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

I switched to rhythm guitar and we recruited drummer Greg Gilmore, who went on to play in Mother Love Bone, and bassist David Garrigues, a local skateboard legend. Our choice for singer was a guy named Steve Verwolf, a dude we all knew from the punk scene. Steve was definitely a visionary. His hair was long and he wore black leather hip-hugger pants and little else. Onstage he was a man possessed, mixing Iggy Pop–like antics with the doom and gloom of Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy and the shamanic power of Jim Morrison. By that stage I’d formed or played in a lot of bands, but up to then there had always been weak links in the bands. Ten Minute Warning felt different.
    We created a new sound, too. By then a lot of us in the punk scene were getting fed up with paint-by-numbers hardcore. Ten Minute Warning’s solution was to slow things way down from hard-core speeds and add a sludgy, heavy psychedelic element. Black Flag’s singer, Henry Rollins, told us we sounded like a punk-rock version of Hawkwind—the 1970s British band that launched the career of Lemmy Kilmister, who later formed Motörhead. We took this as high praise. Ten Minute Warning had real character and dimension. We had begun to share the stage with other bands also coming out of the hardcore scene and striving to do something new, like the Replacements, a Minneapolis band we played with when they came to Seattle. We were getting better and better.
    Paul, who was always dabbling in something, had gone through a few phases of heroin use. But each time he had pulled himself out of it before getting strung out for too long. In fact, I thought he was out of the woods. But I remember vividly the first time he showed up late for a rehearsal downtown at our Bell Street basement space with the telltale nod of an opiate high. I sort of ignored it at first, but the more I saw him high, the more I realized he was swinging back into habit mode. I am not sure whether it was the local notoriety the band was getting that gave him easier access to drugs, but Paul was getting fully strung out, and once an addict finally opens the gates it’s a dark and terrifying road from there.
    So by the middle of 1984, I had lost my long-term girlfriend, my best friend, and my main band to smack. A lot of my other friends and musical mentors—like Kim from the Fastbacks—were strung out, too. In fact, almost everyone I had so much fun discovering music with seemed to be strung out.
    I was still having panic attacks, and I was worried I might have a serious disease: the year before I’d had a tumor removed from my chest, and though it was benign, I was sure there were going to be more. Taken together, the future—with drugs encroaching from all sides—didn’t look so bright. I was also starting to drink heavily as a coping mechanism. So much so that my boss at the Union Lake Café had a talk with me about it. It wasn’t that I was drinking on the job, but he could tell I was drinking every night. I guess I reeked of booze when I got to work.
    I had been at Lake Union Café almost two years. Two things made it a great job: we listened to music in the back, and there were possibilities to advance. My first few months I had worked as a dishwasher, scraping out muffin tins and cake pans like I’d done at Schumacher’s. Once I proved a hard and dependable worker, however, one of the chefs had taken me under his wing and taught me some of the simple techniques—making breads, dipping strawberries. The boss took notice of my willingness to learn and started to test me. One day after work he asked me to take the next day off and show up at midnight instead. Midnight? Those were baker’s hours! I showed up the following night and they announced that I was now a baker’s apprentice. And the boss gave me a raise!
    I had mastered Black Forest cakes and various mousses. I could work with marzipan and filo dough. My raspberry tarts with almond-crust lattice tops were becoming works of art. I