Free It's So Easy: And Other Lies by Duff McKagan

Hollywood from Indiana for the weather. He was here to stake a claim and show the whole fucking world what he had.
    As for Izzy, he wasn’t a great guitar player, but I liked that—both in him and in general. I wasn’t a great guitar player, either. It was a punk thing. One night when we were talking after a rehearsal, Izzy mentioned a band called Naughty Women. It rang a bell.
    “I know that band,” I said, trying to place the name. “I think I played a gig on the same bill with them once. Wait, wait, wait. Were they … cross-dressers?”
    “Yep,” Izzy said.
    He paused.
    “I was the drummer,” he said.
    Cool, I thought, this guy really was a veteran of the punk-rock club scene. He was the real deal.
    Izzy and Axl already had some songs, and the other guys knew them: “Think About You,” “Anything Goes,” “Move to the City,” “Shadow of Your Love,” and “Don’t Cry.” And we did sped-up punk versions of the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
    Rob Gardner, the drummer, played a double-kick drum set—a metal dude. Tracii was an incredible guitar player, but his sound was also really metal. My initial impression was that he didn’t have the feel I had recognized in Slash. Once again I realized with a sinking feeling that this was not the band I was seeking, not one that could move the needle musically.
    They had some gigs booked, though, and since Izzy and I had a lot in common and Axl seemed so unique, I decided I would stick it out for a while. After we’d played the Dancing Waters club and another gig so forgettable I can’t remember the name of the venue, any excitement I had about the band dwindled. I missed the next rehearsal. Axl called me after that. He could tell I was pulling back and asked me to please come to the next rehearsal. I reluctantly agreed.
    Axl met me outside the rehearsal space to talk about my reservations.
    “You have to be part of this,” he said. “Give it another chance.”
    One thing I soon learned about Axl: if he saw something in a person, he would do everything possible to ensure that person remained part of his vision.
    Part of my problem with the band was that I was skeptical about the commitment of Tracii and Rob, who both had comfortable suburban lives in L.A. I had already recognized a difference between people from L.A. and people who had moved there. Axl and Izzy were distinct even from other transplants—they were serious in a whole different way. Axl sometimes slept on the street back then. It was also clear that Izzy would do whatever it took, heroin habit or not. You can come with us or not, they seemed to say, but we’re going to make our way and realize our dream. I liked that. Still, I wasn’t sure how best to express this to Axl. I told him I just didn’t think that Rob and Tracii were cut out for going all in and sacrificing everything to work on their craft. Axl didn’t argue. We went inside.
    During rehearsal I had an idea. I had been through the punk-rock crucible; I was used to sleeping on floors and doing anything else necessary to get my band out there. In my experience, conditions like that also offered a chance to see what your bandmates were really made of. A shake-out cruise could be just what Guns N’ Roses needed.
    I pulled aside Axl and Izzy.
    “Listen, how would you guys like to play some places beside fucking Dancing Waters in San Pedro?”
    They nodded.
    “If we’re going to play for three people,” I said, “let’s at least go do it other places.”
    “Fuckin’-A,” said Izzy.
    I could tell immediately that Izzy understood what I was up to—he had been through this before. He knew this was a way to test the links in a band and find the weak ones.
    In the first wave punk bands I played in, we booked our own gigs, functioned as our own tour managers, handled our own dough, made our own concert T-shirts. The do-it-yourself ethic had been strong, and as a result I knew the