Uncle Joey's Joint with Joey Diaz - #685 - Duff McKagan

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Duff McKagan, a musician and member of bands such as "Guns N' Roses" and "Velvet Revolver" (to name a couple), singer-songwriter, and author, joins Joey Diaz and Lee Syatt LIVE in studio. Duff's new album, "Tenderness" will be available May 31st 2019.  This podcast is brought to you by: Stamps.com -  Use code JOEY for a 4 week trial which includes postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the Radio Microphone at the top of the homepage and type in JOEY.   ZipRecruiter - post your job to 200+ job sites with a single click for free at www.ziprecruiter.com/church  

When I was about nineteen, nineteen eighty-three around there, one of my buddy's uh, dad was fucked up. He was like a degenerate gambler type, drunk type. And he uh, I guess his father had gone to Atlantic City and came back out off the bus in Union City. And he went into the fucking bus station with the cab place, complaining, talking shit, and they threw him out. They bitch slapped him or whatever. So my friend, who was a sweetheart of a guy, came to the bar where we were hanging out and he goes, guys, I'm going to pinch. My father got beat up. I want to go down there and avenge this fucking beating, getting the fucking car and I'll buy drinks later. He was like a bartender, so he was going to take care of us. So myself, Ferney, Pelican,

like two car loads of people go down. We pull up and he gets out first and he's on the orchestrator. He's the Stevenson guy. He goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I just came down here to have backup. I'm going in there first. He goes, I'm going in there. Give me the fucking bat. So he takes a bat. Now this place, the desk to the cab company and all this shit, I guess it was a cab company that the guy bitch slapped him, was facing the sun. So they would put like a sheet on the window and the glass. So you really couldn't see inside what was going on. It was like a tinted windows. We could tell that there was people in there. So my friend John takes the bat and he goes, I'll be back. And he walks in and then we could see that he goes in and he swings the bat one

time and the guy smacks him, takes the bat from him, hits him on the head with the fucking his home bat. The guy can hear like, like one of those things. The guy comes out holding his head, you know, and then we are like half laughing and shit. Like what the fuck happened? And my buddy asked him, he goes, what happened to you? Who are you? Mickey Mantle? Because he was holding on to his hand. Anyway, I thought it was funny when it happened. It was 30 years ago. Who gives a fuck? Greetings from podcastville, you bad motherfuckers. The church of what's happened now is brought to you by Stamps.com. Time is money, baby. Stop wasting your precious time going to the post office when you can send letters and packages right from your desk or your home. You could do that today

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it's at ZipRecruiter.com slash church, the smarter way to hire. Lee, kick this motherfucking meal. Oh, shit. It's Monday, cop suckers. We got Duff McKagan. We got the Christ killer. And your Uncle Joey Diaz. It's a beautiful day to be alive, Duff McKagan. I got you in studio. You look good. You look healthy. You look beautiful. Thank you. And that's it. What's happening? Yeah, Chris, man. We just slept about two years ago. Yeah. It was two years yesterday. Yeah. I seen somebody put it up. That's why I was like, you knew him from Seattle. Yeah. You knew him before you came down here? I did. No shit. Yeah. And then his, he was,

his Susan Silver was pregnant with, with Lily when my Susan was pregnant with May. So they, we had two pregnant, you know, wives together and, and had little babies. So his oldest daughter is Susan's. Yeah. Lily is, is 18. The one he was bringing on stage and singing with her and singing with him. That's, that's his second oldest daughter. No shit. So you knew those guys. Was he really a cook at one of those places that sell salmon? We were all salmon. What was the name of that chain? I think he was at Roy's Bait House. It's actually Ray's Boat House. Roy's Boat House. Yeah. Roy's Bait House. And then there was, what was the other one that just sold salmon and shit like that? Ivers? Ivers. Yeah. Ivers is killer.

Yeah. I mean, that's how you, like, if you were a punk rock kid or whatever in Seattle, you did construction and you were a cook, you were in the back. So you started as a dishwasher because we had blue hair, we had whatever, we weren't presentable to the, be a waiter, a bus boy. You had to work back behind the line. And so all of us probably are great cooks to this day, you know. And you knew him? You knew the guys from Alice in Chains? The Pro Jam guys? Alice Chains guys I met later because they were down in Tacoma mainly, like when they were starting up. I left in 84. I'd heard about Alice in Chains starting up. I did meet them when I moved to LA in 84. And when those bands started to get big, Pearl Jam and Alice, Soundgarden, I was like the

Seattle Welcoming Committee, you know. So the first time Alice came and played in LA, I played, got on the stage and played with them. They came to my house afterwards for like three days. Pearl Jam guys as well. So I knew, yeah, of course, I, I mean, Seattle, you've lived in Seattle and you lived there back in the 90s. It was very kind of provincial, you know, very close knit music community. It was that way in the 80s. And Seattle was kind of way off the beaten track, especially in the 80s, you know, before the internet and all of that. Punk bands would come through. Black Flag came to DOA, of course, from Vancouver, BC, but we were way up there. And people thought we lived in tepees and, you know, whatever in the 80s. And that made this really

close knit music community. We were always sharing ideas and sharing equipment and garages to rehearse in their basements or whatever. And, you know, it rains there. So you spend your time in basements, hone in your craft and creating weird music that, you know, you don't know what the rest of the country's into. DC had their scene with Minor Threat and Bad Brains. LA had their scene. San Francisco had their scene. Seattle had its scene, but nobody else knew about it until it kind of broke in 88. I didn't even know Seattle existed until the Super Sonics in the playoffs on like 79 when I was a young kid. I was there. I went to one game with that. Was it Jack's Sigma? Jack's Sigma just going in the hall of fame. My favorite player was downtown Freddy fucking

Brown. Come on. Drinking a brown bag at the end of the bench and shit. The coach would put him in like Freddy Brown with down eight. Go do your thing. He was built chubby, five foot, like nine. They've had him at six one. I was a lie. He was like five foot nine. Yeah, right. Dennis Johnson. Dennis Johnson. You had the wizard brother, Gus Williams. Oh man. Ray Williams, his brother. He was playing in New York. Seattle, when I was a kid, that's how I first got attention to Seattle. I was like, that place is fucking nuts. And I'd watch downtown Freddy Brown and who, they lost to the bullets. No, we won. Do you beat the bullets? That's what it was. We might have lost the year before. Okay. But we won. That was our only championship until

the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. That was our only like Seattle championship was the 79 Super Sonics. Isn't that stadium the Seahawks, like the loudest stadium in the NFL or something? They kind of designed it. Seattle is loud, you know, like rock concerts and everything. It's always been like this. And I think that's built out of like, because we are so far up there that we wanted to make sure like bands knew that we appreciated them. And the same is true with like sports, like the Sonics games or the loudest. And then they kind of took this loudness of Seattle and constructed this football stadium where the seats come. It doesn't make good radio, but I'm making a V, a steep V shape. It just comes straight down to the field. So it feels like

the fans are on top of you and it and it's sonically super loud. It was weird because that brought my attention to Seattle. I liked how they played basketball. So I'm like, I'm gonna have to go up there. I'm gonna have to go up there just because of the basketball. Good team in 95 too. Now I'm a kid. Now I'm a fucking kid. You know, I'm 1312 when they first went. 77. Yeah, we're the same age. Yeah. I'm a year older than you. So I remember being a kid playing basketball. I would write down Gus Williams' move and go to the basketball court and shit. You know, there was no camera in those days on your phone. And then write down the move. I'd write down the move while I'd watch it. Amazing. And I put like a number to it and the whole thing. And then

I looked at when I got into comedy in 91, the best logo in comedy was Seattle, like somebody had put made put time into this fucking logo. And it's like the towers, the twin, the sky, whatever the fuck it is, the space needle. And it was like a face on top of the needle and it bent over. And I'm like, you know what, man, I've always wanted to go to Seattle. This will be it for comedy. And then, boom, the music. Yeah. Yeah. Then once the fucking music, I was living in Denver and I'm like, I got to get to Seattle. I mean, this is the weirdest story. I'm like, I got to get to Seattle. I got to get to Seattle. And I meet a fucking girl in Michigan and she goes, I'm going to Seattle. And I was like, you know, fucking honest, I mean, I was like,

come get me in Boulder. And she sure fucking did. She came and picked me up in Boulder. We went to Seattle. And by the time I got up there, you know, Soundgarden was huge. You guys were the kings, right? 95. You guys were on top of the fucking world. Yeah. And that's what's crazy. Like by the time all that Seattle music came out fucking guns and roses, just huge. Yeah. You know, my one of my all time favorite videos is a sweet child of mine. MTV didn't really have a lot of videos that year. And sweet child of mine was on MTV two times an hour, every fucking hour. And I mean, I was going to get locked up that August. I was going away to prison. And that's all I did or something was work, call home and watch MTV. And even when I got locked up, I took that cassette

and with me nice of appetite for destruction. What a fucking what a life you had. So you got a GD like me. What made you quit high school in the 10th grade? I was playing music. I mean, back then, you did do it yourself punk rock tours. I was in a band that started like going up and down the coast and going other places. School wasn't really like, you know, 830 to three o'clock school wasn't conducive with me having a job. Because you have to have a job if you want to be in a band, you got to buy a gear, you got to rent, you know, whatever you got to do. So I was the last eight kids to I think by that time, my mom, she saw that I was when I said I'm gonna leave school, I was going to go to alternative school. Right. But they didn't have a lot of those

and were grown up. They had Nova. And they had this place called Nova. So I got into Nova. And I didn't really go. That's when I just I kind of became a lifer in music. Once I left like high school was when I said, okay, well, you've made this big movie better. Be all in, you know, you can't just quit school and be some loser dude. So I really went all in on, I was playing drums, then I was playing guitar, then I was playing bass, then I was trying to figure out which I was going to was going to be my one was going to was like I made a drummer at about the same time. I'm about 16 years old. heroin came into Seattle. This is 80, what 81 late 81, early 82. And it really kind of

this this brown tar heroin came in to Seattle and kind of took out everybody I was playing with. It didn't hit me. I had done drugs and stuff earlier, like really young age, like middle school, you probably did too. It's our age group 12, 12, right? And we moved on to acid acid, sixth grade. Yeah. Yeah. Mescaline member. And we had everything. And in Seattle, we could pick mushrooms on the way home from school, you know, but we knew how to discern liberty caps from every other mushroom by the time you're 13 years old, you're expert on like mushrooms. And so by the time I was 16, I kind of went straight edge. I'd had like a really bad acid trip. I had a really bad mushroom trip. I'm like, okay, I'm done. I started having panic attacks.

