Duff McKagan on New Solo Music, Touring, GNR's WhatsApp Group and Collaborating with Slash
This Guitar Interactive magazine feature is brought to you by Rotosound Strings. Like Duff says, nothing else comes close. For more information, visit rotosound.com. Duff McKagan, absolute pleasure to chat with you today. You're going to be back touring in the UK. It's been five years in the making. You're going to be back supporting the Lighthouse record, of course, in September. Just talk us through how you're feeling about getting back to the UK and playing these shows. There must be some comfort level because the first
place I'm going to come and play these songs with my new band is there, so there definitely is a comfort factor. Maybe it's because the UK was the first place that really accepted and jumped on Guns N' Roses back in '87. You know, we came and played The Marquee three nights, and people knew who we were, and the gigs were sold out.
It was supposed to be one night, then it turned into two and three, and before we knew it, we were playing Hammersmith Odeon, you know, and building up. I've always had an affinity for the island, really. I mean, for being from America, it's like, oh, they're on an island of music. Back in the day, the word of mouth traveled faster, so some band — you know, this is old-fashioned, I'm talking about, but that just shows, I guess, my age — like there was no internet in the '80s. There wasn't. It was word of mouth, telephone calls, you know, like that. So, I'm just excited, but I got a really cool, really, really good band, and kind of the Wrecking Crew of Seattle will be my band. So, looking forward to it. Awesome. Yeah, no, it's going to be
absolutely incredible. Of course, we've got a little taste of it through some of the live performances you've done. You know, like you were on Jimmy Kimmel, and you were able to play. Right.
So we've got a little taste of it, but could you talk us through what your rig is going to be for these shows? I mean, I go through it like — for my electric, I go through a Fender Super Reverb, you know. But I play acoustic a lot. I have a Hummingbird that Slash bought me for the Tenderness tour that I use a lot. I used it for the whole Tenderness tour, and I'll use that here. I got two electric guitar players, and one of them plays the B-Bender guitar, kind of. He also plays keys, so he's like the jack-of-all-trades guy, Jeff Fielder. He played with Mark Lanegan. Then there's Tim Di Giulio, who played on the Lighthouse record. You might as well
get that guy to come and tour because he played on the whole record. He's a killer, like Mick Ronson-ish type of player. He plays, he's talking about Vox AC30s. They're, you know, kind of not super dependable all the time, so he might go against some Fender something — small amps, you know. We don't need huge amps. But my rig's pretty basic. You know, my electric guitar — I have a Fender Tele that I kind of hot-rodded out. And then my
Gibson Hummingbird. I'm assuming that Bernie Les Paul is going to be making an appearance, so that seems to go with you just about everywhere you play. It could. I did — I mean, that guitar, I just played it yesterday in the studio. You know, it's like the best sounding — I have a Gibson Les Paul. I got a few of them, but I
put up the Bernie, you know, and you're in a studio where it's really controlled and you hear it. It's like, well, it's still the Bernie, man. Yeah, well, that seems to be the way you are, though, doesn't it? Once you get a sound that's really you, I mean, you're very lucky in that. Way so that you play this juice number one, right? Enough to beat all the guitar videos, you know? To find a sort of signature sound, no matter which instrument you pick up. But you really like to stick... ...with the sound that you, you know, it just sort of resonates with you. Is that the way you... ...would describe it? That it just sort of resonates in a way, and then if it's not doing that, it's not... Worth picking up? I found my sound, you know. I got lucky, I guess. I mean, it was like the first...
Time I really bought myself gear was when Guns N' Roses got a record advance, and I bought that... That white bass, the Gibson jazz special, you know. And I just looked at it. It was hanging in the guitar store for months, and I couldn't. Then we got our advance check... And I'm like, I want that, and I got the GK 800 RB, and I had a 215 acoustic cabinet... Which I had to put EV 400 watt speakers in because the GK was too... I didn't know about amps and speakers, they gotta match up. What the fuck do I know about that? So I blew up two speakers... Went and got the EV 400 watt speakers, screwed them in, and there was my sound. There it was, man. And I got a chorus pedal, and I've only added to that, you know, much later, just in the last...
