here. Never out here.
Once Axl took his concerns public, the times of being a gang—us against the world—were over. We played the rest of the show, but it was a halfhearted effort at best. Afterward, and really for the remainder of our career, we just went our separate ways. That night officially rang the bell for the end of an era in GN’R.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We should have had a band meeting to talk things out after the Rolling Stones gigs. But we didn’t. I never even told Axl how upset I was. Other things came up, and when not putting out those fires we all just retreated back into our separate lives.
By the end of 1989, there was no longer any way around the fact that my marriage to Mandy was falling apart. Somehow, making our relationship legal had added a
level of seriousness that neither of us foresaw. Before we’d gotten married, we never had arguments; we also never saw any reason to look deeper into long-term expectations. Neither of us cheated or lied to the other as things unraveled, but we were both sort of crestfallen that our passion for each other was somehow waning. She had started to take some things out on me, and I was in turn taking things out on her. I think we both hated ourselves for doing it, but it continued to happen. Mandy and I were both extremely young—I was twenty-five at this point—and naive and vodka-filled. It was a match made for friendship but in no way for marriage and children.
The problems in our relationship also seemed more real now that my mom had seen the full magnitude of them. With no more shows on the horizon and both of us constantly together in the house on Laurel Terrace, things came to a head.
Living down the street, Steven had the best vantage point on our relationship. He knew Mandy and I had sought marriage counseling, and he could see I was in a lot of pain even afterward. He was the one who finally confronted me about things—on Christmas Eve.
“Dude, if you don’t have her stuff out by tomorrow, I’m going to do it,” he told me. “That’ll be ugly. You don’t want me coming in there, because I will.”
He was right. It was over. I had to admit it. And I had to act. On Christmas Day, 1989, I gave Mandy the Halliburton luggage Aerosmith had given me and asked her to get out. I was adamant. And I was keeping the dog. Merry fucking Christmas.
I felt completely lost and heartbroken. I thought I had let my mom and family down. I thought I had been caught living a lie. Or rather, lies, those little lies you tell yourself to help make your life fit a more idealized image. Now they had all suddenly been laid bare. For me it all boiled down to one simple thing: Just like my dad, I thought—in whose footsteps I had tried so hard not to follow.
I was so depressed that McBob, my bass tech, quietly slipped into my house one day and removed my shotgun. He later told me he just didn’t want to leave it sitting around given the way I was acting. He stashed it inside one of my bass cases and left it in a band storage space.
A lot of people around me hoped that once the day-to-day pain of the marriage and its immediate aftermath faded, I would be able to pull back a little from my everyday vodka habit. But instead of straightening out, I kind of fell apart. My drinking had taken off as the marriage went sour. When Mandy left the house, I started to add more drugs to the mix.
My first drink of the day slipped forward, from about four in the afternoon to more like one. I also started to score larger amounts of cocaine so that I could drink more for longer periods of time. It proved a diabolical cocktail for me. Now I could drink until I finally had to sleep—and if you’re doing coke, you don’t have to sleep for up to four days in my case. Only then would I start to see trails. The only other time I slowed down was if someone I respected—like my brother Matt—would say, “Slow the fuck down.” I also found that Valium or codeine could help to bring me down when I finally needed to sleep after a multiday binge. In my mind I was simply using modern scientific methods to get me through a tough time, and I figured I would cut back on the drugs and booze at some stage when the heartbreak subsided.
One day early in 1990 the phone rang at my place.
“Yeah, uh, is Duff there?” said the voice on the line.
“This is Duff.”
“Uh, hi, it’s Iggy.”
I knew instantly it wasn’t some knucklehead friend of mine playing a prank. It was Iggy Pop, and he was in L.A. to make a new album. He asked whether I’d be interested in playing on the record.
“Of course!” I said.
Then, trying to sound somewhat cooler than I was, I added, “I mean, yeah sure.”
I had actually met him a little more than a year before. Two days after the end of the Aerosmith tour in September 1988, Guns played a strange festival-type gig at the home of the Dallas Cowboys in Texas. INXS headlined and the opening bands included the Smithereens, Ziggy Marley, and Iggy. I was excited to meet him. After the show, Iggy and I both ended up at a party in the hotel suite of Michael Hutchence, the vocalist for INXS. I was nervous as hell to be in a room with Iggy, a guy who had inspired a dream that stuck with me for the rest of my life—a dream that cemented the direction of my life in many ways. So I commenced to get really fucked up. Michael Hutchence was already as famous for dating models and appearing in paparazzi photos as for singing “Need You Tonight,” and I think Iggy felt as out of place as I did—so he joined me. We got fucked up together.