And I thought it was from all the psychedelics. So I wasn't like going to AA meetings. I just stopped everything. And I was just so into music. And that's what I that was my drug. About the same time heroin came in, and it took out like guys in my band, this band, we just like we were poised to make that next move we were we toured with black flag, we toured dead candidates, which is you're on your way up in that day and age, right? My roommate that I had a house with, he got strung out by 18, my girlfriend got strung out. And at 19, I was at this point, so it's 1984. And a friend of mine who was strung out, he said, man, if you don't leave now, you got to go somewhere, got to get out of here. You're like our hope, you know,

you know, my little group of friends. And my car, I didn't think it would make it. It was a 71 Maverick. Slant 6 engine, I bought up to 300 bucks, like New York's 2500 miles away or whatever it was. LA's 1200. I've been to LA, played. So I set it south, I moved to LA. Now, how long, what would you do the first couple of months in LA? I mean, I was busy. I got a job at first, at Black Angus, first day I was here, like on the way. I drove in, this is how green I was, I drove into, down over the grapevine, got into Northridge, the 405, right? Got into Northridge, I see lights, I must be in LA. I didn't really know the layout of LA. I'd only played like the Cathay to Grandin, Hollywood,

and some other, you know. So I'm here and I pull off way out there and get a job at the Black Angus. I'm in LA. I had a resume. I was a cook, you know. I had a good resume. I got a job right there. I'd been driving for whatever, 20 hours. But when you're 19, you can do anything. So I got a job after that shift. You worked right then? You started? Yeah. Yeah, man. Got a job. What are you going to do? Oh, give me some time. No, you start. Okay, I got a job. I only had like 260 bucks. So I didn't have enough to get an apartment. I knew there would be a little swing time in there. So after that shift, a guy, an older cook, a front-line cook, I said, how far is Hollywood? He asked me if I could give him a ride home. I'm like, I'll give you a ride home. Where's Hollywood from

here? He said, Hollywood, man. That's like 25 miles away. So he gave me directions and I went to Hollywood that night, slept in my car for the first couple of weeks, that washed up work, you know. Finally, I was able to get an apartment at this really cheap place behind the Chinese theater. The Olympics had just left LA, the Summer Olympics of 84. So what I didn't know, now I have this great leisure of retrospect, right? This great knowledge of retrospect. The 84 Olympics, what the LAPD had done is cleaned out LA. You ever heard about this? Yes, I was here. I came before the Olympics. My uncle said he'd get me a job with the phone company for the Olympics. Now, comedy was not on my radar. Nothing. Entertainment

was not on my radar. I like movies, shit like that, but there was no way it was on my radar. And I came. I think I stayed a week and then we got into a beef. He said, I don't think you really want to stay for the job. And I left. But then I was here and I saw, I was just in shock. I had come to LA a lot when I was a kid to visit my uncle. My mom would send me to Disneyland and SeaWorld and all that shit. But when you live on the East Coast, your impression of LA is beaches and blondes and bitches. And the next thing, you know, I'm saying fucking, I'm in Glendale with, and it looks worse than Newark, New Jersey. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? This is a pipe drain. There's a beach, but then there's all this other land that looks like a bomb fucking hit it,

you know? Yeah. So with our disagreement, I got the fuck out of it, but I didn't, I would have to go around in buses and I saw how filthy it was. I went to Hollywood one day with him. You got to pick up music or something. And I looked around Hollywood and I'm like, this is fucking Hollywood. It was just awful. Yeah. So what the, I guess what the, it's well known now, but the cops came in and they cleaned out Hollywood and cleaned out the place where people for the Olympics would be. They want to make LA look great. And so I guess they shipped like homeless people to Arizona or Orange County, got the hookers out, got the drug dealers out, cleaned it up for that, whatever it is, two months that the Olympics are here. And that

unbeknownst to me, I moved right after the Olympics, September 14th and the cops just left. And so everything came back into Hollywood. It was like the wild west. And I got, but the good side of that was rent was super cheap. Nobody wanted to live there. And so I got an apartment for, I mean, it wasn't cheap to me. 200 bucks a month was a lot of money. But I had my own place, was cockroach infested. There was the, you know, the police helicopters all night long, like just, you know, it'd be right next to my apartment, whatever was going down. I hear people running by my window, you know, there's bars on the windows. It was culture shock from Seattle, for sure. But that first, so I got a job. Yes, what I did. There was a newspaper called a Recycler,

which was you can get everything from, you know, washing machines and lawn mowers, cars. It's still around, isn't it? It might be still around. And it comes in like little magazine things as you're walking on Hollywood, you can open it up. Right. And they had musicians wanted musician things in the back. And I went through this, like, what am I going to do? And there was a guy named Slash, you know, influenced, needed a bass player. I had a bass. I had a, don't think I had, I might have a little lamp. Influences are Aerosmith and Fear and Alice Cooper. I'm like, that's right up my alley. Punk Rock was the hardcore kind of coming in, taking Punk Rock out of what it originally was, which was this kind of open thing where

everybody was invited into this more restrictive uniformed thing by 84. Punk Rock was turned into this other thing. Well documented. So I looked at this Aerosmith, Fear, Alice Cooper, the guy's name was Slash. And I thought, my name's Doft, you know, I'm, he's a Punk Rock guy now looking to make whatever's next ours. And I went and met Slash and Stephen Adler down at the Cantors restaurant. They had a bottle of vodka. And we just talked about music. I had blue hair. They had this long hair and it was that again, was kind of culture shock. I'm sure I was me walking in with like this. I had this my pride. I still have this black and red, like John Shaft, pimp, long leather jacket and blue hair. And I had an anarchy A on the back of the jacket, you know, classic.

And so I think we probably shocked each other, but we all talked the same language as far as music went. And I went to Slash took me back to his house that night, a few blocks away, his mom's house, he played guitar. And I'm like, you're not old enough to play like this. Like, I'd never seen anybody play like he plays like he does now. He played like that then. How old was he then? 19. So you were all kids. Yeah. And you know, again, I told you before we started this Slash mom was really like cool and generous with me. And I mean, I didn't feel like a young kid. She saw me as a, you know, a boy alone in LA up to me. I toured Punk Rock tours, done all this stuff. I was ready for whatever's next, but she was remained in my life and my

wife and kids to come later on in their lives too. But then I met Izzy. Things happened pretty quick, you know, Izzy moved into the shitty apartment building across the street from mine. I saw this guy looks like Johnny Thunders. He's got like the long pimp jacket, too. He's at the phone booth. And we talked and he goes, I'm starting this band, me and my friend, the singer Axel. And I'd seen Slash had taken me to see this gig at the troubadour where Axel is a singer of an early version of LA Guns. And I saw this guy come out and he was like, Henry Roman, you know, he was that intense and real. And like I backed up a few steps, like one of those guys. And I love, I still, to this day, I love the people, guys are girls that scare me somewhat, you know,

where I take a couple steps back because I love that intensity. Iggy had that, you know, Henry Rollins had that, Bad Brains had that, Axel has that. Anyhow, long story short, we started playing all five of us together within maybe four months of me being here. So now it's 85? It's 85. I think our first gig ever was in June of 85. I could be completely wrong. Somebody's going to call and say he's totally wrong. But I think it was June 85 of this, of that five. Now, at this time, Motley Crue was ripping it up on the Sunset Strip. Different world. That was like, they were huge, all those bands. Motley Crue, Rat, all those tight bands were ripping it up at that time. Yeah, they were a few years older than us.

Right. I think we really thought whatever we were going to do was going to be completely different. We were going to start something new. And there was that, it wasn't much of an age difference, but we had kind of come up from it in a different time than they had. Even the five years difference of age was huge. So we definitely were being our own thing. We weren't paying attention to Motley Crue or Rat or anything that was going on the Sunset Strip, which if you came here in 84, you saw all the posters. It was weird. Kind of almost corporate rock bands to us. It seemed that way. They had money to make posters and all this elaborate stage show. We were really more edgy and connected, I think, to the street because that's where we lived.

We eventually got a place together behind the Guitar Center. It was just a room. Wasn't it garages? It was a storage space. It's still there. I lived on Gardner. Okay. When I moved to Gardner in 90s, that's eight. That's the first. I mean, there was hookers in front of the building and it was a trader or gardener? Gardner, a gardener right there, right? I lived on Gardner. Gardner, Curson, Sierra Bonita, and Vista, those are the street. Then they got El Compadre across. My wife and I, we were visiting Shooter. We'll get into Shooter in a minute, I'm sure, but Shooter was producing Shooter and Brandy Karla. We were producing a Tony Tucker record at Sunset Sound. They invited Susan and I to come

by, come and meet Tony and check out this song. We go down. This is only a couple of months ago. So we're down there. We have a good time. My wife's drinking tequila with Tony Tucker. It's just amazing. Tony is what a force that woman is. Susan and I are leaving. Let's go to El Compadre. Haven't been there since the 80s. No. Let's go. We get there. They have valet parking now. Do you know this? Yes. I went by that. It's fancy. That's why I don't stop no more. Yeah. Because they have valet parking. I used to go in there when, you know, it was a fucking wild, wild west. Totally. You go in the bathroom, there's coke on the floor, fucking. They would close it down. Oh, I left my coke there? Yeah. Damn it. It's a crazy place, but I used to stop

there on Mondays and I get the chicken burrito. Sure. Fucking delicious. Kurt Fox, the comic, goes to get the chicken burrito. Yeah. So we'll go and get the chicken burrito. And it's just a, but now the margaritas were super strong. Yeah. The margaritas will fuck you up. Yeah. And so we went to go there. My wife and I, and we pull, I'm like, I got the secret entrances in the back in the alley. I go in the back of the alley. That's where like, there's an outside lounge. There's valet parking there. There's like, sir, there's 45 minute wait, like what? 45 minutes. So we didn't end up going. Yeah, it's busy now. Yeah. That's where professionals own. Everybody else goes to the stand that wants to mingle. If you want to get fucked up and see

the devil, you got to go to Elk and Padre and meet crazy women and the waiters are doing blow. It's still, it's still, you can't get your order of food because the waiter forgot he's in the back cut, the gram. And when he comes to you, he's fucking sweating. The guy playing the guitar was the Coke salesman. So he would come to the table and you throw money into the hole and he would pop up his arm and a Coke rock would fall out. And he'd go, it was crazy. I've seen them carry out. Who's the big time director now that did pulp fiction? I've seen him carry him out of there. Like somebody had punched him with a hammer. Like two Mexicans had them around their shoulders and they would just drag them. They took the keys out of his pocket, just drew them in

the front seat. That's how crazy I've seen that place. Yeah. I mean, when we were there, this is 85, 86, it really, it was just like our clubhouse, like Elk and Padre across the street. When we had enough money to go or somebody said, we'll take you over to Elk and Padre. But yeah, it wasn't, we could just walk in then. Yes. In the daytime, it's wide open. We couldn't afford cocaine. So I didn't know if the waiters had the cocaine. Was coaching horses still there? Was there at that time, two blocks up? I don't know. We didn't wander up. You just stayed behind the Guitar Center, Sunset Grill. You know what I mean? Yeah, all that shit. Denny's was down the block. Filti fucking Denny's. It's that restaurant. Aroma. Aroma now. It's not Denny's anymore? No. What do I

know? Across the Guitar Center that way. It was a Filti Denny's. Yeah, but it was 99 cent breakfast. Yes, it was. No, no. It wasn't Filti as a sense of the food. I was in there eating like late night one night. Some crack hooker just sat next to me instead of playing with my head. That type of thing. Oh yeah. Like when you're eating breakfast, somebody just sits next to you and says, do you want to date that type of fucking dirty? It was dirty in there. Oh yeah. If you can't handle like you got it, you already knew what you're getting yourself into. I'm sure. But if you, yeah, in 1999, I knew what I was getting myself into. It was culture shock in LA. Like none of that kind of stuff shocked me with the crack hooker. Like I moved