10 years, 12 years. Fender came out with that new Super Bassman head, and I love the grind on it. I had been looking for grind pedals since Velvet Revolver, something to dirty... It up. And the pedals just don't really work with a bass, you lose the low end. I found I... Just never found the right pedal until this head came out. And so now I use both the GK... And the Fender head for my live GNR sound, and same basses, you know. I found my thing... I see people switch around, and they're always looking for the next great thing or some boutique amp or a thing, and this is the one. No, this is the one, this guitar, this bass, and...
Yeah, I'm lucky. I just, I know what I like, and why change, you know? Definitely, for sure. And... Another one of those things that you've stuck with all this time is the Rotosound strings. So I'm... Assuming you're using them not only on the Swing Bass, but are you using them on the electric... Guitars as well? I use Rotosound, yeah. Electric and acoustic guitar strings. Yeah, they... Just made me... It was really sweet of them. I got this 8-string bass, I found it on Instagram or something. I'm like, it's a Mosrite...
No, Hagstrom, I'm sorry. And it cost nothing. I'm like, okay, nobody wants this, I guess. And I bought it... And it came. There's a particular song, it's a new song called "Trenches"...
That I thought, oh, an 8-string bass might sound amazing on this. But the strings it came with were just... I don't know what they were. And we asked Rotosound, can you get 10... 8-string bass strings, and they made them. And I just got them yesterday, but they're really good. The guitar strings are great... They're bass strings. I mean, again, that's another thing I found that I just, once I found those Rotosound Swing Bass strings, why change to anything else? For my sound, they're part...
Of my sound. Even the pick, you know, the Dunlop .71 yellow pick, is part of my sound... Because it's got a little flex to it. And I can get that sort of quasi-funky top-end thing with that... And so then I used that guitar pick for playing guitar too. Of course. We saw you with an unusual guitar on Jimmy Kimmel. What was that? A six-string? Oh, right, so that's... I played it in the video as well for "Long Feather." It's this really...
McSwain guitars. He's a boutique guy. But for my 50th birthday, all my friends and my wife had this guitar built for me. The thing is super heavy. I don't know if you know the brand... Chrome Hearts. Yes, you know, right? So I'm really good friends with the owner of it, have been since... he started. So he got involved with the making of the guitar. So it has studs all the way around the guitar. It's 20-something pounds. It's not what... but it sounds great in the studio... It's cool to do a video or a song on Jimmy Kimmel. It sounds amazing. Yeah, it looks badass. It's my... friends, you know, my friends built it for me, so I played it on the show. Yeah, awesome. That... looked fantastic and sounded incredible as well. Now, of course, this whole tour is, you know, in...
support of the "Lighthouse" album. Now, just a couple of months ago, you released an expanded... version of it. Now, I understand that there were 60 tracks that you wrote for the record, and some of them... have made their way onto the expanded edition. Can you just talk us through that whole process of why... you know, why so many songs? There must be an awful lot of great ones that we're yet to hear. I just finished tracking. I'm doing vocals now on 15 more. There are so many songs. What... happened was, I don't know, there was some time in like 2015...
or 2014 that I had an acoustic guitar up against my chest, writing some chords, and... it was when I started writing songs for what would be "Tenderness." And I found that I... listened to the resonation that was right there on my chest. You know, when you play an acoustic guitar... sitting down, the acoustics are right up against your body, and I would listen to that. Finally, you know... how many years did it take me to learn this? The resonation will tell you where to sing.
It's not telling you to push, and it's not telling you to sing super high. It's just like, "Hey, let's go... together and sing these chords." And I started writing a bunch of songs to this acoustic guitar talking to me, and... I just haven't stopped writing songs since then. With "Tenderness," there were a bunch of other songs too, you know, that we didn't record.
and then COVID hit, man, and I just got my studio up and ready to go in Seattle. I have... my own studio, drum setup, everything mic'd, you know, it's all ready to go. And I just started... laying down the songs, and the list just grew and grew and grew. And now we have... because of these new 15 songs, we have a whole other board. So we have, I think, four boards. You know how you record? You have the boards, you check off everything, you know? Okay, drums are...
done, the bass is done. We have four boards. So I hope to release a record, at least the first single... the day we start in Dublin. Oh, wow! Yeah, that’s amazing. So, you know, we have... just so many songs for expanded versions and all that stuff like that. You've got to get the songs out.
