It's So Easy: And Other Lies (10 page)

I was able to book us a string of dates, mostly in places I’d played with previous bands or been through while working briefly as a roadie for the Fastbacks. The first show would be a homecoming gig for me—a June 12 slot supporting the Fastbacks at the then new Seattle club called Gorilla Gardens. The rest of the dates were in little punk venues, communal houses, and squats down the coast back toward L.A. We would play 13th Precinct in Portland, the basement of a communal punk house in Eugene, another house in Sacramento, and a club called Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. That was the full extent of the plan. We would figure out everything else, including where we would sleep and how we would eat, on the fly.

Rob and Tracii were skeptical about the idea from the start. I guess they weren’t sure whether to take the leap of faith necessary to leave home with nothing but your bandmates and wits to depend on. And just a few weeks before we were to leave, they broke the news: they weren’t up for a no-budget road trip. Not knowing where we would sleep each night was too much for them. I assured them we’d find places to crash, and anyway, what did it matter—we would be on tour, a concept that to me was pure magic.

It didn’t matter. First Rob and then Tracii backed out.

We had ten days before we were scheduled to leave for the tour.

“Don’t worry,” I told Izzy and Axl, who were fully committed and for whom hitting the road had the same mythic appeal it had for me. “I know a couple guys we can bring in.”

CHAPTER TEN

By early 1984, my band Ten Minute Warning was becoming the biggest punk act in the Northwest. Back then, to make two hundred bucks for a gig put you on top of the heap. We sometimes made $250 or $300. A weekly alternative newspaper, the
Rocket,
featured us on its cover, and the
Seattle Times,
one of the big dailies, wrote a piece about us. We were headlining concerts in Seattle and playing real shows elsewhere with good bands—we had toured with the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., and our heroes, Black Flag. We had broken down what had always been an impenetrable wall between punk and metal when we co-headlined a show at a roller-skating rink—where all the suburban metal acts played—with a band called Culprit. Our songs had made it onto some punk compilations. And in early 1984 we signed with Alternative Tentacles, the record label run by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. They had us recording demos for an album.

The band had evolved from the Fartz. I’d been the drummer at one point and was still close to the Fartz guitarist, a guy named Paul Solger. Paul and I had taken road trips in his ’65 Mustang—a gift from his parents—to see Johnny Thunders in Portland and Vancouver. Eventually, Paul and I began to write songs together on the side—both of us on guitars—and we decided to put together a new band. I switched to rhythm guitar and we recruited drummer Greg Gilmore, who went on to play in Mother Love Bone, and bassist David Garrigues, a local skateboard legend. Our choice for singer was a guy named Steve Verwolf, a dude we all knew from the punk scene. Steve was definitely a visionary. His hair was long and he wore black leather hip-hugger pants and little else. Onstage he was a man possessed, mixing Iggy Pop–like antics with the doom and gloom of Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy and the shamanic power of Jim Morrison. By that stage I’d formed or played in a lot of bands, but up to then there had always been weak links in the bands. Ten Minute Warning felt different.

We created a new sound, too. By then a lot of us in the punk scene were getting fed up with paint-by-numbers hardcore. Ten Minute Warning’s solution was to slow things way down from hard-core speeds and add a sludgy, heavy psychedelic element. Black Flag’s singer, Henry Rollins, told us we sounded like a punk-rock version of Hawkwind—the 1970s British band that launched the career of Lemmy Kilmister, who later formed Motörhead. We took this as high praise. Ten Minute Warning had real character and dimension. We had begun to share the stage with other bands also coming out of the hardcore scene and striving to do something new, like the Replacements, a Minneapolis band we played with when they came to Seattle. We were getting better and better.

Paul, who was always dabbling in something, had gone through a few phases of heroin use. But each time he had pulled himself out of it before getting strung out for too long. In fact, I thought he was out of the woods. But I remember vividly the first time he showed up late for a rehearsal downtown at our Bell Street basement space with the telltale nod of an opiate high. I sort of ignored it at first, but the more I saw him high, the more I realized he was swinging back into habit mode. I am not sure whether it was the local notoriety the band was getting that gave him easier access to drugs, but Paul was getting fully strung out, and once an addict finally opens the gates it’s a dark and terrifying road from there.

So by the middle of 1984, I had lost my long-term girlfriend, my best friend, and my main band to smack. A lot of my other friends and musical mentors—like Kim from the Fastbacks—were strung out, too. In fact, almost everyone I had so much fun discovering music with seemed to be strung out.

I was still having panic attacks, and I was worried I might have a serious disease: the year before I’d had a tumor removed from my chest, and though it was benign, I was sure there were going to be more. Taken together, the future—with drugs encroaching from all sides—didn’t look so bright. I was also starting to drink heavily as a coping mechanism. So much so that my boss at the Union Lake Café had a talk with me about it. It wasn’t that I was drinking on the job, but he could tell I was drinking every night. I guess I reeked of booze when I got to work.

I had been at Lake Union Café almost two years. Two things made it a great job: we listened to music in the back, and there were possibilities to advance. My first few months I had worked as a dishwasher, scraping out muffin tins and cake pans like I’d done at Schumacher’s. Once I proved a hard and dependable worker, however, one of the chefs had taken me under his wing and taught me some of the simple techniques—making breads, dipping strawberries. The boss took notice of my willingness to learn and started to test me. One day after work he asked me to take the next day off and show up at midnight instead. Midnight? Those were baker’s hours! I showed up the following night and they announced that I was now a baker’s apprentice. And the boss gave me a raise!

I had mastered Black Forest cakes and various mousses. I could work with marzipan and filo dough. My raspberry tarts with almond-crust lattice tops were becoming works of art. I even had business cards:
Duff McKagan, Pastry Chef.