my second apartment when I moved on up to like a $260 apartment. I moved up to Franklin and El Cerrito. So now I'm out from behind. I'm out of the cockroach building. Really bad cockroach problem. Like I got used to cockroaches crawling over you at night. You get used to, you got to sleep, right? You get used to whatever your environment is. You turn the light on and get up with your LA weekly and try to like, you know, there'll be a thousand of them scattered, but you got used to. So I moved to this building without as many cockroaches. And this is 80, whatever, five or six. And Sly Stone lives above me. This guy helps me move into my apartment. He lives next door to my, he goes, what are you moving in? I'll help you move in. And it's this

guitar player guy who became a really good friend. He showed me open e-tuning and I wrote it so easy like that minute, West Archean. He was kind of connected to our band from that moment on until he passed away. But he goes, yeah, man, Sly Stone lives upstairs. I grew up to sign the family stone. Like that was music of that, that flavored my youth. It was in playing in our house, James gang, Sly Stone, but what do you mean he lives in this shit hole? Like, yeah, he's got hookers and he's on crack and stuff. And that's when that was my first aha moment. Like I just thought Sly and the family like Sly Stone would be living off in some fancy mansion somewhere, you know. And that was a good lesson. I of course ran into him. He ducked into my apartment one time

to take a hit of crack. Somebody was after him. I'm like, okay, he gave me a demo tape one time and I wish I knew where that was. It was a lot of it was just crazy music, but some of it was amazing. I'm going down rabbit hole here rabbit hole. Sorry. No, no, it's great. But I'm like, oh, wow. So Sly Stone lives here. Like what happened? You know, crack. That's what happened in that case. But I don't know what I was getting at. We're just talking about the logical order before a type of destruction. It must be kind of crazy because when you move it, like I've been here for eight years in LA and to most people, that's nothing. And it feels like not that much time. But then when you look back

at what you did, you're like, oh, shit, like a lot of stuff has happened. And to think about you, like you were talking about, like you go back and forth between Seattle and LA now and then hearing about a $200 a month apartment where you got used to cockroaches. Yeah, it blows it blows my mind. It's like, wow. So what you went through when you're starting is crazy. Man, I got Empatigo. I thought I because I had my piece of shit car, I always had to work on the engine. Like, you know, I remember replacing a master cylinder. I didn't know you had to keep the things under pressure. Master cylinder is your brake thing. You have to keep the hoses under pressure. So I pull out, I go to the junkyard, find a master cylinder that matches mine, right?

Cost me 30 bucks, whatever. Bring it back. Going to take out the old master cylinder and put in the new one. That's for your brakes, right? But the hoses and the brake fluid, you have to keep under. So I take this thing out and all this brake fluid goes flying. So then you have to find, remember those books on your, your cars? Right. Remember that? Your car is, you got to see all the fucking equipment that's needed and what, what it costs. And it'll tell you what you got to do. Like you got to keep the things under pressure. And if you've lost the pressure, you got to do this whole other thing. My point to that is not how to fix the master cylinder in a 71 goddamn maverick. It's a, it's said, I thought I like, I'd rubbed up on battery acid, like the battery too

many times. Cause I started getting these like, what seemed like battery burns all over me. And there was some, I met some woman, her dad was a doctor and he said, okay, you got battery acid burns on it. Like it's like on my waistline. Like you use, you know, whatever it was, baby powder, something tried that it got worse. And she's like, Oh, you should probably go to a free clinic or something. Her dad, it was a pharmacist. That's what it was. It's all coming back to me now. I put the Empatigo out of my fucking brain. Empatigo, you get when you're extremely dirty. I go to this free clinic and I've been keeping myself clean, you know, but my apartment was fucking dirty. Like you couldn't clean the felt out of this fucking place. And

um, in Empatigo, it's like a thing third world babies get. It's just like bacteria. So I got Empatigo from that first apartment. Wasn't battery acid burns. And like to you, was it exciting to be in Hollywood, even though you were running that shitty apartment? Like you thought Northbridge was that's like, they like, it's like, when I got the, yeah, like, were you, were you like super excited to be there? And like, it wasn't like, Hey, I'm in Hollywood. It wasn't like the movie. I wasn't in Hollywood for the movies. I wasn't in Hollywood for, I didn't know what fancy stuff was. I didn't grow up with fancy stuff. So all of that was out of my head. Like those, you didn't go up in the hills because

that was fancy stuff up there. Might as well not even go look at it. I was here for one reason. I was, I was a lifer in music and I was there here to find my band, you know, so having my own apartment was, yes, much better than living in my car. Oh yeah. Do you have any doubts at that time? Were there any doubts about going to Seattle and you always could get a job at Roy, whatever's and cook? No, I couldn't do it. I couldn't come back with, you know, my tail between my proverbial legs, you know what I mean? I had to do it. And I, you know, people have asked me, like, what do you tell a young musician? I mean, if you, I couldn't breathe if I wasn't doing music.

And I tell anybody young, if you, if it makes it hard for you to breathe to not do music, then you're doing the right thing. You know, if you've got some backup plan, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. If you got a, I didn't have an option for college and I didn't have an option for things, you know, which was I, I wasn't mourning that. It wasn't like, I didn't know any different. None of my other brothers and sisters had the option either. They went into Vietnam, they went in, you know, whatever. So, no, I was totally dead set. I was sure of myself and with what talent I had, I knew, I at least knew how to like spot other talent, I think was, and I saw Axel when, when Izzy said Axel, I started this band with

my friend Axel, they'd come out from Indiana. So I knew they were in it too. They had no backup plan. You wanted to find those people. And I'm like, Axel, man, I saw that guy, that guy's super intense and met Axel. You know, we started playing and we got Slash and Stephen in and that was it the moment we played our first. And you rehearsed behind gardener there. We finally got that spot. That's where the rehearsals. We were in Silver Lake. Yeah. And then we got that spot, which I think that spot was like 300 bucks a month or 400 bucks a month, but there's no bathroom, no kitchen, no just storage, just to go in and lock yourself in and play. All these. Yeah.

At certain times, all of us, our gears there, we built, we went to a construction site and stole some lumber and built the room. I mean, the toy, the place wasn't much bigger than this. No, no, no, I know those garages there. We built a little loft, you know, like above our amps, like a sleeping loft. It's tremendous. When was the first time you saw any success with Gunther Roses? When did you feel you were on the right fucking path? Well, that was, we just kept writing songs at that point and playing little gigs, three people, you know, five. And the three people was like West Arkeen, his girlfriend and the guy that's, you know, our buddy who has a big enough car to put our gear in.

But we started, we just kept writing songs and playing more and more. Axel was super, he's like, super driven guy. He just had a bigger worldview or our band. Like he's like, we're going, this is going to be our next step in the next step. And like, okay, that sounds amazing. I don't know. We're just writing songs in our shitty little place. But we started drawing more and more people and getting better gigs. And it was so like, to us, like it didn't, it happened over, we made like a mailing list. We had, we did all this stuff to like push our band. We'd go after fans, you know, like keep on them, get their address, mail them flyers, you know, get the money for poachers, poachers stamps. All you do is fold up the flyer,

tape the top, put a stamp in their address and melaton. But we toured, we made, you know, we got signed to Gaffin. On the stipulation, we could, we had all artistic, you know, last word on everything. Nobody could touch our music. Nobody could, we would pick the producer. We'd pick the mix with everything, pick the singles, all of that. So that was a good feeling. It wasn't success necessarily yet. And we toured for a year and a half on the record opening for everybody, you know, with like seven people coming to see your band. And we started to break in, in UK. And that was a great feeling over there going and playing. We went and played the Marquis,

which is tiny. And then the next time we played, we sold out Hammersmith Audien, which is a big theater. And that's quite a jump. So that was maybe the first time I felt like, oh, we sold out the Hammersmith Audien. And we were going over to Japan, Australia, Australia and getting some, some movement there in the US, such a big market, really commercial. You know, it was like Rockset, Madonna, White Snake with that big record. But we were nothing like... Def Leppard had a big album. Def Leppard.

86, 87. You guys released in 88, correct? 87. 87. December of 87 or something. I think it was June of 87. But the album took a long time to catch on. If you thought we came out in 88 because it took a year and a half. It took, because I got sentenced in 88. And by that time, you guys were off and running. Right.

Everybody knew who the fuck Guns N' Roses was. Yeah. I bumped into, I bumped into Slash when I first moved here. There was a pseudo comedy club on Sunset. I didn't say much. Then I saw him again at the comedy store. Didn't say much. Then I got on a plane with Rogan to go to Vegas in 98 maybe. And I saw him on the fucking flight with us. I didn't say nothing. I went to the hotel that night. I had insomnia. I had no weed in Vegas.

No money. I was broke. And I said, let me just go for a walk. And I saw Slash was a game convention or a comic book or something to do with something. And he was at the bar and that's when I said he's by himself. Let me go up to him and ask him. And I went up to him and I remember going, I love your albums. What really happened with Axl? And you know, he could have told me to go fuck myself and he goes, you're a comedian, right? I go, yeah, he goes, are you hungry right now?

Or are you, I go, yeah, I'm not in the hard time. He goes, remember these times. So when you get successful, you could look at this and see that you did the work. That's all that counts. I want you to remember that you did the work, you know, that you put in the hours and that resonated with me. So this day it resonates a lot. And from what you're telling me, it seems like the guys that you, you got very lucky because the guys you were in the band went had the same dream you had or even more powerful. That lifts you. That's gotta be lifting. You have to find the right in a year. We're going to be playing the Hammersmith,

whatever the fuck and you're like, how much dope did you do last night? But then you go home and you're like, maybe he's got a point. Yeah, you know, somebody asked me about this and I've never fortune, maybe. I don't know if luck, if there's luck involved, you put in the work, you put in the 20 hour days, you know, day after day. We were hers twice a day. We were all in. Like we didn't have hobbies. We didn't have other things that were outside. It was all about the band. And you were like a family at that time. Yeah. You guys just hung out together, fucked chicks together, the drugs together, starved together. All of that.