I did that EP... last year. So this is the song EP. It's just, I have so many songs, like, "Okay, we gotta start... getting them out. I don't want to clog the way of the next Guns thing, so yeah, I gotta do it in... between. I'm not trying to compete with Guns or, you know, any of that kind of crap. These are totally... It's totally different music to me. So, but I really have some, like, I'm really excited
about the next record as well. I think it will be, it feels really good. The next, well, it just really feels like you've really found yourself, Duff. I mean, I know you're classic ever since the outset of everything. You're such a multi-talented guy, but there seems to be something on this record that's just such a stream of consciousness in a sense. Now, I know you talk a lot about sort of three
chords and the truth, but do you feel that you've cracked that whole method? I've been able to really communicate what you want to say in a song. I have a method and it seems to lead me around. Not to sound like a hippie or whatever, but it really does lead me. It will tell me a lyric like "Long Feather." Okay, what? Oh, "Long Feather" is home. Okay, it's trying to tell me to write this song. It just comes out, you know. Songs come out of the ether, man, and kind of hit you. That song, I just don't know how to write it. I don't know, was another one of those songs. I had the chords, I had the song, and had that "I just don't know." Okay, what don't I know? You know, and I was walking my dog and
those lyrics, "The ether's ever glow," "The ocean's undertow," came to me walking my dog. I had to hurry home and write those lyrics down. I think I found a place where lyrics were so important to me, and they have become more and more important. I'm a book nerd, you know. I write columns and books and stuff. Being around some friends that have done a really good job of this kind of music like Mark and Greg Dulli. My dog's trying to chew the tablecloth here. Dude, I'm doing this, dude. He's always up. We have a new puppy. He's always into whatever is right around us. Well, that just
makes the home even more full of love, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. On "Tenderness," you know the track "Chip Away," beautiful song, but I heard recently that Bob Dylan had quoted to the Wall Street Journal. I just want to make sure that I get the quote right because he said, "There's a Duff McKagan song called 'Chip Away' that's of profound meaning for me." He goes on to describe in a little bit more detail why that is, but the way he describes it is "It's like my own songwriting. I overwrite something, then I chip away lines and phrases until I get the real thing." Now obviously you're a legend in your own right, Duff, but talking about songwriting, what kind of impact did that have on you? Well, fuck, what do you mean? Put yourself in my shoes. You write some songs you believe
in, you think you got it right. You found this way to write with your acoustic guitar up against your chest. You go record, you put the thing out, and somebody like that says pays that compliment to you. I mean, he's the godfather of that kind of music, this kind of music that I do. I'm not trying to copy Bob Dylan or any of that kind of stuff you need to think about it. But to have him, the weight of that is really special. I didn't know. I started getting texts and emails
from friends who wake up earlier, friends in England who were like, "Dude, there's a thing on Wall Street," sending me links. Axl sent me a link first thing in the day, "Did you see this?" I started, so I'm like just inundated with People, including my friends and me, were super happy about it, and then I read it, and it's great, you know. When anybody connects with something you create like that, you feel some depth within yourself in connection to the songs, and somebody says, "Hey, I really like that song," and it really means a lot. Thank you. I did my best, and Bob Dylan did that, so that happened. It's a beautiful thing, man. To go back to "Lighthouse," there are a lot of new tracks, as you've described. It's a prolific period for you in songwriting, but you did revisit "Hope" from almost 25 years back. How was it revisiting that track, and why did you feel that was the right one to include?
Right, so I got the masters back for this record I did back in '96 called "Beautiful Disease" that got shelved by Capitol when they sold to Universal Music. I was like, "Wait, I had a release date, I've already done the press for this record, I have tour dates, what do you mean you're shelving it?" And they said, "You can pay us and get it back." But what the fuck are you even talking about? So shelved it was, and finally, after all these years, I got it back. Just give me my record back, you guys don't even know you have it.
