It's So Easy: And Other Lies (24 page)

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 digital 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.

I bought a new place in 1990. It was also in Laurel Canyon, but this time right at the top, on Edwin Drive, perched on a cliff overlooking Dead Man’s Curve on Mulholland Drive. The place was up the hill from the old mansion built by Houdini. Here on the Hollywood side of the hills, Laurel Canyon was still quite countercultural—it was certainly no Beverly Hills. The name originally came from a studio owned by Stan Laurel, as in Laurel and Hardy, and the road up and over the Hollywood Hills through Laurel Canyon had originally been built to connect to that studio. The first places put up in there were hunting lodges. Later Houdini and Marilyn Monroe moved in, development mushroomed, and it became a countercultural enclave. By the 1980s, the Houdini mansion had been split up and a bunch of unreformed hippies lived there in a sort of wizened dorm-party milieu.

There were secret entrances to the area and I could avoid main roads and cops. This seemed important because it was getting harder and harder for me now to wait until 1 p.m. to start my daily doses of pain management.

Early in the afternoon on the day I moved in, Billy Nasty—one of my partners in crime—and I were hitting golf balls off a tee we’d stuck in an artificial fire log. Neither of us knew how to play golf; both of us were wasted. My dog, Chloe, looked on with an expression of placid amusement on her face. She never seemed to hold my shortcomings against me. One ball hit the fence, ricocheted off, and—
crash, shatter
—went right back through the massive picture window of my brand-new place. Chloe flinched. I couldn’t stop laughing. The movers looked at me like I was an asshole. I just didn’t care.

The house itself had a cool loft space with a spiral staircase. It was fun, light, airy. It provided the inspiration for another new hobby: shooting shotguns off the balcony. Another perk: my go-to coke dealer, Mike, lived right around the corner, and I could whip down to his place and get in and out via little local roads. Or he would deliver the stuff to me.

There grew such trust between us that I had a key to his place and he had a duplicate of my ATM card. I knew he wouldn’t steal from me—I was too good a customer. Shit, he even helped me paint things in my new house. We had an ingenious system whereby he would write me fake receipts for stereo components or music equipment, or for servicing or installing the phantom electronics. With these receipts, I had some explanation for my accountants for my constant drug expenditures. Only later did I realize the expenses were always the same amount, three hundred dollars. I didn’t really care whether the accountants caught on or not. I was living a constant lie at this point and only halfheartedly trying to hide it.

I needed multiple dealers in case one of them ran short. A guy named Josh was my other main dealer. He brought supplies to my house himself or sent his wife, Yvette. I became social friends with Mike, Josh, and Yvette. I knew that they were not really the type of people I should be hanging out with, but I also convinced myself that they had my best interests at heart. It was just another one of the lies I was telling myself.

I bought a potbellied pig. Again, Chloe took it all in stride. But with me in a haze of drug-fueled partying, the house became quite literally a pigsty. It barely registered with me that there was pig and dog shit everywhere. In fact, it didn’t register at all until one of our accountants came by; soon after, he recommended a housekeeping company to me. And I thought,
Oh, is that what you do—house cleaners?

Pig shit notwithstanding, my house quickly became a regular stop for hard-core partiers. The pool behind the house clung to the very top of the ridgeline and offered a spectacular view out over the valley side of the Hollywood Hills. Now that I was finished with the divorce and was partying for nights on end at various L.A. club nights, that basin of sapphire-blue water often ended up a naked free-for-all. Somehow I still lived the life of a Gardner alleyway urchin: sex, drugs, and, um, excrement. Nice.

One of the girls I started to hang out with was a newscaster. She had pictures in her office of herself with Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson. She repeated a catchphrase to close all her on-air reports. Years later she landed a job at a national news network, and every time I heard her finish up with that catchphrase, the image on TV would fade and I would see her paddling around nude in my pool.

A circuit of clubs dominated Hollywood—Bordello, Scream, Cathouse, Vodka, Lingerie, Spice. There was a club to go to each night of the week except Wednesday. I have no idea why Wednesday was an off night. I didn’t care. Wednesdays—and after-hours the rest of the week—the party came to my place. I plucked the stand-up bass to accompany Tony Bennett onstage one night in the VIP section of Spice. I got up and played drums with Pearl Jam the first time they came to L.A. for a show at the Cathouse; there was a lot of alcohol consumed that night, but I think we played a song by the Dead Boys together.

I swelled with pride at what was happening up in Seattle—even if I was a little jealous it had taken off without me. Although I loved and lived for GN’R, with things going off the rails I began to do the obvious—to torture myself with what-if scenarios. What if I had stayed in Seattle? Would I have been in Soundgarden or Mother Love Bone? Would I be making records for Sub Pop, the hip and suddenly successful label set up by Bruce Pavitt, my old coworker from the Lake Union Café? I could have stayed close to my family and childhood friends, people I missed more and more as the fabric of Guns—my surrogate family unit—began to fray.

When Alice in Chains came to L.A. for their first gig—at the Palladium right as “Man in the Box” was blowing up as a single—they asked me to come down to the show and play that song with them. Awesome. After their gig that night, I invited the whole band and various hangers-on back up to my house for an after-show party. The party went on for three days straight.

Other news reached me from Seattle—unexpected news about Eddy. He had cleaned up for real. Life was funny: from now on, I was hiding from him, and not the other way around.

My brother Matt moved in with me on Edwin Drive while he fulfilled his student-teaching requirements. He lived in the back bedroom; off his bedroom was one of only two bathrooms in the house—one of the few shortcomings of the place. He taught every day, so he’d come home and sleep while I headed off to wherever the party was that night—and eventually showed up late at night with a gang of people looking to continue the party. I had installed a billiard table and a drum kit in a room abutting Matt’s. One night Lars Ulrich from Metallica came over and went up to the bathroom off my brother’s room without realizing Matt was there. Lars came out and sheepishly discovered Matt sitting up in bed, wincing. All he said was, “Uh, sorry, man, I just took a big shit.”