DUFF MCKAGAN's Story: Getting To L.A., Getting GUNS, And Getting Gigs

VELVET REVOLVER/ex-GUNS N' ROSES bassist Duff McKagan has penned the latest installment of his weekly column, which appears every Thursday on Reverb at SeattleWeekly.com. An excerpt follows below.

"A couple of months back, I wrote that I was going to test little bits and pieces of a potential book I may write. If I do enough of these tests, who knows? I may just have the start of a larger work. To make things coherent and in context, I will present things here in a broader sense. Think of it as an outline. Here goes another installment.

"The memories I have of the mid-to-late-'80s Hollywood rock scene do not necessarily include bands that may pop into one's mind. My band, GUNS N' ROSES, and the close network of friends that we kept, were a ragtag bunch of outcasts that remained rather insulated and kept to ourselves during this period. We had little in common with the popular L.A. bands then. Though parts of this story may seem a bit dark, this period of my life was one of the funnest and most profound. It also contained many strong elements of a young man's rite of passage, including a loss of innocence in many respects and facing mortality as a result of losing close friends to overdoses. Maybe not the usual rites of passage, but at the time these life hurdles seemed normal.

"I packed my bags and cut my ties with my hometown of Seattle in September 1984. The idea of driving to New York in my beat-up 1971 Ford Maverick became moot as soon as I realized that, on a budget of $360, the East Coast was just too far away. I decided Los Angeles was a safer place for me than the heroin-infested punk scene of the Pacific Northwest. I was badly mistaken."

Read McKagan's entire column at SeattleWeekly.com.