A decade prior, I’d been unsure how to begin an admissions essay and now I was writing on a regular basis in a public forum. Of course, I was always looking for new hurdles, the more difficult or seemingly incongruous, the better. These latest seemingly monumental challenges didn’t elicit any physical pain (well, maybe just a little—I’m still a crap typist). But I found them taxing in a different—and equally thrilling—way. I also loved the interactivity permitted by new media. When my pieces were posted online, I was able to engage in a genuine and substantive back-and-forth with readers. It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but it struck me as very punk rock—breaking down the barrier between artist and audience; bringing me and the readers face-to-face, if only virtually; turning readers into writers by allowing comments. I even made sure to invite my harshest critics (at least those brave enough to post their whereabouts) to come shake hands whenever I passed through their towns with Loaded.
Writing about financial strategies in the midst of a recession made me reconsider some of the implicit lessons I was teaching at home. I remember telling Mae a bedtime story one night. Usually these consisted of made-up tales about Buckley, the family dog—he was a superhero at night, which explained why he slept all day. But this night, I decided to tell her one of the stories my mother had told me about growing up during the Depression. My mom’s stories haunted every major financial decision I made in adulthood. It dawned on me that maybe it was time for me to teach my girls more of the values I was taught growing up in a large family with working-class parents.
I maintained an idealized Norman Rockwell–like picture in my mind of how our home life should look. Ah, but things seldom happen according to plan when you have kids. I tried to teach my daughters to play guitar many times over the years. Or at least to get them interested in it. It seemed logical. I’m a musician, and my girls would probably take after their old dad, right? Wrong. The reality was that they thought I was a dork, and that all the things I did were somewhat dorky—including playing in a rock band. Okay, I got it: my girls would never start the new Runaways or L7. Fine. I had let that dream fade years ago. My girls would blaze their own trails.
But then my wife and I took the girls to see Taylor Swift. Before anyone chastises me for my taste in music, let me just say that I completely backed my girls’ enthusiasm about Taylor Swift. Raising kids was hard enough—if my kids happened to be into an artist with a sweet and innocent message, well, more power to them. And maybe, just maybe, it showed they weren’t in such a rush to grow up after all.
The day after the Taylor Swift concert, my wife asked me if I could show her a few chords on the acoustic guitar.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
I muttered that I was a crappy teacher, but that I would do my best.
To my surprise, Susan locked right into it and played the chords I showed her for the rest of the day.
The next morning, Grace asked me if I could show her a few chords on the guitar, and if I could teach her an MGMT song.
“Um … sure!”
Grace and Susan ended up playing all that day. The next two days after that, Grace went straight to the guitar when she got home from school. Susan stuck with it, too.
Then, on the day after that, Mae came into the living room—where I have DirecTV’s baseball package so I can watch my Mariners when I am down in L.A.—and asked if she, too, could learn a few chords.
“I want to play with my sister,” she said.
There I was with all three of my girls asking me guitar questions. They were all playing different chords at the same time. Buckley the dog was snoring something fierce. Ken Griffey Jr. was at the plate, and we had a chance to go up by two in the eighth inning.
“Why do you have such an old guitar?” asked Grace.
The guitar in question was a Sears-made Buck Owens American acoustic that I treasure. I started to get flustered, until I suddenly realized that right there, right then, I had everything I’d always wanted. A family that needed me. Kids who were excited about something I could actually help them with. Two dumb dogs (we had added an unruly pug somewhere along the way) who were finally semi-house-trained. And my baseball team on the TV.
If only Norman Rockwell had been there to paint the scene.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
In the summer of 2010, I had to be in L.A. for a few weeks to work on the next Loaded record while my wife and kids were in Seattle for summer vacation. But that was okay. It was cool to be a lone wolf once in a while, to range free and howl at the moon—as long as I was home by 11:30 so I could call my wife before she went to bed. And yes, uh, well, my dogs got lonely when I was gone too long.
Once while Susan and the girls were gone, I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at an ultrachic Hollywood lounge. I was too afraid of blowing my cover to ask for the address. Cool people were just expected to know where this place was. If you didn’t know, you didn’t belong anyway. There I was, the guy calling 411 to ask for an address. I had to try about four different spellings of the name—is it French?—before I got it right.
As I walked up to the doorman, my phone rang. It was my wife making sure I had fed the dogs and was wearing a coat and had taken my vitamins and drunk enough water. She loved me. I told her I had to get off the phone. I didn’t want to look like that guy: the douche bag on his phone heading to the door of a cool club.
“Yes, you are my monkey,” I whispered. “Yes, dear, the girls are our monkey babies. Yes, okay … I love you, too.”
In October, Susan and I took a trip to London. For about a year, I had been working on starting a wealth management company—called Meridian Rock—together with a British finance partner named Andy Bottomley. And now we had reached a key moment: hiring a fund manager. We planned to spend a week taking meetings with the final candidates and then making some company decisions. This was serious stuff. But it was also the final hurdle of another challenge I’d set for myself, to create a company of my own to help others with the nuts and bolts of finance and investing.