Now he was asking me to play with him. Slash was also enlisted, and we went into the studio along with the kick-ass Kenny Aronoff on drums. I showed up expecting the sessions to be one big drugging and drinking fest—the absolute perfect way to spend a few weeks, I thought. Folklore would surely be passed down about how we rewrote the book on debauchery. But when we got down to Ocean Way recording studio in Hollywood the first day, producer Don Was informed me that Iggy had recently cleaned up his act. I could almost smell the brake pads burning as my runaway ideas about the sessions came to a screeching halt. Oops. I had a full-on drug and drink habit, and now, out of respect, I would have to keep it somewhat on the down-low while recording.
Iggy was no rookie to such games and soon caught on to the fact that Slash and I kept disappearing to the bathroom for lines of cocaine and gulps of our hidden bottles. Iggy was more than cool about our little indiscretions and never sweated us about it. And in the end, one of my all-time favorite gigs was the record release party we played together later that year for the album, called Brick by Brick. Sobriety had not changed one thing: whether in a studio or on a stage, Iggy flipped a switch when he performed and on came an incandescent, uncontainable rock-and-roll force, whirling, yelping, raw and fucked up. Raw and fucked up.
Slash and I began to hang out a bunch again. I still eyed an imaginary line and I tried to anticipate potential pitfalls—I would ride a bicycle everywhere so I didn’t have to drive home once things got sloppy, for instance. I’d be in shorts and Converse sneakers with a bottle of booze taped to my bike frame. I discovered bike trails in Wilacre Park just above my house and started to detour through there. It was a wild park and pedaling through its arid but tree-covered glens created a sensory effect like sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool: the city suddenly receded, its noise and activity dampened.
Slash’s guitar tech, Adam Day, was living down the road with Steven at the time. I liked biking through Wilacre Park so much that I convinced Adam to ride with me sometimes. I’d call him up and we’d go out for a little exercise, riding on Betty Dearing Trail.
For the most part, though, idle time gave me trouble. Work kept me engaged. Sure, I might start drinking toward the end of rehearsal, but I always showed up and always remained coherent. Steven, on the other hand, was beginning to get erratic. His participation in rehearsals and writing and recording sessions became less frequent, and his ability to perform suffered big-time.
Izzy had gotten sober for good by this stage, and he kept his distance from us. During the songwriting process, he would send us homemade cassette tapes of his songs and ideas. There was no animosity about his reluctance to come to rehearsals, and his songs—like “Pretty Tied Up” and “Double Talkin’ Jive”—were great.
We decided to contribute our first finished song to a charity album, Nobody’s Child, being put together by the wives of the members of the Beatles to benefit Romanian orphans. Early in 1990, we went into the studio to record it. Up to now we had always recorded basic tracks together. Slash, Izzy, Steven, and I played in the studio to get the rhythm tracks on tape. The first thing we wanted was a full fluid drum take. Bass and drums always got done quickly in the early days. I hardly ever had to do bass fixes because Steven and I were so solid as a rhythm section. But when we had tried to lay down the basic tracks for “Civil War,” producer Mike Clink and I had to patch together the drum track from dozens of inadequate takes—by hand, as this was before d
igital editing made that sort of thing much easier.
This all coincided perfectly with the implosion of what was left of the band morale. Axl had figured out that if he said he wouldn’t do this or he wanted that, ten people would jump. People from the management company, the label, would-be concert promoters, it didn’t seem to matter as long as somebody jumped.
Axl also started to see a psychologist, who seemed to consciously feed his megalomania. It seemed to me that she was almost predatory in the way she handled him. After all, she was trained to recognize people’s quirks. As far as I was concerned, she took advantage of him and milked the situation.
Sometimes he talked to me about the things she told him.
“Come on, man, this is me you’re talking to,” I would say. “She’s blowing smoke up your ass.”
“I know, I know,” he would say. “But listen to this …”
Of course, I was in no position to throw stones. I dealt with my shit with booze; Axl had now found his way to deal with things.
My marriage was shot, and now the other thing I most loved and cherished seemed to be slipping into a dysfunctional state as well. The band was so huge that like any big bureaucratic or corporate entity it had acquired a momentum of its own. There was no stopping some things. Once again, I didn’t know how to deal with it, how to fix it. Instead I fixated on my belief that my time on earth would be fleeting. Better go out swinging, I thought.
And I don’t remember a day of peace from 1990 until 1994.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I decided I needed to start fresh in a new house. I found I could rent out the place on Laurel Terrace and cover the mortgage that way, and I started looking for a new place, one without the ghosts of a marriage past. Or maybe just one strategically positioned to make it easier to drink and drive without getting caught.