Put everything went into a pot. That's a big thing to learn in life. Yeah. And we were separate from, we felt separate from everybody else in Southern California, not just L.A. And so we were like this little gang, you know, we protected each other, we did all that stuff. And so, you know, we, I think we wrote the right songs. We were really super hard on ourselves with writing. We wanted the best thing. You know, you got your, you get your feelings heard a lot in a band situation. You're not a solo artist, right? This is like everybody's wanting to make that song the best. So that riff that you just brought in, you just, something in your band just like side comment, that sucks. You know,

when you're moving on, you got, you can't, you got to grow thick skin and, and serve like the song and serve the band. And so when our kind of number was up, it wasn't a lucky break. We had just done all the work and, you know, maybe fortunate that, that the timing of our songs and subject matter struck a chord with the rest of, when it finally got out, struck a chord with the rest of the rock world, you know, the kids our age. These were, we were, it was finally kind of like a truthful voice of, or what's really going on in life, kind of like the NWA record was a couple years later, you know. So I think that was it, you know, but we were all super driven, like we would have done anything for the band. Was it weird that you found, like it sounds like these

people were the first people that you met in LA? Like to me, it wouldn't seem that you would go through like five, six different bands before you found that out. No, I was, I played, I was playing with other people. In Seattle or in LA too. In LA. Okay. I was, you know, I was meeting a lot of people slash wasn't the only person I found a recycler. I just like opened it up, saw him and went to Caners and that was it. No, there was no real idle time in my life. You know, I'd work, finally got a job in Hollywood. So I was playing music all the time, but this was the thing once, I think once it was Axel and Izzy, we started playing together. It wasn't Slash and Stephen at first. It was the two other guys. Slash and Stephen or with Tracy Guns? No, it's Tracy Guns and this

guy Rob Gardner. We're in guns first. Okay. Right. And Izzy and I booked this kind of punk rock tour because I was used to doing this, this West Coast. I knew all the club guys and the crash houses where we could crash. It's all done. We had a guy who would drive our gear. We got a U-Haul trailer. And that was kind of the like shit or get off the pop moment for guns in the history, art history. Tracy and Rob were just like, I mean, I'd never done like a tour and like didn't put these are punk rock tours. Then we're not like exactly knew we were going to sleep that night. You didn't know exactly how you were going to eat. But I'd done it so many times and Izzy and Axel were like, okay, let's go. We got gigs booked. Let's go. And those two guys, Rob and Tracy, just like

basically last minute, we're not going to do it. That's just sounds too, you know, winging it. And to me, that was normal. These were normal things you did. That's what you do. And that was, we're not canceling this tour, man. And that's when we got together with Slash and Stephen. But more than that, when we got together with those two guys, it was the first records we played. It was like, oh, that was the best movie we've ever made. And we were off to the races, went and did that tour. Well, we only made the first gig, which was in Seattle. A car broke down in Bakersfield. So we hitchhiked the five of us to Seattle. You know, we hitchhiked. Oh my God. Who picked all five of you up? 1,100 miles, we hitchhiked. 1,000 miles. We were eating onions

out of the onion field and like Bakersfield. And we had $37, all right, between us. So we went to truck stop. And there was a trucker there. The guy was tweaking out of his mind on crank. He said, oh, so we need a ride. We're going to Seattle. He goes, I'm going to Medford. How much money you guys got? Medford Oregon. Yeah. How much money you got? We got 37 bucks. All right, give me a 37 bucks and I'll take you to Medford. And the guy was, we all got in the cab, you know, like to sleep like our guitars. And the guy did, he got us to, he dropped us off at one point in Sacramento. It was like 110 degrees, man. And we're at the, like the Capitol building on the lawn. There's water fountains and stuff. And the trucker takes off for like, he's dumping

us here, man. But I think he just went to get more crank. And sure enough, he came back around, got us like an hour or two. Got us to Medford. We hitchhiked. We got one ride from Medford on the I-5, you know, this Mexican guy with his little pickup, but we all got in the back and it was rubbing the tires. And he's like, I'm sorry, you guys. He took us like five miles as back tires were smoking. I'm sorry, you guys. It's going to ruin my truck. I wish you the best of luck. And then these, so we're out there, you know, now we're north of Medford somewhere. And we're hitchhiking. And this pickup truck, a real one, like a regular size pickup truck, with a cab in the back, these two women in their thirties. So they were old to us.

They said, you guys, where are you going? We're going to Seattle. They said, well, we're going to Portland. We could take you that far. But at this point, I'm like, okay, I'm thinking I can call friend in Seattle, come down to Portland to get us. And we're getting the back of these, these girls pick up. It was like that corrugated back, you know, cab, but they had a window up to the front. And they said, you guys, they said, look, we passed you guys. And then we turned around and came back and got you because we used to hitchhike and wear hippie girls. Nobody would pick us up because of the way we looked. And we just did that to you. We passed you. And then we talked to them. We said, we just passed people that were like us. We passed them for the same reason,

because they don't look, you know, they look different. And they, they were really sweet. I wish I would have remembered their names because they, they, you guys hungry, fucking starving. Okay, we're going to stop and get some gas. We got some sandwiches. Just come on in the store with us. They got us some beer. You know, it was just like angels picked us up. And at that gas station, I called collect to my friend Donner in Seattle. I said, man, we're on a mission. Dude, we're hitchhiking since Bakersfield. Can you come get us in Portland? He's like, I'll do that. And not only that, I'll throw you guys a party when you get to Seattle, like nobody's ever seen. So we get to Portland, there's Donner. He picks us up. These women

dropped us off. Good luck guys. You know, never got the trucker's name. He was so tweaked out on meth. I don't know. We got to Seattle. There was like this house party, like beyond house parties, there was barbecue and, you know, booze and chicks, everything. And it's like, gotta welcome my new friends, you know, Seattle, like this is our band, especially after that hitchhiking trip, we were a band. Yeah. Like don't fuck around with us. It's over. Yeah. The gig we played in Seattle, we our gear didn't make it because the car broke down. So we borrowed the Fastback's gear, who we were open up for a band I used to play and play drums in. There was nobody there. We sucked. But it didn't matter at that point. Didn't matter. What songs were you doing then? You remember? I

know you remember. You're a fucking genius. Well, we were doing like we had Jungle. We had those. Oh shit. Yeah, we had and we were playing like we have a new box set that came out last year. It has all these Sound City demos we did. And that kind of gives you a good indication of what we were playing. Like Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis, like the speeded up version, Reckless Life off of our first EP, Nice Place, Don't Play Rock and Roll by Rose Tattoo. We were playing covers, but we had our own song. We had a good grip by that point, like eight or nine songs. We played probably Don't Cry, Jungle. Of course, now in Seattle, like 2000 people said they've been at that gig. That first gig we played where there was only actually three people there.

We sucked. I'm glad people weren't at that show. But that was, and we got back to LA. We couldn't do the rest of the tour because the guy who had the car with the U-Haul and our gear, the car never got fixed. He was trying to get it fixed. Our hopes were he'd get it fixed. Minneson Seattle, we'd be able to do Portland, Eugene Sacramento, San Francisco, but we never did it. But we made Seattle and we made our way back and we did our show somewhere when we got back because we had an LA gig at the end of this tour. It might have been at the troubadour. It might have been opening on a Monday night for two other bands. That's where you start there. And we did it, man. We came back like changed people, I think, in a United Band.

And how long from then till you have to record? Now, Don't Cry. You already had Don't Cry then. Why didn't you put that on appetite or eyes or anything? Yeah, there were some songs from before. I mean, there was Axel started in November Rain. He had this thing. All the way back then, he had this piano. Like anytime we, things we didn't have piano, right? So anytime we'd get around the piano, he'd start playing this thing. And he had like this, this melody. He might have had in words. But yeah, when you don't have a piano, like, how are you going to develop a song? And he did over those like four or five years, he developed by the time we made the Illusions record, he'd had this whole thing.

But there was bits and pieces to all kinds of songs. We just sat in that. I'm stood in that lived in that little room and just wrote song. So Don't Cry. Yeah, I was. Why didn't we put it out on appetite? I think probably Sweet Child, but I took presidents. I don't think Sweet Child's a remake, correct? Well, you guys wrote that originally. We wrote that we wrote. Okay. Yeah, there was some loss. I thought it was a remake. But yeah, oh, living like die later on. Use your illusions. That's what it was. No, no, no, I thought I for some reason or another, I just thought Sweet Child. Oh, no, Cheryl Crow fucking did it. Oh, yeah. That's why that's who we did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I listened to that album the other day on the plane. The second or third Cheryl

Crow, my favorite mistake, that album that she put on that one, that's what we did it. She did it like about for soundtrack for some movie. I remember getting the license request, like, okay, I think that's first time Sony made remade. That was like 94, right? Or 98. Was it 98? What do I know? My time. You have so many, like, listen, man, you're why I wanted to get you is you're not like most musicians. Every musician has their own path. You do something that I believe in a lot. I forget who said it now. McCartney, one of those guys that moving to area in the area with excellence, you know, you, like you just said earlier, even though you were hanging out with slash and those guys,

you were hanging out with other guys too. Like you've always been, when did you cut out? I mean, you know, in 90, 91, guns was the biggest sound in the world. You know, use your illusion one and two came out in November that year. And then something like that 90, if you say so. Yeah, yeah, like it was like one and two. And Bert and I, Bert Kreischer and I did a podcast about a year and a half ago and we went off on a guns. Like I didn't know Bert like guns, Bert Kreischer, do you know that comedian? Him and I just went off. Like we started playing videos. Like it wasn't even a podcast. It was like yo MTV raps. We just kept playing, you know, don't cry and all that use your illusion stuff. And we got so many fucking emails because a lot of people don't remember,

you know, a lot of the young kids, they didn't listen to that shit. Right. You know, they didn't listen to that. They listened to something else. We got nobody had, I mean, I loved MTV. And even that, you guys put those videos out and just flipped MTV. They were like fucking ballads, like a short movie. It seemed like, you know, don't cry. And what was the other one? November rain is strange. Fucking beautiful. I mean, you guys just took videos and flipped them. Now your first solo album was 93. That wasn't yeah, 93. You're right. Right. Right to tail end. So I was basically making demos really, like for the next guns record or whatever. But I was a drummer, right? So I played

drums on the record and I played bass and I played guitar. I got some guest people come in. But we were traveling on that illusions tour was was massive. And I took a little solace, like got out of the fray of the tour by going like getting little studios in Dallas or or wherever the hell I recorded that record, I was I was pretty out of it. But I made wrote those songs and and come one thing led led to the next and somebody Gaffin said, well, you should just put out a solo record right at the end of this illusions tour. And, you know, if I were to look at myself then from where I'm now, I would said, no, you're going to go get clean, which did eventually happen to me. So I went out and toured

straight after the two and a half years of illusions. Oh, I had a band got a band together. And we went out back to Europe, open up for scorpions on a big like tour did a bunch of our own shows, did some LA or did some US dates. We were set to go to Australia, I think, and the gigs were doing really well, you know, we went to Japan came back, we're supposed to go to Australia and something like I was, I just woke up one day, I just bought my house in Seattle, like that finally back home. This is it, man, I finally got the house like in the neighborhood we used to steal cars from, you know, like the other side of the tracks. I got a house there. We lived on the other

side of the tracks, but I the other side of the tracks for me was like this neighborhood on the water, like with big houses. And I was able to get this house there, this house on the lake, you know, we used to steal boats and cars and everything from this neighborhood. And I got this house and I had like a bed. My manager got me a big screen TV back when they were huge. So the box for that TV came in was my couch in this house, like you just sit on it right and you make it a couch. And I woke up one day and I had like what I thought was like a sharp kind of gasp pain. And I've rolled over like trying to get it out and the gasp is just spread across my like whole midsection and dropped down into like my right top of my quad and was everywhere. And I

couldn't, I moved again and it spread like over across the rest of my intestines. And I knew something was really wrong and I couldn't reach over to, I had a phone next to the bed. And I couldn't reach every movement just hurt. It was like dull knives pouring into me and I couldn't reach the phone. I called 911 and I just laid there and I'm like, well, this is it. Whatever's wrong. I had no idea it was wrong, but then this is it. It's over. You know, and I was kind of thinking that day would come. Just wasn't sure when. And a lot of thoughts came to my head then like, man, part of my whole dream wasn't like when I was 16 and 17 and 18 saw my friends getting strung out. Like that wasn't part of my dream. Like becoming this bad. I was just to play music.