Our British Airways flight touched down at Heathrow Airport on the morning of October 14 at about quarter to noon. My meeting schedule that day was fierce, and kicked off only two hours after we landed. We collected our bags, went through customs, met our car at the curb, and drove to the Metropolitan Hotel in central London for a quick shower before the first of three meetings, staggered at two-hour intervals until dinnertime.
As we walked into the hotel lobby, the manager met us to ask how our trip had gone. Exceptional service is one of the reasons I stay at this hotel whenever I come to London, I thought to myself, but they’ve really outdone themselves this time. But then I remembered: Susan and I were staying in an unusually big room, a suite—in fact, the hotel’s biggest suite. I’m by no means in the habit of staying in extravagant hotel rooms, however, and there was a simple explanation behind our staying in one now. My financial partner had booked the suite, which would also serve as headquarters and conference room for the week’s business and was being paid for accordingly. Since it was such a lavish space, it seemed perfectly normal when the manager offered to personally escort us up to the room.
As we glided upward in the elevator, the manager said to me, “So, sir, you are playing a concert this evening?”
“No, no, I’m not here for a concert this time. I’m here on other business.”
“Are you quite sure you’re not playing this evening, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not playing at all this entire trip.”
A slightly pained look flashed across his face.
“Well, sir, in that case I feel compelled to tell you that a Mr. Axl Rose is staying in the room adjoining yours. But I’m sure you are already aware.”
“Uh, no … I can’t say that I was aware of that. But thanks.”
Though it wasn’t something that gnawed at me over the years, I realized as soon as the hotel manager said Axl’s name that I did have this one last unresolved connection to the
past. Thirteen years is a long time not to talk to someone with whom you went through a formative phase of your life. And if I’m completely honest with myself, there was an element of personal doubt involved in it—I guess I wondered whether lingering resentment or just plain anger would emerge from somewhere deep inside of me when I finally, inevitably, saw Axl again.
Time was a luxury I was short on that day, however, so I didn’t have a chance to dwell on this strange coincidence or mull the situation over just then. I had to shower fast and have a final brushup with Andy before we started our interview sessions—Andy and I had worked for a year solid to get us to this point. The first two meetings went great. I was getting my feet underneath me and sort of hitting my stride. During the third meeting, shortly after 6 p.m., the phone rang in what was serving as our conference room. I apologized to the gentlemen in the room, then answered.
“Duff McKagan!” I heard.
It was Axl’s manager.
Okay, I guess the word was out that I was staying in the same hotel. I told him that I was in the middle of a meeting and asked him what room he was in; I would call him back.
After finishing that last interview of the day, Andy and I went over our notes and had a discussion about the three candidates we had met. Only after that did I start to think about my neighbor on the other side of the wall.
Though it had been thirteen years since we’d last spoken, I had always assumed Axl and I would one day meet again. I didn’t know how it would happen, I just held out hope of perhaps rekindling a relationship of some sort, at some time. These days our only relationship, if you could call it that, consisted of being CC’d on the same emails about various business and legal affairs. Often vitriolic, caustic, or unpleasant emails. This type of language, I’ve found, keeps the clients angry and the lawyers employed.
Now here I was, a forty-six-year-old father of two girls Axl had never met. Grace provided a real-time gauge of how long it had been since Axl and I had spoken, since my departure from GN’R coincided with her birth.
In the end I just went to the door of his hotel room. People from his entourage stopped me in the hallway.
“You can’t go in right now, man,” said one. “He’s about to get in the shower to get ready for the show tonight.”
“I’ve seen him naked before,” I said.
The door to Axl’s room opened a crack.
“I thought I heard your voice out here,” said Axl.
He wasn’t naked.
He motioned with his head and said, “Come on in.”
And so, for the first time in much too long. Axl and I finally met again face-to-face. Any doubts I had about what might happen melted instantly.
We hugged.
From then on, there was no awkwardness at all. It turned out it wasn’t a big deal for either one of us, I don’t think. It was just cool. After so much time gone and lost, we both seemed eager to mend a personal fence, to bridge a gap between us that had felt wider the longer we had gone without meeting. Time apart had done some damage in the form of the aforementioned legal wrangling, but time had also allowed me to figure out some major shit that had happened in my life. With Axl, or really anyone from my past, I tend to look at how I might handle a similar relationship now. What I did back then remains in the past. I don’t necessarily forget those things, but I only bring them out of my memory from time to time to help me better deal with things today. So was I still harboring resentment or anger? To my relief, the answer, I now knew, was a resounding no.
The O2 Arena, where Axl’s gig was that night, sits at the tip of a thumb of land at a bend in the Thames River. Rather than go there by limo, Axl had a boat ferry him to the venue, and he invited me and Susan to go along. He and I told jokes and old war stories as we cruised through central London on the river. He reminded me that I once tried to burn down Gorilla Gardens in Seattle when the club owner withheld our payment. And now Susan knew I had once tried to burn down Gorilla Gardens, too. That must have been one from the vault that I’d forgotten to tell her.
Susan just laughed.
I showed him pictures of my daughters and he had a chance to get to know Susan a little bit, now that he had helped her learn something about me.