We got it back just at the beginning of COVID. We got the masters, like, "Oh, here's my record," and tearing it apart and listening to it. Martin and I, my producer Martin Tavia, who is a super important part of all of this, of me recording and songwriting, gets it. If we reference something like Killing Joke or just random stuff, we have the same references. So we listened to these songs, and I thought "Hope" would work. I try to tell a story in my albums; I still call them albums. You know you're supposed to listen to this from song one to the end, and there's a journey in there. In that journey of this record, "Lighthouse," "Hope," this song of hope in the middle there just lyrically works. I didn't pick it for any other reason, and I re-sang it so that my voice sounds the same on this record. Other than that, it's Abel Laborio and Slash and me throwing down a song, and
the rest of the track comes from those original sessions. It was recorded at my house in 1996. Incredible. I had a drum kit in the middle of my house, all mic'd up. Before I was married and had kids, you know. Just talking about that being from "Beautiful Disease," do you think we'll get to hear the rest of the record? At some point, I will. I don't know. I'll figure that one out. I have so much music I have to put out. That is another thing I can put out, but I don't want to inundate the fans. I'm already putting out expanded versions and "Live at Easy Street" and "Live at El Rey," and I have another studio record coming out sometime whenever that's going to be. I'll put two records out in a year,
two studio records out in a year, and a couple of live records. "Beautiful Disease," I might just pepper those songs into my studio records like I did with "Hope." I don't know. It would be amazing to hear that, that's for sure. Duff, just tell me, seeing bands like The Clash
And Killing Joke and Magazine in the late '90s. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. '70s, early '80s, compared with seeing Led Zeppelin, KISS. Why do these first three bands I talk about have such, such more—because you love them all—but why do the first three have so much more of an impact on your musical career? Well, all those early shows had a massive impact on me just because I was young and I was starting to play music. So whatever, I'd see Led Zeppelin in the Kingdome, massive, you
know, like it's still... That's where you want to see Led Zeppelin, in a huge place where you can barely see them. Because they are, at that point in my 13-year-old brain, they're like, they fly around on a Led Zeppelin jet, and they come here, and then they're gonna fly off after the show, and they're gonna play this big place, and you can barely see them, but I saw Led Zeppelin and heard, and it really, um, didn't inspire me to be in a big band. It's just like, I saw these guys playing together on the stage, you know, they weren't spread out. They weren't spread out, they weren't spread out, they weren't spread out, they weren't spread out, they weren't spread out, and there wasn't a catwalk. There wasn't all that
stuff; they were just in it together, and that was really cool for me to see. And, uh, I saw arena shows, but the first punk show I saw, I was still young in the punk scene. I was, you know, 13 or so, but going and seeing these bands that I thought were, like, as big as KISS, like D.O.A., and, you know, The Clash. But I was in the same room with them, you know, and they were
right there. And there was a, you know, famous thing and show I saw with The Clash where Strummer came out and wanted to cut down the barrier. There was a wooden barrier. There's no difference between us and you. We're in this thing together, you know? I'm like, fuck, there it is. And I still think that way when I play live shows. You know, like, there's no—we're in the same thing together, you know? And I often look out at people when I play, and I'm like, oh, what's their... they, you know, I meet people in elevators and shit, like, their story's way more interesting than mine, you know? Like, fuck, you did what? You swam the English Channel and, uh, you know, like, whatever, right? And, um, so I know there's those people in the audience, and it's all of them, like, you've got a story, you've got a story. And so it's kind
of an honor that they'd come and see me, something I'm doing. They come and take that time to come see it, you know? Um, I feel that, and that's sort of a punk rock ethos, I suppose, you know? And punk rock to me just means really, uh, straight in, you know? No buffoonery. Um, the truth, you know? And I can play acoustic guitar, and to me it's still punk if it's telling the truth, and that's what it's about to me. You know? Um, so yeah, those early shows, you know, I saw a lot of them. Dude, I saw, you name it. I was there. I was at The Police and The Specials, 150 people, you know? Before it, before The Police blew up, you know? And I'm gonna go see Stiff Little Fingers on Sunday in Seattle. You know, I saw D.O.A. recently,