It was all the things I just told you about like moving LA, finding your band, doing that thing, being able to like hitchhike 1100 miles and being aware and write the songs and do the stuff and do the work. And here I was, I couldn't reach the fucking phone next to my bed. And my best friend, and he's still my best friend. We've been best friends since we were three. He came out. I heard him downstairs. He came. My car was in the garage. So he knew I was home. My keys, my wallet were downstairs. So I'm here. I'm like, where are you, man? Well, he comes up to stairs and he sees me on the bed. It's like, oh, fuck. Finally happened. I was bad for a few years before that. So he got me to, there was a doctor like two blocks from my house

at an office. And this doctor, his dad had birthed all of us kids. So it was the doctor's son that had become a doctor. Going to the doctor's office and it's like, I couldn't talk, right? I could barely move. And even the car ride, just getting down from my bedroom, extremely, extremely painful. It took me to the doctor's office. There was nobody in there. The doctor came, okay, what's he been doing? And he's like, I don't know. It was like I wasn't even there. They were having this conversation. I couldn't talk. Shot me up with two shots of demoral. I knew what that should do. It didn't do shit. And so Andy got me to Northwest Hospital. The doctor said, you'll get them there faster than the ambulance if we call them. Go now. I'll meet you

guys there. And they got me into, I mean, it took me into the emergency room. I was laying on the ground. I couldn't move. And they got me in and shot me up with morphine and all kinds of stuff. Did it, my doctor arrived, they did a ultrasound. They didn't know what was going on, but he had an idea. Like I was alcohol. It was drugs. It was, it took my heart. My pancreas had expanded to the size of a football burst. So it was all the enzymes that digest your food were on the outside. So it was just eating up, you know, the outsides of your testines and stomach and quad muscles. That's why I felt it down there. And so what they do, you know, I mean, it was very beyond serious at that point. My doctor, they were going to go in and take part of it out.

I would be on dialysis at best if I didn't, you know, die of shock from the pain at first, right? I'm hearing all this stuff going, I signed the guy, the surgeon comes in, I signed the thing. I'm like, just, I told the guys to just kill me. I can't take this. Like I'm on morphine. Now, I'm starting to have withdrawals from alcohol, right? So they give me a librae in the other arm, right? Because you can die from alcohol withdrawals, right? This is all, all fresh news to me as it's going down. The pancreas bursts, the size of a football, there's enzymes on the, it's eating you, they're going to, they open up your stomach to let the steam out to release some of the pain before you die. You know, okay, well, I just told the surgeon, but just, just kill me, man.

I mean, there's nothing left for me. And they didn't, so I spent the night there, like ice chips, I had librae in one arm with the button, right? And I had a morphine in the other arm with the buttons on both of them. I was just pressing the buttons continuously. And ice chips are, I mean, intensive care. So there's always somebody there. And they did an ultrasound before the surgery. And my pancreas has actually kind of come down, back down. And my doc said, we're going to wait for the surgery. And just kept me on ice chips and my room in the morphine and checked again. Didn't ultrasound that night. It kept coming down. And my doctor, by the next day, they did another ultrasound. He goes, okay, listen, man, I want you to hear me. You've been given a

second chance. Don't fucking waste it. And I stayed in the hospital for about 14 days, that hospital. They moved me out of intensive care after about five days. They took the buttons away, which sucked. And then I went, but my mom had Parkinson's. I told you I have eight kids in my family. My mom was much older than me. But to see your mom in a wheelchair, you know, with Parkinson's crying because her son's got tubes running. I just, you know, I was like levitated above the bed, and I'm looking at her and looking at me and like, but the order of things is wrong here. I should be taking care of her. You know, you've failed, you fuck up, you know, you fucking moron. So that was my calling. You know, like I was like, okay, you've, you're off booze, you know, even though

I had things in my arms, you're off booze, you're off cocaine, you're off all the other drugs, like this is your chance. Like the doctor's voice reverberating around my head. Don't fuck up. Don't fuck it up. You've been given a second chance and see my mom and all that. And it really changed everything, man, for me. And I came out of the hospital, they had a rehab for me to go to, and I'm like, I'm done. I am done. I didn't know how to live, you know. But that was a long time ago now, you know, to recall that it now it's starting to seem like a long time ago. Maybe 10 years ago, it wasn't that long ago. But now, because I think of, you know, eventually I met my wife, like I went and got into martial arts after that.

After the rehab. No rehab. I was, I had to come back down to LA from Seattle. I didn't know how to even buy fucking groceries sober. Driving my car was like, are you kidding me? All you smelled was brake pads because I was like so fucking tense. I was always on the brakes and going into a grocery store is like you're on acid, you know, hearing the voice come out of the thing because you're so sober, you're not used to it. And crumpled up like dollar bill, like a sweaty all the time. I was riding a mountain bike with my jeans on, you know, because I had to do something. And somebody introduced me to Sensei Bani. I was going down the

North Hollywood golds. I was doing everything, riding my mountain bike, then I would go to golds, did not have a workout, got some guy that said, there's a trainer there, you know, he can help you figure out how to work out this guy who was like, okay, man. I said, you know, I've got some issues. My pancreas just burst. He's like, all right. I worked out there for about a month and I saw this kickboxer, this guy, Danny come in. It was a professional kickboxer and he was doing all the stuff under the look on his face and all. I'm like, I want what that guy has. And somebody took me two doors down to the back of Sensei Bani's dojo, house of champions. And there was Sensei Bani in the little, he could see right through me all the way down

to my core. And I started talking and he goes, uh, no, because you want to, you want to, you want to be a part of this. This, this is a fighter's gym and you'll do, you'll do what I say. You'll work hard and there's not going to be a lot of conversations here. You show me you work hard. You can stay. So I just, man, I was in that dojo two times a day. I just wanted whatever I saw in Sensei Bani's eyes, that knowledge and that depth and the, they didn't seem to be freaking out cause there weren't on alcohol and drugs and they had to calm about them. And, and I stayed in that dojo. I stayed close to that dojo for two years straight, you know, two days, no touring at that time or nothing. Where was guns

at this point? Um, this is 94 into 95. Um, I didn't think I could play music again. I thought, you know, when you get sober, that's the misnomer. Right. That's what I kept. That's why I didn't quit coke for all those years. Right. You're not going to be funny. You're not going to be whatever. You're not going to be funny or off crazy. Yeah. I'm probably talking too much for this fucking podcast, but no, I love this stuff. All right. Um, but, uh, yeah, stay close to that dojo. And I got us started getting honest, like for myself, which is a turn of events, you know, to be deeply honest with yourself when, and you do simple things like you come home to your answering machine, like those calls you wouldn't return. I was returning every call.

I was making my bed. I wasn't leaving dishes in the, in the sink. Right. I was like keeping my house clean, uh, washing my clothes for you to overcome addiction. You have to get your character. Yeah. Your character comes into question a lot when you want to overcome an addiction. Yeah. Same thing happened to me. Yeah. Same thing happened. That's what comes back. Is that character that you fucking shout away, snort away and drank away. That little guy that when it's you and him, when it's you and him alone, you'll throw the cigarette out the window on Laurel Canyon, regardless of what, uh, you'll throw a McDonald's fucking soda out the window, you'll litter, you'll do little things that cause guys like you and I always do the big things.

Yeah. It was little things we stopped doing. That's what made us, it's the little things I tell people on this podcast, uh, I don't give a fuck about your big accomplishments. Give me 10 little ones. And that's bigger than I started being polite to my wife. I started all these things. I mean, you went through a couple of divorces. So you could write it off. They were, they were both before. Before. Yeah. So it's, it's just the things you see. And then you are around martial arts, which is, that brings character back quick when you have three or four gold albums. But at the end of the class, you're mopping down the mass. You are mopping down. You're mopping down the mass. No, no, no, those fighters knew who the hell I was. They didn't care.

They didn't give a fuck. Yeah. They didn't give a fuck. They didn't give a fuck. No, but I finally, you know, so I worked out, I learned to step, jab, step, jab, you know, defense, jumping rope, doing all this stuff. Uh, my body started to really start to change. And I was riding my mountain bike. I'm doing everything. I'm like, I shed like 50 pounds of just booze weight, you know, in a very short amount of time, like five months, it just fell off. And when you're in hitting bags and jumping rope and, and carrying a dude upstairs, you know, you know, we're going to do that 50 times. Okay. You know, you're just, you're going to drop the way, the dojo is no AC in it. Upstairs, upstairs is the golden room,

right? It's about 115 up there and you're, you're, you're sparring on the floor, not in the ring yet, not allowed in the ring yet. You haven't earned the ring yet. You know, you do your stuff up here. But that, that moment when Sensei said, you're ready for the ring, it's today, and there's P.D. Cunningham up there getting ready for a fight in Paris. And if anybody knows P.D. Sugarfoot Cunningham, he was the best in the world, middleweight, probably the best in the world period at that point, 95. Need sparring partners, get in. P.D. Cunningham, axe kick left, his shoulder, axe kick to the right. I couldn't jab, I couldn't punch. You know, he's just, I had head gear on, he's just banging the crap, kicking, punching. I'm just trying to move, trying to give him some work.

I know that's what I'm supposed to do. And I did a couple rounds with him and just beat the hell. And he said, you could tell your friends you did two rounds with the world champion. I'm like, okay. I didn't do them very well. Lost all my, I call it. I got beat up. I get beat up every time I got a kickboxing. It's just part of the little things. It's the little things because that getting beat up will make you more humble on the outside. Yeah, I got really humble. You get really fucking humble. And you're thankful for everything. When did you decide to go back to school? All right. So, well, okay, so I met my wife. So I did start playing music and Steve Jones, one of my heroes from Sex Pistols, had been sober for a couple of years and Shannon Hoon,

it just died. And there was this benefit for Shannon Hoon's wife and little brand new daughter, right? And he said, Steve called me, Steve Jones, my hero. Hey, you want to play a show with me at the Viper Room? We're going to raise some money for Steve Jones. All right. I don't, Steve, I don't know if I can play music. I'm sober. I know you're sober, mate. I've heard that's why I'm calling you because you can play. It's going to be okay. And Steve, just Steve Jones telling me it's going to be okay. So I went down and rehearsed with Steve and John Taylor from Duran Duran and, and so on, Matt, so on. Got the set together and I could play at the rehearsal place. Just fine. I was playing guitar in this thing, right? Not bass, playing guitar. But I learned to play guitar. All my

guitarists were Steve Jones. Like now he's going to see like, and he was, I think at that point, used to people like a lot of people cop Steve Jones guitar licks. And so we played this gig, man. I was scared. And I had, you know, since a, all the stuff in my head, I was like, chest up, you know, head up, you know, it's okay. It's like getting in the ring. It's okay. Like, you're all right. You've done all the work. And I got on stage and played the show. People said I played better than I ever had. People thought I had like plastic surgery and like, because I'd looked so different, you know, all these rumors. Jonesy's like, yeah, people thought you had a facelift and I was like, Oh, what? And, but I could play and we started

