Biography - N.I.R.

Duff McKagan was born in Seattle, WA. His musical interest awoke early, and he was in his first band around the age of 14. In the following years he would play in a lot of bands on the Seattle punk scene, including The Vains, Ten Minute Warning and The Fastbacks. His main instrument was guitar, but he was also the drummer in some of the bands. Eventually Duff felt he needed to get away from the town: "There was a lot of heroin in Seattle when I was playing in punk rock bands from 1979 to 1984. Heroin flowed just like that and everybody was a junkie. There were no clubs for playing, no nothing! It was one of those times in life when you have to make a choice. I had to choose between staying in Seattle or moving to Hollywood for a chance. And that's what I did. I moved into an apartment, and Izzy lived just across the street. Boom! We set up our band. Then it all began."¹
   Duff switched to bass around this time. "I played guitar, I wasn't really... You know, moving to LA, there's like, a million Yngwie Malmsteens there. So, I sold everything I had, which wasn't worth much, and bought a really cheap bass and a little bass amp, and I said, "Ok, I'll just get my foot in the door."²
   In the summer of 1985 the members of the classical Guns N' Roses line up ended up playing together after going through several different bands in Los Angeles. Success came relatively quick, and when the Appetite tour ended in 1988 the situation became pretty difficult to deal with for the band, including Duff: "I bought this nice, big house and got furniture and all that, and moved it all in and the doors shut and I was like: "Wow, what am I gonna do now?" It was the first time off I'd had in years and years and years. I started to go down to clubs in Hollywood, just to meet people. And all of a sudden, you know, these people that wouldn't give me the time of the day before, were like: "Wow, this guy…". You know, they were coming up to me, and girls and all that. And I just thought to myself: "Wow, I must be holding myself better, I must have more self-confidence or something". I'm really not naive, but I really was when it came to that. And after about two or three months of this, after kind of getting stomped on a bit, I went: "To hell with this!"³
   So Duff went back to his house and started writing and recording songs. It would take a couple of years before they saw the light of day, though. This was mainly because of the problematic recordings of "Use Your Illusion" and the following tour. While touring, Duff still found time to work on the songs: "Things got hectic, I would go into a recording studio, wherever we were at, and kind of just turn off the lights and light candles and roll tape."⁴
   The result of this was "Believe In Me", released on Geffen Records in September of 1993. Although Duff played a lot of instruments and sang on the album, a lot of guests were featured. The most well-known were all from GN'R (except Axl), Lenny Kravitz, Snake and Sebastian Bach from Skid Row and Jeff Beck. Duff put together a band consisting of his friends and went on a tour to Europe and Japan. It was around this time his drinking problems got really bad...
   "I didn't do drugs anymore, but was drinking like crazy. I always needed a cocktail by the bed when I woke up in the middle of the night, because else I'd feel awful. I wanted to stop the whole thing but I couldn't. /../ I was lying at home when I felt this pungent pain. At the moment I thought it was weird, though to be honest I was in pain all the time, I was real fucked! But this time the pain began to extend and became so severe, and lasted so long that I couldn't even move. Not even wake up to call 911. Luckily a friend of mine dropped by, and I heard him down the stairs crying "Hey, where are you?" when he entered the door. I couldn't even shout I was upstairs, but he came into my room, found me and took me to the hospital. My pancreas had exploded and a shitload of toxins were running around my stomach. When this kind of thing fucks up a lot of people die, but I did not."⁵
   This really turned Duff's life around. He completely lay off drinking and eventually he got into training a lot. He did martial arts and running. According to Izzy he even ran a marathon in 2000 or 2001,⁶ which for anyone who's seen an interview with Duff from 1993 ought to believe impossible. In the end of the nineties he also went back to school and took night classes at Santa Monica College.⁷
   The rest of 1994 didn't hold much. Slash, Matt and Gilby all worked on the Snakepit material that Axl had rejected. Not much is known about what Duff did, except that he played on the infamous recording of "Sympathy For The Devil", released on the "Interview With The Vampire" soundtrack. Throughout the "Snakepit one era" Duff stayed with Axl and tried to work. In 1995-1996 he was in Neurotic Outsiders together with Matt, Steve Jones and John Taylor. After the last tour with the band ended the serious problems in GN'R started. Slash left the band in the fall of 1996, and Matt was fired in the spring of 1997. Duff was then alone with Axl and Dizzy and new guys that Duff thought Axl had brought in dictatorially.⁸ It didn't take long before Duff left the band.
   "I had folks yelling in my ear, "Hey man, you can't walk away from this million and that million, blah, blah, blah." I had been doing it more for other people then myself. The manager, the label, the band, a bunch of other people. I finally woke up one day, I swear to god, it was just like, "Well, I never started doing this for the money in the first place. So…" /../ There was no way I was ever in music for money. Fame, yeah. Girls, yeah. To be up there on stage, shit yeah. But money? And it didn't really hit me until I had already got the house, the car, then two houses, then two cars, and I realized, whoa, I was doing it for the money. It wasn't fun anymore. So when they asked me back, I asked myself, "If I went back now, it would only be for the money, so why should I start doing it for the money now?" No way. It was ridiculous. It was an absolutely ridiculous thought and that's when I just went, "Screw this, screw the lawyers and the accountants and everything else that's supposed to be so damn important. I want out. I wanna do my music." So that's what I did." ⁸
   "I went out for dinner with Axl and I told him: "Enough is enough. This band is a dictatorship and I don't see myself playing in those conditions. Find someone else."⁹
   Family life also played a big role in leaving the band. Frustrated with the recordings, Duff wanted to spend more time with his family, and it was likely not by accident the departure occurred just two weeks before his daughter Grace was born.¹⁰ Duff spent 1998 writing and recording his second solo album, and did a brief stint with the resurrected Ten Minute Warning. In the end though, the album, which even had been titled ("Beautiful Disease"), was never to be released: "Last December, the album was recorded, mixed and mastered. I met the Geffen staff and everybody was really enthusiastic. I started the promotion and tons of magazines reviewed the record. Then Seagram came, bought Polygram and fired everybody at Geffen in less than a month. So I had another reunion and I just wanted to know if the album was going to be released or not. The only answer I got was that it was impossible to answer me! I was out of my mind: I had a band, we had started the promo, the tour, everything was ready and the only thing they could tell me was: maybe. Finally, the album was supposed to come out on the 9th of February and that very day I discovered it wouldn't. /../ One week later, I still hadn't recovered, especially when I thought about all this fucked-up work. I had worked every day, except on Sundays, during one year.¹¹
   Another thing Duff had done to promote the album was launching a website. When he and his touring band, Loaded, found out that the album wasn't going to be released, they decided to record a live album and distribute it through the website. Eventually it was released on May 27, 1999 under the name of "Episode 1999: Live". After that there was talk about Loaded re-recording "Beautiful Disease", but the tracks never reached the public. In 2001 a new version of Loaded, with Duff the only one left from the "Beautiful Disease era", released their album "Dark Days" in Japan. Duff has also done a lot of work together with Izzy Stradlin, including playing bass on three of his solo albums.