When we arrived at the O2 Arena, everyone there made us feel welcome, and that went a long way toward making it an enjoyable experience. I had always wondered what it would be like to see this band called Guns N’ Roses from anywhere but the stage. The guys in Axl’s current band are great players and good fucking guys. I’d had a chance to hang out with a few of them in other contexts over the years. And I’d been a fan of the guy who replaced me on bass—Tommy Stinson—for decades. He was an original member of the legendary Replacements, underground heroes of the 1980s. I must say I had a blast watching them all at the O2 Arena—and the band played awesome.
Then, during the encore, they hauled me out to play “You Could Be Mine,” a song I hadn’t played since the Use Your Illusion tour. I heard the crowd of 14,000 gasp and then go crazy when I emerged from the side of the stage and Tommy handed me his bass. Then I kind of forgot about one of the bridges in the song. Oops. At least Axl sounded good.
A little later I had a chance to go back out onstage and play along with “Patience.” And though I didn’t count the song in, it still felt as if doors were opening. Or perhaps reopening. Given this serendipitous chance to reunite with my old friend, I didn’t want to let it be a one-and-done chance meeting and leave it at that. I decided I would make an effort to remain a friend now.
Axl invited me and Susan to dinner a few nights later, which timed well with my meetings. This was a much more leisurely evening, and one without questions hanging in the air. Axl and I could let down our guard. We both now knew: things were fine.
When the waiter came to take our drink orders, Axl looked up at him, paused, glanced at me, and then said, “I’ll have a virgin mojito, please.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
When Susan and I returned to the States, I was surprised to learn the Seattle Seahawks had started to blast a new Loaded song, called “We Win,” during their home games. It turned out a sports radio broadcaster had played the song and urged Seattle teams to get behind a local band. The whole thing sort of took off, and soon I received a call from the Seahawks organization to ask whether Loaded would play a halftime show on November 10, 2010.
Killer!
Seattle sports teams have always meant a lot to me. I’ll never forget being at game seven of the Western Conference finals in 1996 when the Sonics beat Utah to reach the NBA Finals. The crowd went nuts, confetti fell from the air, and “Paradise City” blared from the rafters. That was a dream come true. This halftime show had the chance to be another.
As the show approached, though, I came down with a bad sinus infection. My whole body ached. Once we took the stage it was fine. But afterward I thought to myself, No more. No more of this bullshit. I need to fix the inside of my head once and for all. Dr. Thomas suggested a local specialist and I went to see him for a new batch of tests and another CT scan.
The doctor had me back to his office and showed me a huge poster of a healthy sinus system. Then he put my scan up next to it. Hello, surgery number two.
Ah, cocaine seemed like such a good idea once upon a time.
Watching my kids grow up has made me realize just how young I was when I did some of the things I did. Sometimes I cringe when I look at Grace and Mae. I really try to have an open and nonjudgmental relationship with my daughters, and my goal is for them always to feel safe coming to me with any problems or ordeals. The McKagans do honesty these days, and I probably learned that in part from my own father not doing it.
Of course, I knew the day would eventually come when I would have to face the realities that accompany growing up. Recently it had gotten back to Susan that the kids in our girls’ middle school had started joking around about sex.
“Joking around?” I said. “What the hell does that mean?”
The time, alas, had come for me and my wife to sit down and speak somewhat candidly about the birds and bees with our daughters. I started to sweat.
We have a standard way to start our team meetings.
“McKagan family conference!”
The girls always got excited at what might be in store. Sometimes we called a family conference to plan a vacation together, for instance. This time, however, a look of dread started to spread across their faces as I began talking.
“You know that you girls can tell us anything,” I began.
When I said the word sex, Mae started to bawl.
Oh shit, this isn’t going to be easy.
Things settled down once it was clear that no one was in trouble and that this wouldn’t be an inquisition. Grace soon stepped up and put everyone at ease with her candor.
“Yes, Dad,” she said, “the older girls do talk about all of that stuff, but I think that it’s pretty silly—they are just trying to act grown-up.”
The mood of the talk became lighter and our family bond became a little tighter that afternoon.
Our house and its contents are always in constant motion. Girls are so different from boys—well, a lot different from me, at least. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that in that ever-growing pile of debris on the floor someone could actually find something to wear, or, in at least one case I witnessed, something to eat. I have learned the hard way to stash my important stuff in a backpack and hide it. Yes, that’s right. The king of this domain and alpha male of this wolf pack must tuck things like his passport, phone charger, laptop, and headphones in a bag in the trunk of his car to keep them from disappearing into those growing piles on the floor.
Still, when I am riding my big, rumbling Harley—swathed in black leather, my skin covered in yards of tattoos, the toughest and baddest man ever to ride two wheels—I can finally feel my testosterone return when the loud tailpipes set off car alarms as I roll menacingly down the bad streets of wherever I am. If, however, I get home after everyone is in bed, I shut the bike down a good block away from our house. I don’t want to wake my sleeping angels. Just don’t tell any of my biker friends, okay? As I walk through the door, Buckley rolls over on his back for me to scratch his belly before he leaves on another secret mission. He waits for me to change into my superhero costume. The launching spot for our crime-fighting forays is always the bed in the master bedroom, right next to Susan.