It's So Easy: And Other Lies (21 page)

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!”

They put the magazines down in front of me at the cashier. Guns N’ Roses was on the cover of
Rolling Stone.
I vaguely remembered being interviewed for a
Rolling Stone
article during the Aerosmith tour, and someone probably told me the magazine had changed its mind and decided to put us on the cover instead of Aerosmith, which had been the original plan. But somewhere along the line, I must have forgotten.

Being out in public meant hysteria from then on.

Once
Appetite
topped the charts, the label packaged the acoustic tracks we had recorded along with our old
Live! Like a Suicide
EP for what became
Lies
—which came out at the end of 1988 and joined
Appetite
in the top five just a few weeks after we were on the cover of
Rolling Stone.

Axl’s lyrics in “One in a Million” immediately caught attention. The press labeled us things like David Duke’s house band; I heard that the KKK—or some faction of the Klan, at least—started using the song as a war cry. I stood by my original interpretation of the song and of Axl’s intentions. Art gets misunderstood all the time. Still, I found myself uncomfortable as a result of this particular misunderstanding. I had always looked up to my oldest brother-in-law, Dexter, who was married to my sister Carol. Dexter was a black man with a Black Panther tattoo on his left forearm, and having him in the family meant I never distinguished between black skin and white skin as a child. Carol and Dexter’s kids—two nephews and a niece of mine—were half-black. Or was it half-white? And they were very close in age to me; we had all grown up together. Now I worried what they might think of me and my band with all the controversy swirling around the song.

Prior to the release of
Lies,
David Geffen, the head of our label, had arranged for us to play a charity gig to benefit AIDS research in New York. Axl had used another slur in his lyrics for “One in a Million,” too: “faggots.” Again I felt he had used this word as an indictment of the attitude behind such statements, not an endorsement of them. Even so, the plug was pulled on our charity appearance as protest mounted.

We were happy to get away from the controversy and finish 1988 by headlining our first-ever shows in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. When we left Japan, the promoter gave each of us a nice camera as a thank-you gift. I had never before flown home with something I hadn’t taken with me. The first two times we came back from England, we didn’t have enough money to buy anything. So obviously I didn’t have to declare anything and fill out any customs forms. This time I had the camera, but I didn’t know to declare it—it was a gift, after all. When we returned home the third week of December, our port of entry to the United States was the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. It will come as no surprise that a young, scruffy (and in my case, of course, plastered) bunch of rock-and-rollers didn’t get waved through the express lane at customs. As a customs official went through my bag, he pulled out the new camera. He asked where I got it.

Still in the vodka-induced haze that was mandatory for me to be able to fly, I just assumed the best thing to do was to pretend it was mine all along. “Got it in L.A.,” I told the officer.

Then he opened it up and started examining the writing on the camera body. “Hang on,” he said. “This is Japanese.”

When it became clear that U.S. Customs was going to confiscate my camera, I hoisted it up and viciously smashed it on the ground as hard as I could. Twenty-five years later I’m still trying to get that incident cleared from my passport file.

Mandy and I went back to Seattle for Christmas that year. I had fucked up my thumb at the end of our Asian tour. Freak accident. My bass tech, McBob, had been diagnosed with cancer and had to go home for treatment. I took the replacement tech, Scott, to a dinner in Sydney, where we were awarded an Australian gold record. I had a couple of gold records already, so I gave this one to Scott. We went to high-five and my thumb caught on his hand awkwardly. It started swelling up as the night went on, and I had to duct-tape the pick to my hand for the last two gigs of the Asian tour because I couldn’t hold it. In Seattle, my brother-in-law, a doctor, reconnected the ligaments. I had a cast on when I flew back to L.A.

There’s no way to prepare for how strange and claustrophobic it makes you feel to be constantly recognized. There’s no training for it. One day you can pop into the grocery store to pick up a pack of smokes; the next there is hysteria as soon as you walk through the door. In theory, my world and future were opening up, and the money and fame represented seemingly limitless opportunities. In practice, my world felt as though it was shrinking, as there were fewer and fewer places I could go without attracting attention and having to function in front of an audience. I began to feel like a zoo animal: king of the jungle, stuck in a cage.