playing gigs. And it was called Neurotic Outsiders. And, and so now it's like 96. I still hadn't didn't know how to be like with a woman. I didn't, that was kind of far off my radar. I was reading books at home, but working out, I was like a monk, you know, but that this, I was out on this tour and this guy from to ask your magazine, I was in Detroit. He's like, Hey, man, I know you've been like sober for a couple of years. You know, like you had a bad time with women. He goes, but I, since girl I grew up with, she just moved to LA. I'm going to like put you guys on a blind date. Like, you guys would be good to go. I've known you since 86. I've known her since she was a kid. And, and she's a model, but she's like, just moved from Paris, New York back down to LA. And,

and like, I don't know if I want to get into that world, you know, like I, my world is so simple right now because her world, she's like you. She's from Bowling Green, Ohio. She's really, she didn't get mixed up in all the cocaine and the modeling or all that stuff. She's really, and he put her on the phone. We got to my room, went up to my room, called her on the phone and she sounded like one of my sisters. So I'm really calm, really. I talked to her a few times on the phone through the rest of the tour and she came and picked me up at the Burbank airport. I flew from Phoenix to Burbank. She goes, I'll just pick you up. What, what she didn't tell me, she didn't want me to know where she lived because she thought I was a, you know, I could

potential creep, right? And never know, you know, she was totally right. So she picked me up at the airport and it was Susan, who's my wife, you know, and this, this woman, I, this one before TSA and all that. So she met me at the plane and she was all dressed up. I'm wearing like sweatpants and white feet are in tennis shoes. And she looks amazing. And I'm like, oh, crap. All right. So, hey, listen, can we go to my house just so I can at least change? Like, we can't go to dinner with I just thought she was going to pick me up and we go get some simple thing, but she was dressed in the nines. And she was the sweetest girl on that first date. She was just like the girl I talked to on the phone. And she was really nervous. You know, I found out, okay, she was, oh, she's

Susan Holmes, like John Taylor, like, I knew because John Taylor from Dran Dran was in our band around outsiders. He was way more into the fashion world than I ever knew anything about. He's like, man, this girl, you show me pictures of her. Like, this is my dream girl. And it was Susan. It was Susan. I'm like, I know who you are. I actually know I've seen pictures of John Taylor's got a big crush on. She's like, Oh, that's sweet. But she was just this met Susan. And we kind of not been apart since that first date night. So I we, you know, I kind of had like tell her like my story, you know, and eventually not that night. But over the next couple of months, you know, I said, you know, I've been married a couple of times

and I was to die alcoholic and drug addicts, you know, I was knew I was going to die and I was kind of set for it and almost happened and it didn't. Now I do. You see, I go to this dojo all the time. That's my thing. And I'm riding this mountain bike. This is going to be my thing. And by the way, I just got Sonic's tickets for like 21 games courtside. I hope you like basketball. Because I'm that that was, I mean, that was me making it was being able to get courtside tickets. You know, 95 96 songs. Come on. Fuck yeah, come on. And she was camping shit. That was camp. Yeah, the rain man. Yeah, the rain man. Yeah, the glove. Hersey Hawkins. Hersey Hawkins. Jesus Christ. Yeah, we I mean, what a team that was. And

anyhow, are you going to that team? We could we could spend an hour on the team. I'm taking a lot of your guys time. But Susan, she got pregnant with great. I was now I was thinking about school, like I want to I need to I've been reading all these books. I knew I'd made money. I didn't know how to ask about my talk about my money. I was kind of averse to money. I really like I didn't ever get into music to make money. But then again, I drew since a Benny and stuff and in angling in the ring and defense and fight your opponents and fights you and redirect and all of this stuff. I was learning about my own life as well. Right. Take control of the things you can take control of. And my money was one thing and I didn't know how to ask the

questions. So I started taking some business classes. And I got myself into Seattle, you eventually sort of threw along into their business school. So I was G I went to Seattle, you were my GED, right? And I'd taken a couple of business classes. And I said, I write you a check, you know, I want to go to business school. And they said, you can't come here with it. What kind of moron are you, you know, like you have to. So I had to go to community college across the street at Seattle Central. And they told me which classes to take. And they said, get all A's. And maybe it was you. And I did. I got all the A's and then I said, okay, that's cool. Do it again. They told me what classes to take. I did it again. And got all A's and then they said,

we did an admissions essay. What? And I don't ask somebody. And so I asked my friend Dave Dieter, who was in President's United States of America, those guys all went to Ivy League schools. I known Dave since we were kids. Like they wanted an essay from me. What do I say? You know, like, what's it kind of essay? Do I write on my story? You guys know, tell them your whole tell them your thing. Tell them you your pancreas explode. Tell them your alcohol. Tell them you moved to LA. Tell them you've had this dream. Tell them the dream went astray for a while. Tell them you do martial arts. Tell them you met your wife. You got a little baby. Tell them you're in Guns and Roses to give them your whole story. Tell them the truth. So I wrote this thing. And it was

gnarly. But they accepted me in. And yeah, went to business school. See how the Albers school business go Red Hawks. And really, my life was getting just so much better day by day with Susan, then we had Grace and eventually we had May two daughters who are now 18 and 21. So being able to be there and be present and grow every day I tried to at least, you know, learn something new or be open minded to an idea and not be a closed minded cocksucker cocksucker. It's funny that you went to business school. You did not ask for money. But I think that the Sly Stone thing stayed with you. I think that that was on the back of your mind that you did not want to end up like fucking Sly Stone. Of course, you guys sold. I don't know how many millions of

fucking records worldwide. You want to know what six year fucking tour? Yeah, you know, there's got to be a dollar somewhere. Yeah, I mean, I knew I didn't know. I didn't know his hands were in it. That was the thing. You know, I didn't know what a stock or a bond was. I was too ashamed to admit I didn't know what those but then I when I went to business school, I really found out like most of us don't know what those things are what what interest rates really mean and how they why they affect things and what risk what investment actually means. You know, what is a portfolio? That's a fancy fucking word. You know, what does that mean and mean investment portfolio? So I just took, man, I took it from the very beginning accounting into finance into, you know,

macroeconomics, microeconomics, all of that stuff that you take and I really I moved, you know, business managers and said, okay, I was able to start reading our financial statements and nobody really ripped us off per se, you know, but there was it was time for something new for me to start fresh and I knew what I was talking about as far as financial statements went at this point and I moved CPAs and started fresh. And you started a company? Well, that was later on, much later on. But you started a company to pay so musicians could sign with you or comedians or whatever. Yeah, well, it was more of an educational art. I started writing for Playboy.com during the financial crisis. I was writing for

Seattle Weekly. I started writing and an editor at Playboy, Tim Moore, who had edited like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, all this stuff. It's like, you would be perfect for this financial column. I know your business school, like just tell people in plain language what's going on. So I started this, this column as a weekly column at Playboy.com got a lot of feedback, people were freaking out, you know, people are like selling everything in their 401k like everybody was freaking out. And I was just, you know, I kind of gave people the history of the stock market in plain language. If something would come up that week in the news, like these mortgage backed, you know, these mortgage backed equities that were selling. What does that actually mean?

So I'd break that down. What does a mortgage back equity? What does equity mean? You know, what does a mortgage mean? So I'd break these things down and that started to get a lot, I started to get calls from a lot of friends like, Hey, could you help me out with my money? I'm too embarrassed to ask, or, you know, what we all are. Unless you go to fucking business school, I'm like, do you have to go to business school to actually like know what you're talking about? This is ridiculous. Should be easier than this. So I was thinking of just writing a book of like a simple like that we could all read. This is what a stock is. Let's start there. Here's what a bond is. I read one of your books, not the business one. No, no,

isn't your agent bird level? No, I'm one of the books because he sent me, he's a book agent. He sent me a copy of your book. The first one was called It's So Easy and Other Lies. The second one about your kids. They're both kind of, yeah, there's one called How to Be a Man and Other Illusions. No, that's that one. Right. That's the one you said before, kind of black coverage. Yeah, I think I still got at the house. It was weird because when I went looking for it, I have over a thousand books in that fucking house. So I couldn't find you. Yeah. No, I try to read as much as I can. That's all you got. But it's weird that so you went to business school, you know, you do all this stuff and now you realize you could play

music. Yeah, so Velvry Volver, we started that thing up. Velvry Volver. And that thing did really well. And now, you know, we were all fairly clear headed. We got Scott Wyland, he got sober and And the first record and all of that was really a, we knew how to handle ourselves business-wise too. We were all pretty much all upset at the dojo, you know? It was like, we were 40 and kicking asses. Like, again, we were on that kind of where guns was when we were living in the shitty garage

because people doubted us. I was gonna say, too dirty, they're too scummy. They're writing their lyrics about drugs and shit and blah, blah, blah. We got that. And the ball revolver, now it flashed forward 20 years or something, ah, the two hold. You know, they're not in touch with what's going on.

They play rock and roll. So we just like blasted this record and kind of the whole mindset of that band was like, we're gonna go out and slay, you know? And it did well, you know? It did really well at this point. You know, Susan's now seeing like the rock world. And some things-

That flash is Godmother's name, Ms. Susan. Susan. Susan. Little hippie glasses. Okay, I'm all looking- Ms. Susan, there you go. I must know her. There you go.

But I don't know where I'm getting to. But Susan got to see, now she's seeing like, and things kind of started going sideways above all of some drugs and some things and some outside influences and things. And Susan's like, whoa, this world's fucking weird. And she just wrote a novel. She just came out, she took her nine years to write it.

She worked so hard on this thing. But it came out a couple of weeks ago and it's kind of, I read pieces of it as she was writing it, but she wouldn't let me read it until she had like the final draft and she's like, and she took all of her experiences from her modeling world. And then kind of like that first thing

into the rock world, I made this 90s novel that's pretty genius. Like, I'm like, I know where you got that story from, sort of, you know? But my point to that is her, like us having two little girls and there's like rock and roll, like hardcore. We're touring hard and a lot. And we learned how to be a family like on the road

and how long I can be gone and not gone. It gets past 12 days, it gets weird. I'll come home for a day. Now the girls have grown. We kind of passed that. We've been through all these cycles together as parents, like raising our kids on the road. They've now been able, they've traveled the world

like eight times. They got that extra education of being world citizens, like seeing there's other cultures, other things going on. But also raising our kids through this social media age that kind of came in right when they were like seven and 10, like, oh, shit, how do you do this? Cyberballing, all that stuff. But I think from traveling the world,

we got guns back together. It's like stronger and more pure than it ever was, like getting slash and ax and really like, again, like being on stage with them, like show me what hard work and being badass is about. It instills that old thing like how fucking hard we worked. And we never phone it in. It's never like a thing.

It's always real. But a very interesting, we got this like, we got our like the brotherhoods back together, you know? And it gives me this sort of really sense of calm. My girls are now all they're, you know, whatever they were, they're going to be good, right? I've got college covered for them, like made a 529B for both my girls in business college,

business school. So girls, you get to go to college, right? Like that's what I didn't have. You want something better for your kids, right? OK, you know, like guns, this thing started, things started to change on the news before we went out. Like October, November, December, and I got sucked in. And I read a lot of books.