One of my buddies at the restaurant was a guy named Bruce Pavitt, who had moved up from Olympia the year before. He had started a music column called “Sub Pop” in the weekly
Rocket.
He told me that summer he had decided to start a record label and put out a single, following through on a dream. He already had a name for his label: he was going to call it Sub Pop, after his column.

An unpleasant thought began to churn in my already agitated mind: Was I at risk of surrendering my dream?

Much as I enjoyed baking, I wasn’t approaching my job at Lake Union Café as a potential career. To become a head pastry chef and make real money, you had to have your own recipes. I wasn’t collecting and perfecting my own recipes, I was just executing other people’s. But with my bands foundering and my friends falling like flies to heroin, what exactly
was
I doing?

I still had a dream, a dream of finding a team of like-minded musicians who wanted to push the envelope musically, and who were willing to put in the work it would take to do that. And, of course, ultimately I would have loved one day to be able to make a living playing music. It dawned on me that it was time to begin thinking about a way I could start fresh musically and personally.

I cast about for new avenues—avenues not already dimmed by the dark shadow of heroin—and started to expand my social circle. One night, I ended up hanging out with a guy named Donner. I vaguely recognized him from the periphery of the punk scene, but that night we found we had a lot of stuff in common—most important, a growing distaste for the way heroin was killing our relationships with close friends. Donner was just then opening a club called the Grey Door in Pioneer Square. His club quickly became my favorite hangout. The gigs he booked were always all-ages. Beer was served surreptitiously from a keg in the basement.

Donner and I even briefly started a band and I went back to playing drums. It wasn’t a serious endeavor, but it was a blast. Like me, he was a big drinker, and always had a bottle of something nearby. Seattle being Seattle, we would mix whatever we had with really strong, homemade coffee—our version of a speedball, I suppose.

The Grey Door is also where I met the singer Andy Wood. His band Malfunkshun would come over from Bainbridge Island and stay the weekend at the club—it also served as a crash pad. With maybe ten people in the audience, Andy would point to the rafters and yell out, “I want all of you on the left side to say ‘hell,’ and all of you on the right side say ‘yeah,’” just the way his hero Paul Stanley of KISS did in huge arenas. A few years later, his next band, Mother Love Bone, signed a major-label deal and recorded a benchmark EP. Then Andy died of a heroin overdose—only a few days before the band’s full-length album was supposed to be released. A couple of the remaining guys soldiered on with a new singer and took the name Pearl Jam.

Andy and I would talk for hours about music in general and Prince in particular.
Purple Rain
came out that summer of 1984 and I bought it the day it came out. I had loved
1999
and listened to Prince’s records constantly, either at home on my record player or on cassette on the crappy little boom box I always carried around. A new girlfriend also started making me really cool mixtapes of Parliament, Lakeside, Gap Band, Cameo, and other R&B stuff. Along with Black Flag’s
My War,
T-Bone Burnett’s
Proof Through the Night,
the Rolling Stones’
It’s Only Rock and Roll,
and a new album called
Two Steps from the Move
from the band Hanoi Rocks, this made up the soundtrack of my life during that period of soul-searching.

Prince records had made me realize, too, that being a multi-instrumentalist could open doors. Prince wasn’t so much a solo artist as a one-man-band. Maybe one day I could create records all by myself. I had whisky-and-coffee-induced daydreams of moving somewhere like Hollywood, recording cool Prince-like records, making it big, buying a house, and having Donner and all my friends move down there with me to live happily ever after in a pimped-out punk-rock commune.

Those daydreams took on additional heft when another friend, Joe Toutonghi, suggested I leave Seattle. I had always admired Joe. He picked up on new kinds of music—he was among the first to play me Bauhaus, for instance, and British ska, like Madness and the Specials. He was part of the Jaks, a skateboard crew with members up and down the West Coast. Joe would hop freight trains like an old-fashioned hobo—a skateboard under his arm instead of a stick and bundled handkerchief over his shoulder—just to get out and see other places.

Joe was strung out at this point, too, and he pulled me aside one day and spoke conspiratorially.

“You have to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve squandered my chance. You still have a chance—you are
our
chance.”

Even though Donner and I were becoming thick as thieves, by the end of the summer of 1984, I began to think that if I didn’t get out of Seattle then, I might never get out at all. A lot of my calculations about where to go were based on practical considerations: my old Ford had a slant-six engine that was ultra-dependable, but it already had 200,000 miles on it. Also, my budget was tight and I had punk contacts and crash pads all the way down the West Coast. And my brother Matt was studying down in Los Angeles. Okay, so things were not exactly pointing toward New York City, which had been my initial thought.

Joe’s last music tip—during the conversation when he urged me to leave town—had been about a new group called the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Los Angeles skate-punk band experimenting with funk sounds.
Hmm.
I could make it to L.A. in my old car, leapfrogging from crash pad to crash pad, maybe land at my brother’s apartment for a few nights. Beyond that, there was nothing in particular drawing me toward Los Angeles. It was just a place—a bigger place, a place that wasn’t Seattle, and with luck, a safer place than the heroin-infested Pacific Northwest.

To some people, moving a thousand miles might be a big deal. For me, in the end, it was just a way to avoid embarrassment. I was out one night, drunk off my ass, and told a bunch of people I was going to move to L.A. So that was it, decision made. I had to do it now.

My move to L.A. presented immediate dilemmas. My drum kit was a piece of shit and falling apart. Drums were hard to lug around and set up and break down all of the time. Hey, I was a multi-instrumentalist—no drums, no problem. Okay, then, settled: I would sell my kit. I got eighty bucks for it.