um, paying respect to these guys. You know, I'm gonna go see Stiff Little Fingers on Sunday. Fucking mad respect. Thank you for giving me—I mean, these guys, like, thank you for giving me the light and showing me the way, you know, for what I do. Because that's when I decided that music's what I'm gonna do. It's not gonna be college. I was in too big of a family
to go to college, you know? I'm gonna go to college—you had to go get a job yourself to go to college, and it's like, which, if that's what I chose, that's what I would have done. But I chose music because I saw these fucking great bands. They showed me the way, you know. And Duff, you've just recently celebrated your 60th birthday. It's hard to believe. You don't look a day over 21, sir. But hey, just going
back to that period we just talked about and what you know now, and all the experiences that you've had, what would you tell yourself entering this life 40 years ago, in the musical life? What advice would you give yourself? I learn things as I go along, along. And I guess I probably learn them when I'm supposed to learn them, like the acoustic guitar thing I told you about. Do I wish I would have learned that earlier? Maybe, you know, but I didn't, and that's the deal. My life has turned out, and I think it's just because getting sober at 30 really changed a lot of things, and I was able to get to a straighter line to that truth, and the truth of life, and I think that's what I've learned. And the truth of life, and the truth of life, and the truth of life, and the truth of life and the truth in yourself. First, you've got to figure your own shit out first, right? You know, and I did a fairly thorough job on that before I met Susan and all of that, so I think I was prepared. And things have happened in my life. I've met, you know, the perfect partner for me in Susan.
Keeping friendships has been a key in my life. If you fuck up a friendship, make amends and get it back on track, that kind of stuff. I've been able to do that. I mean, I would have told myself maybe at 20, "Watch out, dude. You don't need to drink. Stop." But I didn't, and that was part of my path, all the way to my pancreas fucking bursting. That's part of my learning path.
I learned from that. I didn't not learn. I didn't get better out of the hospital and start drinking again. Fuck that. I learned, like, "Oh yeah, I'm done. I drank enough. I wanted to stop for years in my 20s. I just couldn't find a way." But even when I was in the hospital bed after that thing happened, I was like, "I think I learned a lesson. Let me think about this."
"Oh shit, yeah, I need to call some people too and say I'm sorry, and I've got to reconnect with my family and help my mom out because she had Parkinson's. Like, you're the youngest son, dude, it's time." I don't know, I would have been really happy for myself at 20. Like you said, I'm 60 now. To be in a great band with Guns N' Roses, we're out there killing it. I'm
learning something from those guys every night when I play with them. It's great to be in a band like that, where you can look at Axl and see him sing a certain vowel or whatever, and the way he twists it. I'm like, "Oh fuck, that's how he got that vowel." I get to watch the master do his thing, and Slash, you know. So, I get to be in a band that has that sort of weight or, I don't know, significance. I really get to learn a lot every night, and as a bass player, I'm kind of a cognizant guy on stage, like, "This is your gig, you're holding the shit together, right?" Of course. Just one final, cheeky one, Duff. Just because you mentioned Guns N' Roses, it's just a real daft one and it might not even be true,
but out of all these rumors out there, there is this rumor that there is a WhatsApp group for Guns N' Roses and it's apparently full of dad jokes. Is that true? And if so, could you tell us one? Oh, I have so many dad jokes. I mean, there is a group, and yeah, it's pretty dad joke-heavy. Dad jokes are so great because they're so fucking dumb, and so you try to get the dumbest joke you can, you know, like, "Hey, Bono and The Edge walk into a bar, and the bartender says, 'Not U2 again,'" you know? Just, you know, "Two peanuts were walking down the street, and one was assaulted." Do you really want these? Do you really want just... I thought, you know, "Can it be true?" It's like it's so ridiculous it's got to be true. It could be true. It could be true. Yes. Look, it's an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
Congratulations on all the success, and I look forward to seeing you when you're playing in London. Yeah, killer, man. Thank you so much.
2024-08-17 08:36
