Duff McKagan and Guns ‘n’ Roses kicked off their historic reunion tour at LA’s The Troubadour last week. As the “Not In This Lifetime” tour travels around America, we revisit a chat with Duff McKagan backstage at a music festival in 2013. Here he talks about his first show, why Axl Rose was dangerous, his first show opening for Black Flag, falling in love with his supermodel wife, making it through to his second chapter and more. Check out our story covering the reunion show here.
Christina: To me, Appetite For Destruction is the perfect rock record.
Duff: We worked so hard on it. And we were at that point in our maturity, which was not quite mature, but we were learning how to write songs and that chemistry of that band. [We were] working really hard on all the little parts of those songs. We would rehearse twice a day and we just lived for it. And when you’re 20, all you care about is your band.
Christina: You grew up in the Seattle punk scene, right?
Duff: We were all veterans of bands. And really when you’ve twenty years old and you’ve been playing in bands, and touring, for six years, you are a veteran.
Christina: You were playing in bands at fourteen?
Duff: Yeah. My first gig was opening for Black Flag when I was fourteen … that was a big scary gig to play. We were called The Vains, it was 1979 … Ron Reyes was the singer of Black Flag then and it was scary. They were Black Flag. I had gone to a bunch of shows, but never opened, not been on a stage.
Christina: Did you ever think all that piano stuff in the later Guns [songs] … is that punk rock enough?
Duff: I came from the punk rock scene and Axl was more punk than the most punk guy I knew, because it was real. He was dangerous. Something could happen anytime … he didn’t give a fuck. He was more metal than the metal guys, he was more Freddie Mercury … so in that band, we didn’t give a shit. Even when it got huge and some people say bloated and all that stuff – we were doing things on our own terms in our own bubble. Nothing affected us. No changes in music affected us. We were still playing stadiums.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ROCK HISTORY:
GUNS ‘N’ ROSES TAKE AUSTRALIA, 1993
Matt Pike of Sleep & High On Fire: [Appetite For Destruction] was the perfect go-between. The punk rockers liked it, the metal heads liked it, of course the glam rockers liked it. It was just like … there was something everyone can latch on to. I still always love that … the guitar playing on that. They had something going on. They had a magic moment in their life.
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