DUFF McKAGAN
Duff McKagan is back in the place where it all started for the greatest rock’n’roll band of their generation: Los Angeles, California, where in 1985, at the age of 21, he became the bass player with Guns N’ Roses, and where, two years later, I first interviewed the band.
McKagan, a resident of Seattle, where he was born and raised, is in LA to promote his new solo album, Tenderness. On this sunny spring morning he’s risen early and worked out before his interview with Classic Rock begins at 9.30am.
Back in March 1987, things were different. Guns N’ Roses had just completed what would become, contrary to all conventional wisdom, the biggest-selling debut album of all time, Appetite For Destruction. It was in my low-rent hotel room on the Sunset Strip that I interviewed the five members of the band – singer Axl Rose, lead guitarist Slash, rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin, McKagan and drummer Steven Adler. And as they talked, the room filling with cigarette smoke, McKagan was so wasted he passed out on the bed.
Thirty-two years on, he laughs at what little memory he has of that moment. “Of course I don’t remember passing out,” he says. “But I guess it was a comfortable bed. And in those days you caught a few winks when you could.”
Such was life in The Most Dangerous Band In The World for the man dubbed The King Of Beers – until, in 1994, aged 30, he suffered a near-death experience when his pancreas burst. But as he says now: “That was my path, man. And I learned a lot from it.”
What he has also learned in his 55 years is that life is full of surprises. The fact that he is now back in Guns N’ Roses, having been out of the band for 19 years, is, he says, proof of that.
Born Michael Andrew McKagan on February 5, 1964, he was nicknamed Duff at an early age. The youngest of eight children, he was 13 when punk rock broke big in 1977, and was instantly converted. His elder brother Bruce taught him to play bass, and through his teens he played in numerous punk bands before he moved to LA and found fame with GN’R.
After quitting that band in 1997, three years into his medically enforced sobriety, the former alcoholic punk rocker proved smarter than the average rock’n’roll star by enrolling into a business school and buying shares in two promising Seattle companies: Microsoft and Starbucks. In the 2000s, he reunited with Slash and former GN’R drummer Matt Sorum in Velvet Revolver, the supergroup fronted by Scott Weiland, former singer for grunge stars Stone Temple Pilots.
But for McKagan there was always the feeling that Guns N’ Roses was unfinished business. And following a chance meeting with Axl Rose in London in 2010, a healing of old wounds led to McKagan and Slash rejoining the band six years later. Their wryly named Not In This Lifetime tour ran from April 1, 2016 to December 8, 2018, and it was during that time on the road that McKagan wrote the songs that make up Tenderness – what he describes as “a socio-political album”, produced by Shooter Jennings, son of maverick country legend Waylon, and performed in a low-key, mostly acoustic style.
As he looks back on his life, he has mixed emotions – nostalgia for his days as a teenage punk rocker, pride in how Guns N’ Roses shook the world, gratitude for his survival, and sadness for, Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell.