I read a lot of history books. And I'm watching the news. I'm getting sucked down these rabbit holes of these panels that are yelling at each other. And they're talking about this huge divide. This is 2015. I'm like, wow, this is really interesting. This is a divide, but I start to fall into it.

And when we start rehearsing for the guns tour, and I'm starting to follow people like on Twitter, I'm going down the wrong rabbit hole. It's a very un-me thing to do. My wife, honey, goes, you're watching a lot of news. And you're getting kind of caught up in this, and you should probably stop watching the news. And I made this purposeful switch,

right when we started that tour in April of 2016. I turned off all the news. I shut my, my home screen was no longer yahoo, you know? And I muted all the, I started following people on the news. Like I was watching the panel member, this guy. And I knew that, like they were yelling at each other. I knew that was all to sell ads. I know what the cable news is about.

You know, we all know what's going, if you read a book or five, you know, it's like it's a commercial vehicle, right? I went to business school. I know what they're doing. So these panels yelling at each other must keep people on the channel longer, right? Divide, divide, all the stuff's going on.

So I turn it all off and I mute all the people I'm following on Twitter. And I don't even look really at Twitter. I post like soundcheck, picture soundcheck in, you know, San Antonio. And suddenly I'm out seeing what I do on tour, what we didn't talk about on tour. Since I've been sober, I go out and see the things

that I read about in history books. And I've seen so much on this planet because of that. And I talked, what happens when you go out and see, go to Little Big Horn, let's say, you're talking to park rangers, you're talking to people when you go with the alligator guy in Louisiana on the airboat, you know, you're talking about,

hey, alligators like Marshmallows, who knew? And then he told me and the marshes disappeared. We were supposed to go down this way, but it's cut off now. And he told me about how quickly the marshes are disappearing. And all of these things I was doing, like every other day, all around the world, nobody talked about a divide.

Nobody talked, and I didn't feel a divide. And I wasn't watching the news and I wasn't doing it. So I didn't have these influences. And I'm going around the world and I see the woman with the full head covering and Kuala Lumpur, with the devil horns up rocking up. We're playing these gigs where the gatherings of tens of thousands of people per gig,

and nobody asks who you vote for when they come in the show. No, it gives a fuck. It's bullshit. Yeah. You know what I call the news? Right. Lion or white people. They just lie to white people, scaring white people,

whether it's the weather, they petrify the normal American. You know, last night, 75 million people are in danger tornadoes and they show Iowa and there's nobody standing around. What fucking 75 million? Tell me that you're hitting New York while A. The news is there to scare white people.

I've said this for years. Really gentrified white people, they buy into the news, and then they go on social media and they spew that shit and they make it bigger than what it really is. And at the end of the day, it doesn't affect who Duff McKagan, Lee Sciata, Joey Diaz are at the end of the day. It really does.

It still has to get up, tweet, fucking feed his kid, take her to school. It doesn't matter. All that, it's unnecessary noise going into your head. That'll keep you up at night for no reason. It has no effect on your income. It has no effect on how you're gonna make an income because you still gotta get up and stand online

and still put your pants on one leg at a time. So I just law all this political talk that has infactuated our country the last three years, whether you wanna hear it or not, because it's whether you wanna hear it or not. It's right. The first 10 minutes of the news are going after the president and the cabinet, and it's all something

that does not affect you at all. It doesn't. It does not affect your income or anything, zero. It's just to scare you and petrify you and shit on your head before you leave the fucking house. If you watch the morning news, you're getting shit on your fucking head before you leave the house.

Whether it's the baby where they found the dumpster or the parents that ripped the kid out of the lady in Chicago, I feel bad as a human being, but it has nothing to do with you. So if you go from politics to the lady who got her baby ripped out of her fucking pussy to the Chinese guy who got beat up on United, you're leaving the house.

This is what's in your mind while you're driving. It's doubting who you are as a human being. It doubts you. It makes you go, why should I leave the house if somebody's gonna stick a finger up their ass and rip my baby out? Right. I mean, all these fucking things that have nothing,

and that's why I don't even get involved in that shit. I told my wife, as much as I love my wife, I come in this house again, I see CSNBC on, I throw the fucking TV out the fucking, no more TV. And she goes, why not? I go, because it affects you. My wife gets very affected by it. I see her at dinner, I see when people come over,

she's from fucking Tennessee, you know. She's from the mountains of Tennessee. The biggest thing she ever saw was a fucking rattlesnake, whatever the fuck they do up in Tennessee. Right. I can see how it affected her. Mm-hmm. And it affects a lot of people that way.

I can walk into rooms now and definitely see who, know who watches the news. And just because I got sucked down at two, and I knew I was getting sucked, it was the weirdest sensation. Like, you know you're getting sucked down a rabbit hole. Like I'm on all three Scample news networks. I'm following people like, you're smarter than this.

But it was a rabbit hole that maybe I got sucked down. I always choose to believe things happen for a reason. And when I turned it all off, and I got to experience the world, and I was reading books out on the road. I read J.D. Vance's, Hillbilly Allergy. I read Sarah Kandahore's, View from the Flyover Country. I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

I read Educated. I read The Grant biography. The Ron Cherno's Grant. Amazing. But when you read these things, and I was kind of noticing taking stock of like, any positive change that's happened ever, like on this planet, from all the history I read,

it's not a knight. I mean, it's not a king. It's not a queen. It's not a war maker. It's not a president. Like I played in punk rock bands, and we were railing against the lobbyists in 1980. You know, like we knew the man wasn't like

the current president. They're so fluid. They happen. They go away. We'll be pissed about something else in two years. I guarantee you something completely out other than what we're pissed about today. I guarantee you this is history.

So it happens. But I did notice like the small differences that we make. Like in Seattle, you can't help but see the homelessness. I wrote a song called Cold Outside about like walking fast with the keys in the hand, like getting in your car and getting the fuck out. And maybe it's just, maybe it's your fear of, like I grew up with depression here at parents.

Like they grew up with depression. Your fear of like you're only too bad moves away from being there yourself. Is that what you're scared of? And the opiate crisis and these things, which is a real fucking thing. You and I grew up with drugs. We know like if the drug companies get involved,

shit, all bets are off because that's coming. That's coming at you legit through the, you know, I went to an AA meeting at VA in Seattle and I had to wade through the line, long line to the pharmacy to get to the meeting. And these kids, I've climbed mountains with these kids. They're kids, man. Listen, missing a leg.

Just got back from Afghanistan, a Marine. They're 21, 20. They get sucked on drugs and stuff. You know, Marines, there's so many suicides. They don't talk about these, these kids that I've gotten to meet and now hang out with and climb mountains and do stuff. You got to go to an AA meeting at a VA and check this out.

So I did, I went through and you got to wade through all the people, you know, they're really waiting to pick up to the prescriptions and like, so I figured out like these little ways to make things better in my life is like to, those little things we were talking about that making your bed. For me, it's maybe, okay, I'm going to go into the jungle

in Seattle and meet some people and maybe get rid of that fear of the others. And maybe I can do something, one more step from that. Maybe I can get some fans involved. Like, you know, and that's what I wrote to a record while I was on the road. And it was going to be a- It's just a new one.

Yeah. Maybe it's going to be my third. May 31st. May 31st, right. And the name of this is tenderness. Right. That's the name of the owl. Yeah.

Now you're doing something on this owl for that respect, totally. Because you and I discussed this before. We both have paper routes. Yeah. We both know what it is to save a couple dollars for Saturday because you and Nikki Foot are going to walk two miles to the fucking record store.

Yeah. And you're going to buy- I could take the 71 bus. Right. I could take the 71 bus and go straight to the record store. And I'm going to buy the Clash live in London or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah.

And then we get there and you go, I don't know if I want sex pistols. I'm going to get hard second album or whatever the fuck it is that you- You know, is that 10 bucks? Yeah. So if you had 10 bucks, you were lucky it maybe was eight. Now I see, years ago I did a movie

and they sent me DVDs to the house. And I opened up the DVD box and there was nothing in there explaining the movie. And it came to me what happened to the record industry. Like you and I would go to the record stores, you would buy an album, I would buy one. And then we'd go to your house and pull out the line of notes and read the line of notes.

I remember Van Halen one or- You knew where that record was made. You knew where the record was made. You know who produced it. And one hotel they stayed on the road. You want to thank the Holiday In's or the Hilton's or the fucking Before Seasons, you knew. And now you buy a CD and there's nothing there.

I see that if you get 10 of this, it comes with a book. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, on your website you've offered different packages for it. Like you could just buy the album and you got like a sword or something, my saw or something. But then you have a package that has like the book, a CD. That's tremendous.

That's what people want again. That's what people want again. And I think Brian, your manager, sent me the line of notes and what gave me the inspiration to write all these songs and whatnot. Guess what? That's what people want to see again.

I think people would go through the change again. I don't think we're doing this all fucking day. Everybody you see, I went to New York last week at the ferry. I saw nine people on the dock. It's crazy, isn't it? All nine are fucking looking at something. New York City has changed because people are always on their phones. I don't know about you.

My mother, when I got there from Cuba, my mother said, keep your head on a fucking swivel. Your head's on a swivel because you don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. Me and New York, I didn't go in my pocket one time for a phone. And if I use the phone, I walk over to the side and I watch people as they come up to me. People just walking with their head down.

I can't fucking. It just kills. Crazy. Fucking kills me. Now, did you do this album with Shooter? So I wrote the songs. I was going to write a third book. I had all these ideas.

I was having these experiences, which I'm just telling you about. And I start writing these little passages. And I had a acoustic guitar on the road with me, which I always do. And in that rare moment that I'm in my hotel room, because I am always out seeing something, I was reading my Word document on one of the subjects I was writing about. And I had my guitar in my hand.

And I started playing a couple chords to what I'd written. And I came up with the first song, which is It's Not Too Late, which is the second song on the record. And I thought if I make this austere record, which I've wanted to make for 27 years, a very toned down musical record, if I put these words to this record, maybe what I'm thinking about, which is a concept of healing, of tenderness, of doing something for yourself.

And maybe just your next door neighbor, like we did after 9-11, how we all kind of closed in and checked on your neighbors. And you had to grocery store. And if somebody stumbled, you're like, are you OK? Remember that. There was nobody asked who you voted for. Then do you remember that?

Nobody gave a fuck. We were just taking care of each other, the hurricane and Houston hurricane. And we just took care of people like J.J. Watt raised that big thing. I'm like, I'm in. I like you as a football player. Like, OK, and people were taking care of each other.

The fires here in California. The one that they portrayed on the news before I left on this tour was this divided, fucked up place. And this is the Gunt G&R talk. Yes. And I discovered it's not that at all. And this song, this album reflects those discoveries, I think, in what I offer.

Yeah, I wrote a whole 3,500 word thing along with the record. That kind of explains a lot of things about the record. And my worldview, there's not a lot of me in the record. It's we. And I hope to make people more aware. It's like, it's OK to turn off the news. It's OK, it's just to fucking reach out to your fellow man. It's OK to put your phone in your fucking car and leave it there.

