Duff McKagan has seen it all, done it all and survived it all – by the slightest of margins. The stories of his escapades as the bassist of Guns N’ Roses, a band whose members practically had their humanity ground out of them by sheer fame and debauchery, are legend.
Fortunately, Duff was in control of his intake during the band’s glory years, resulting in the classic Appetite For Destruction and Use Your Illusion double albums, on which the bass playing is a thing of rock ’n’ roll beauty. “My drinking never got in the way of writing bass parts,” Duff told Bass Player. ‘I was writing music with other drunks at the time! So we were all on the same playing field.”
Like his bandmates, the hell-raising stories about McKagan are numerous. And yet these frankly unnerving escapades seem worlds away from the now 60-year-old bassist who’s spent the last few years touring with the reformed Guns N’ Roses alongside guitarist Slash and singer Axl Rose.
“Axl was never a drunk, but he was never around for the writing of the music. He would come in once something was done. On Appetite we didn’t have a PA in our rehearsal room, so he couldn’t sing stuff even if he wanted to. But Slash and I have been songwriting partners for the major part of my career.”
We could fill pages with bullet-pointed lists of the mad things that Duff did before 1994, when a brush with death caused him to clean up, sober up, get ridiculously fit and go on to a very productive post-GNR career.
In a YouTube interview for Beneath The Bassline, Duff recalled the time his belt buckle gave him a problem during a Guns N’ Roses show.
“I had this killer Chrome Hearts belt that I wore for every gig. And we had this grated stage that we would take all around the world with us, but if it got wet out then that stage would get slick. One show I slipped and the belt got stuck in the floor. We were in the middle of a song!
“I had roadies help me to take the belt off, but it was like that moment in the film where the mini Stonehenge comes down.”
The interview also finds McKagan looking back on the band’s appearance at London’s Live 8 event in 2005, and in particular, meeting Paul McCartney.
“There was a lot going on backstage. There was the Who, Madonna, and Pink Floyd were going to play. We hit the stage, and there’s Paul McCartney. He looks at me and he says, ‘Hey, Duff.’ You only play three songs, so there’s no time to warm up and you’ve got to hit your nut real quick, but all I can think is, ‘Paul McCartney knows my name. How the hell did that happen?!’”
While McKagan's punk-rock roots are well documented, his childhood musical education actually has its foundation in R&B heavyweights like Sly and the Family Stone. At the same time as he discovered punk, he also discovered Prince.
“Meeting Prince was the most freaked out I've been. He was on the Diamonds and Pearls tour in Berlin, and we had a night off, so we went and saw him. Suddenly some big dude says, ‘You can come back and say hi.’”
“I only started playing bass when Guns N’ Roses started, and at first it was more like Prince’s bass playing,” McKagan told Bass Player. “He played bass on his first four records and he had a high-end to his sound. I incorporated that into my sound in Guns N' Roses, which you can hear as early as Appetite for Destruction.
“It's all there, and you can hear the nice round bottom, like a full bottom, but very pronounced. I was at that age when I played drums, guitar and bass, and this guy was only six years older than me, making his own records and playing everything. I was completely enamoured by him.”
