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Vice squad (continued)




McKagan now lives in Seattle, with his wife and two daughters, in a house he bought in 1993. He’s stayed close to his friends there: when the Fastbacks toured with Pearl Jam in the mid ’90s, their equipment went in GNR road cases. 10 Minute Warning reunited for an album on Sub Pop in 1998, a couple of years after McKagan and Sorum teamed up with Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Duran Duran’s John Taylor in the Neurotic Outsiders. And McKagan still plans to write a book about music-industry finance with his good friend Dave Dederer, the guitarist for Chris Bellew’s Presidents of the United States of America.

Although he spent the most remunerative portion of his career as something like the Sid Vicious of the Sunset Strip, McKagan is now VR’s in-house business expert. In 1994, he got sober. While still in GNR, he enrolled in a business class at Santa Monica Community College and learned how to read a financial statement. "I realized that in fact the financial statements we had were unreadable. Then I took a stocks-and-bonds class, and the professor said, ‘You’re really good at this, you should pursue it.’ " Several years later, after McKagan had moved back to Seattle, he enrolled in finance classes at Seattle University. He was one quarter away from graduation when rock and roll called again.

"I think knowledge is kinda punk rock," he argues. "I came up in the original punk days, at least in America. The people in our scene were the most brilliant, intellectual people. I learned that a lot of really brilliant musicians are really smart guys — and a lot of heroin addicts are really brilliant guys. Ignorance is bliss, and they’re not ignorant, so they got to do something to get in the way of that hurt — that light blazing in your eyes."

It was McKagan who brought his pal Weiland to the rescue when the former GNR members, rehearsing without a frontman or a name, got a pair of high-profile movie-soundtrack offers a couple years ago. ("Set Me Free," which appears on Contraband, first showed up in The Hulk; the band debuted with a cover of Pink Floyd’s "Money" for The Italian Job.) They had already listened to nearly a thousand audition tapes and tried out more than a half-dozen singers in the flesh, including former Buckcherry singer Josh Todd. Weiland, who’d been keeping tabs on the band all along, had left STP. But he was also on smack. For a band who were looking to make a run at the charts, he was a risky personnel choice. "I think from the outside it would really appear that way," McKagan says, "but you’re talking to a bunch of ex-junkies and alcoholics. Scott came to us and said, ‘Look, STP broke up, and I started a habit, and now it’s gotten out of control. And now I wanna quit.’ He came to me and said, ‘Look, I’ve been to rehab a thousand times, I know you got sober through martial arts, I’d like to try that way.’ "

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Weiland’s lyrics on Contraband are about cleaning up and going through an ugly divorce, but the latter proved an obstacle to the former, and he recorded about half the songs on the disc while in and out of court-mandated rehab. "Sucker Train Blues" is an attempt to describe the physical effects of withdrawal that veers quickly into gibberish: "Somebody raped my tapeworm abortion/Come on motherfuckers and deliver the cow." On the disc’s nastiest songs, the old carefree rock-and-roll themes of sex and drugs have gotten complicated by the demands of age: marriage, kids, nagging addictions. On "Big Machine," he sings, "I’m a slave . . . I guess I chose to be," before hoping that he can teach his son "to be a man . . . before he hits 35." And even now, cleaned up and on the road, Weiland chooses to play up his battle with drugs as the band’s chief drama. "Negative Creep" was his suggestion. "I think that lyric — ‘I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned’ — is just Scott’s proclamation of who he is now, through an old song," says McKagan. And when Duff and Slash asked Scott which GNR songs he wanted to perform on tour, he picked two: "It’s So Easy" ("He said to us, ‘You know, "It’s So Easy" is where I got the voice for [STP’s] "Sex Type Thing" ’ ") and then, of course, "Mr. Brownstone," GNR’s ode to heroin.

"We’ve been through a lot of shit already in the year that Scott’s been in the picture," McKagan concludes. "And a lot of people were saying it would never happen, you know — ‘Scott’s gonna go to jail, he’s gonna fuck up again, you guys are gonna start getting high.’ It’s endless how many negative comments we’ve gotten. Which is fine, it just makes us feel more like a band — more us-against-them. And it’s a familiar place, y’know?"

page 2 

Issue Date: June 11 - 17, 2004
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