Yeah, it's all right. You take the phone in the kickboxing gym, you know I'd never do. No, I do not. I leave it in the fucking car. I do not. Today I took the phone, I took it from the car to see if anybody had called and was going to run later or whatever. And I went into the school when I finished.

I had my handraps and everything in there. I try to remove myself from this fuck. On the road now, there's no social media. When I go on the road, I have an iPad, but it just has a Netflix. And I have my writing app. No more social media on that. Yeah. On the road, there's no Facebook.

I have Twitter on the phone. I want to like Facebook on the phone. I took a chance between one or two. Right. Because I was suffering from the same thing. Yeah. I could feel it. I could feel it.

And I don't want to go through. I want to enjoy life. I want to enjoy life on my terms. Not reading about it on the fucking Twitter. Yeah. I see these people who are constantly, every time I check Twitter, I see six or seven people who are constantly on all day. And it breaks my fucking heart.

I had to stop last week and went after a girl because she lives in Thailand. And she's always talking about how Thailand is so beautiful. And she had like nine tweets in a row that had nothing to do with Thailand. I went on a personal message and I go, if Thailand is so beautiful, why are you fucking tweeting so much? I had to call her out on it. Like, why are you tweeting so much? Thailand is this fucking land that you say about.

You should be sucking dick and throwing kicks for Jesus. Out there getting coconut oil rubbed on your titties instead of being on fucking Twitter all day and on social media all day. But anyway, that's my view on it. Why? I don't disagree. You're starting to tour. You're starting to tour May 30th.

But the beauty is, it goes back. I want to ask you why. Why are you starting in Philly? Is there a particular reason? There really isn't. I wanted to get to D.C. and hopefully go to Walter Reed and me and Shooter are going to play for some of the dudes, people there.

So the first day, that might be too much. So we're starting in Philly. It's a great rock town, you know? It's funny because every band usually starts in Philly. I thought it was to get it out of the way. If you want brushes thrown at you and shit, because in Philly, they don't give a fuck. No, no, that's true.

They had the, in football, they had the only stadium with the court downstairs. That's how many people would get arrested at their football games. That's how crazy it was. I don't know if the new stadium has a jail underneath, but that just goes to show, you know, if you look at those old videos from Bill Burr when he went to Philly and they heckled them and they threw shit at them. So once I saw this, I go, is that why AC DC started the back and black tour in Philly?

If you check it out, July 31st, 1980, it was in Philly, and then they went to the Palladium on August 1st or something like that. But I saw a lot of schedules that they were open up in Philly. I go, why are they open up in Philly? And after the Bill Burr there, I go, ahhh! Because you want to get that shit over with. If they're going to throw bottles at you, you want to get it over with the first night. Just so he gets...

Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm with Shooter. Shooter produced the record. I had the good fortune of us crossing paths at the end of my writing the songs for this. And he really bought into the whole idea that I had and really took it from there to the next level. He is a next level type of guy. And now his band played on the record. His band is going to be my band with Shooter in it.

For this tour. We're starting in Philly. I don't know why. I've always had a good time in Philly. Me too. I love Philly. I just was saying, why do fucking people start in Philly? And then when I saw the Bill Burr bombing, like people throwing things at him and shit, I go, oh!

Yeah. That's why I put that together with the football and the whole fucking thing. Kickboxes, we're tough guys. We can take a bottle or two, you know? But yeah, but you know, DC, we want to do some other cool things if we can. When we can. And then you're back here on the 13th and you know, I'm going. You're going good.

I'm going like I'm going to see it. I was supposed to go see Michael Shanklin. OK, 14th of May. I really, really wanted to go. I guess I've had the baby. I've been living like a fucking pussy. How old is your baby? Six. And I'm 56. Yeah.

So I've been living like a real pussy. And I was psyched about going to see Michael Shanklin at the Troubadour. Oh, whatever the fucking was a couple of weeks ago was April 14th or something. April 15th, but I had to start a movie that day. And I missed out Michael Shanklin. So when I was going over your web page last night, I saw you going to be in LA. And I go, that'll be my first show to break my cherry because I haven't been to a show in years. I stopped going to show.

Yeah, come to the show, man. It's it's a that night we're actually going to have the the horn section because it's my brother who lives here in LA and the same horn section. Now, this is Bruce, my brother, Matt. Now, which brother taught you how to play the bass first? Now, which brothers that was my agent's teacher in high school? That's Matt. That's no shit. Yeah. No, he's taught.

He's been a music teacher for the fact you went to visit him one day. I've gone out. My my agent said he goes one day, but Duffin and Duff talk or something like that. I played the ukulele. My brother, my brother's a legend out there. Yeah, you won the Mr. Holland's Opus Award, the best music teacher in the country. You know, you can only win it once. He won it early.

But he also played horns on all the gun stuff early. Their first EP moved to the city, living, let die. That that horns and piccolo. The piccolo is his wife. By an apple, then an apple, then a shit. So the suicide horn section is what we call them. So they they played on this record and they're actually going to play with us on the on the song.

You'll play at the end. Don't look behind you. They'll come out at the end of our set and play, which will be a special moment for me. My mom got to see my brother and I wheeled them for the Stones in 89 Coliseum down here in LA flew my mom down and her two sons were up on the state. The suicide horn section played with us that night. My mom got to see that.

How much do you miss your mom? Yeah. Yeah. So. So my brother will be there that night and El Ray will be a good show. But all of them, I'm looking forward to playing national with this. When it's shooter and that band, it's going to be a different world for me. You know, like a lot of this this stuff, I'm getting played on outlaw country and Americana stations,

which is something I've never been exposed to. I didn't intentionally make it outlaw country or Americana record. This was just this austere songs that I wrote and shooter took it to the next level. And so I'm I'm too being exposed to some cool stuff. I got to tell you, when I listened to the album, I was writing in my office. I was doing various things. But that's like the fourth song I was like, I like you. I really genuinely like you as a human being, because we were the same like we.

You like variety. Yeah, you know, I expected to hear fucking devil's cry and the guitars and cymbals getting lit on fire. And it was just this beautiful, these beautiful words, you know, in the midst of all this gun stuff, like we're we are playing loud rock. Well, we're I'm where I'm supposed to be back, you know, in as far as loud rock and roll goes and we we do it and we do it right. And for me to come out with like a hard rock record

in between tours would make no sense to me. And I wouldn't have a reason to do it. This was going to be a book of observations. It became an album of observations and austere doesn't doesn't even it's not even the same, you know, music classifications, anything Guns at Roses does is it's off the beaten track. That's why I'm not afraid to take the chance, you know, like if fans want to come along, great.

If some are like this is too mellow, that's fine, too. But I think you matured and your fans are matured. I think that was 1987, 88. Yeah, that's a long fucking journey, you know, that's 32 something years. Not only did you grow. You hope that they grew and they got off the drugs like we all did. Yeah, I remember seeing you guys at some award party. Like like not seeing you live.

I was watching on TV. I don't know if it's MTV or the Grammys. You guys were fucked up. Yeah, I mean, fucked up. I was cheering for you. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, you were scaring white people like that night that you were scaring people like must have been like, who the fuck he had the hat on.

You had the long hair. Fucking crazy. And bro, that was that was just Tuesday night. That was not Tuesday night, you know, and special. That's what's the website where they could find the tour dates. They could order the album from it's Duff online. Duff online.

Yeah, very interesting. I like the video that you put up there. Cool. And you have your little guys getting interviewed. You really give the fan a way to look into your mind. Most guys don't give a fuck about it. And you have you look beautiful to have evolved. I was watching the rock and roll Hall of Fame last night.

I still haven't touched Def Leppard on that. It's on HBO and I put it on. I'll tell you who killed at that Hall of Fame day, the cure. Did you watch? Oh, I haven't watched it yet. The fucking cure destroyed that joint. But the singer looked like a fat woman. He still had the blue eye shadow on. He had his hair like somebody pulled it for an hour.

You know, the thing about you is you evolved. And I think slash is everybody evolved. You know, for years, we heard Axl was done. Look, he came back, man, did a great job and then went over and helped that ACDC for a little while, you know. And the way he did that was like amazing. He's like, you guys don't mind it. I'm going to go try out.

They need a hand here. It's like, you know, we know like Bon Scott's his all time. And it's like, dude, you know, you don't have to really try ACDC. But he was really nervous. I'm going to go try out and just see if they got a couple of months. It fits in with our touring perfect. And slash there like you got the gig. But he went to Atlanta and tried out, quote unquote, and got the gig.

And yeah, he was a I saw him twice on that tour. I flew to London to see him and flew to Cleveland to see that. What was your phenomenon? It was great. Phenomenon ACDC. It's just what I think what it did for for him, you know, like. We got to know Angus through that, you know, Angus now come out and play with us a bunch of times.

And that was I think that thing as a when you're 14 or 15, when he was 14 or 15, man, one day if I ever got to be in ACDC, you know, you're singing with a broom and he finally got to do it. Amazing. So whenever you want to come on, you have a family up to the tour. I really want to see you back on the podcast. I want you to talk about what happened on the tour and what your feelings are that you're a great fucking guy or a genius.

And you got a family here on the church, brother. I appreciate it. And I'll be there on the 13th. It opens up in Philadelphia on the 30th, moves to DC on the 31st. Then you got Boston on the 1st of June, New York City on the fucking 30th, taking the night off and the LA, I would write the whole fucking schedule down, but I'd rather them go to your website. Sure. I said, you're always welcome here.

Don't forget my dates, June 1st at the Ice House, June 7th in New Orleans and June 8th at the Tabernacle Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. I want to thank you. I want to thank the motherfucking Christ killer. But most importantly, I want to thank the church family for supporting us. If you're any of those cities, please support Duffy's, the real fucking deal. Holy feel. If you have a kickboxing school, you want Duff to visit on the road, fucking reach out.

He'll show up with a mouthpiece, gloves and a fucking stick for you. Young cock suckers. Don't get any ideas. I want to thank Duff McKagan. I want to thank the Christ killer and I want to thank our sponsors for always having our back, our number one sponsor, who I love with all my heart is Zip Recruiter. Why? Because listen, it's hard out there.

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You'll be out of the tip top, my good by nine with a smile on your face. And you go give your wife a stab in that easy. All right, old girlfriend. Like I said, I want to thank all you guys for being part of our little Tate Tate and for supporting us over the years. I love you, motherfuckers. Lee, kick this motherfucking meal. This better days.

Leave it all behind you. Nothing left to say. It's all been shot through. Never look back. Don't look behind you. We're all done giving fools. Look up the skies blue. Never look back.

In my blind you. We all want the truth. We all want something new. Never look back. It will find you. It's getting better soon. The light is coming through. Never look back.

Don't look behind you. Our tenderness is true. There's better ways. Right here beside you. The darkest shade. It won't find you. It will find you. It will find you.

It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. Never look back.

Don't look behind you. We're all done giving fools. Look up the skies blue. Never look back. In my blind you. We all want the truth. We all want something new. Never look back.

It will find you. It's getting better soon. The light is coming through. Never look back. Don't look behind you. Our tenderness is true. Right here beside you. Never look back.

It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you.

It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It will find you. It'll find you.

It will find you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. you