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

nuts and bolts of the business. With some songs mastered and these local gigs under our belts, I knew I could use the contacts I’d accumulated over the years to line up some shows for the fledgling Guns N’ Roses—a punk-rock tour of the West Coast.
    “I think I can book us a tour,” I said. “It’ll be bare-bones, but we’ll be out there playing.”
    They loved the idea.
    “Yeah, let’s do it!”
    I was excited now, too: we would know by the end of this whether GN’R was the real deal or not. Punk-rock tours in those days ran on pure adventure and adrenaline. You counted yourself lucky if you earned enough to pay for gas and still had something left over to buy ramen noodles. You slept at a crash house if you could find one or on the club floor if the owner liked you. But none of that was important. The main thing was that it offered the chance to prove yourself, to push yourself beyond the confines of your comfort zone, to take music you believed in to other people’s towns, to throw all caution to the wind. Come to think of it, there was no caution in those days.
    I was able to book us a string of dates, mostly in places I’d played with previous bands or been through while working briefly as a roadie for the Fastbacks. The first show would be a homecoming gig for me—a June 12 slot supporting the Fastbacks at the then new Seattle club called Gorilla Gardens. The rest of the dates were in little punk venues, communal houses, and squats down the coast back toward L.A. We would play 13th Precinct in Portland, the basement of a communal punk house in Eugene, another house in Sacramento, and a club called Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. That was the full extent of the plan. We would figure out everything else, including where we would sleep and how we would eat, on the fly.
    Rob and Tracii were skeptical about the idea from the start. I guess they weren’t sure whether to take the leap of faith necessary to leave home with nothing but your bandmates and wits to depend on. And just a few weeks before we were to leave, they broke the news: they weren’t up for a no-budget road trip. Not knowing where we would sleep each night was too much for them. I assured them we’d find places to crash, and anyway, what did it matter—we would be on tour, a concept that to me was pure magic.
    It didn’t matter. First Rob and then Tracii backed out.
    We had ten days before we were scheduled to leave for the tour.
    “Don’t worry,” I told Izzy and Axl, who were fully committed and for whom hitting the road had the same mythic appeal it had for me. “I know a couple guys we can bring in.”

CHAPTER TEN
     

     
    By early 1984, my band Ten Minute Warning was becoming the biggest punk act in the Northwest. Back then, to make two hundred bucks for a gig put you on top of the heap. We sometimes made $250 or $300. A weekly alternative newspaper, the Rocket, featured us on its cover, and the Seattle Times, one of the big dailies, wrote a piece about us. We were headlining concerts in Seattle and playing real shows elsewhere with good bands—we had toured with the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., and our heroes, Black Flag. We had broken down what had always been an impenetrable wall between punk and metal when we co-headlined a show at a roller-skating rink—where all the suburban metal acts played—with a band called Culprit. Our songs had made it onto some punk compilations. And in early 1984 we signed with Alternative Tentacles, the record label run by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. They had us recording demos for an album.
    The band had evolved from the Fartz. I’d been the drummer at one point and was still close to the Fartz guitarist, a guy named Paul Solger. Paul and I had taken road trips in his ’65 Mustang—a gift from his parents—to see Johnny Thunders in Portland and Vancouver. Eventually, Paul and I began to write songs together on the side—both of us on guitars—and we decided to put together a new band.