2021.01.18 - Rotosound - Duff McKagan on Guns N' Roses' wildest show, covering Prince, and recording in lockdown

Transcript:

Duff: I just remember the last two people on stage were Axl and I. We've lost, like, you know, Steven fell off, Izzy fell off, Slash fell off, and just, I remember, like, Axl and I on stage, and like, okay, what do we do now?

Rotosound: Thanks so much for this, Duff. This really means a lot to us. We're really excited about it, and loads of our fans have shown really loads of enthusiasm on social media as well.

Duff: Oh, good.

R: Yeah, thank you very much.

Duff: You're welcome.

R: How's everything going out there?

Duff: That's a loaded question. As far as me, musically and pandemic-wise and whatnot, things are as good as they can be. You know, I have this studio here, you see behind me, I'm in Seattle. It's been a great place to go every day. I'm in a really creative time of my life. Luckily, you know, sometimes that doesn't always happen. If you have time off, you get writer's block, but I've been in a real creative mode. So I've been coming in here every day and keeping, you know, physically fit. All the things that I know what to do for myself to keep myself sane. And just playing a lot. Playing a lot of bass, playing a lot of guitar and things are going as well as they could be going at this point.

R: Is that studio? Is that kind of part of your house or is it near where you live or you managed to kind of move there for the time being?

Duff: Yeah, so I found, it's an old studio that I found that was for sale. It's five minutes from my house. It's in the area that, like when I grew up as a punk rock kid, it's in the area we used to hang out. So it's kind of come full circle. This place is a studio maybe from the 60s or 50s even that nobody knew about. And it's this building that I can come and use. And it's really convenient to my house. And, you know, as you can see, I have a drum kit here. I've got amps, isoboosts[?], everything. Up behind me there is a control room. So it's like a mini Abbey Road. And it sounds amazing in here, the sounds we're getting.

R: Had you been in it when you were younger? You know, you said you were growing up around there. Is that somewhere you'd been before, or was it somewhere new?

Duff: I knew the building. We didn't know it was a studio. It was just one of those buildings you walked by and like, I wonder what's in there, you know? So, found out. I mean, who knew? This was a studio the whole time.

R: That'd be cool to travel back in time and tell your younger self that that building there, it's got a studio in it, and one day you're gonna be spending quite a bit of time in there.

Duff: Who knew? Yeah, exactly. It's really just, it's a dream come true, especially at this time in our world history where everybody's gotta stay in or stay away from other people until this virus is eradicated, it's great for me to be able to come here.

R: And I know that a lot of the artists that I've been speaking to have taken the time to kind of hunk down and record and write, and so that's what you're kind of concentrating on at the moment?

Duff: Totally, yeah.

R: So does that mean we can expect, you know, if you've got your eyes on an album or some singles or something like that, or is it more just see how things go?

Duff: At this point, I'm just writing songs and recording them. So where they end up, really, I'm letting that part of it kind of transpire when it happens. For now, it's more helpful for me to not think about where the songs are going and just keep writing.

R: And of course, you're very fortunate, you're very skilled that you've got the, you know, the vocals, guitar, bass, drums, you know, you can one man band it. So has that been something you've done before when you've kind of gone through your solo records?

Duff: I did a record, I mean, I was still drinking and using and stuff, but I did a record on Geffen in '93. And what I did, we were on the Illusions Tour and I would go to studios wherever, you know, wherever we were at. If we had a couple days off, I'd book a studio in Pennsylvania or in London or wherever. And I'd go in and record, and I'd kind of play everything myself. So I do have experience doing all that. I've been lucky to have some other drummers come in here, you know, I've had like Jamie from Shooter Jennings Band come up here. But you know, it's like a three-day spurt and I'll have 14 songs for him to play on. And he doesn't really know the songs. He's such a good drummer. He's so intuitive that he can kind of do all that stuff. And he was available and all that. And we were COVID safe. And it's really, you know, to get somebody to come in and play, you have to go through... I mean, we kind of demand... I have, we have our mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, my wife's mom, she's 82. She lives next door to us. So that's kind of the main concern for us, like keeping safe is to keep her safe. So like we have kind of, we have protocol here at the studio. There's three of us here and we get tested. I've been getting tested once a week just to make sure, keep everybody safe. But getting a drummer up here, I've done that a couple times. I've also played drums on a few of the songs. We did a song in here for Alice in Chains, for a kind of an honorarium that the MoPOP here in Seattle did for Alice in Chains. I think the event itself was December 1st. It was really well done. December 10th, whatever it was. But I did Down in a Hole here, and I played drums, played bass, played guitar. Martin here, who is my producer here at the studio, he played some keys on it, we all sang backgrounds and then sent the track to Shooter and he sang the main vocal. So you can send stuff around as you know. And it came out really good. But playing drums again has been really, really fun.

R: Yeah, I know, not just musicians, but everyone's kind of said, we are in a lucky age with the digital connectivity with having the pandemic that, you know, something like you say with doing projects like that, you can send things here, there, and you don't all have to be in the same location or the same time to get stuff like that done.

Duff: I miss it. You know, I miss, like, the ultimate thing here is I have this great live room, would be to have a drummer and me playing bass and a guitar player and to track songs live. That'd be the ultimate thing to do. That's why this live room's so big, is to fit people in, you know? But, of course we can't now. And it's gonna be really sweet to get back and rehearse with my band, you know, with the Guns N' Roses for a tour. It's gonna be, it's almost, you know, it's gotten to a point, like, wow, can we actually be in the same room together? But of course, we'll be able to at some point soon. And that's gonna be, you learn to sort of... I'm always, you know, I always feel honored to be in a band that people come to see. They spend their money and their time to come see. And that's something that's always stuck with me ever since I was playing in punk rock bands as a teenager, you know, to now. I do appreciate that. I have a lot of, I guess, thankfulness for that. I don't take it for granted. But I think now, even more, I'm gonna, when we get back on tour, I'm gonna look out and go, you know, this is pretty amazing that I'm in this position that people are still stoked to come see, you know, something I'm a part of.

R: I think that's definitely true and it's true as well for the audience. I think everyone's going to feel it's so much more special when they go out to their first live show again, you know, a proper live show where you can interact and stand among people. It's going to seem, it's going to be such a great atmosphere I think.

Duff: I have a motorcycle here in town and I rode out. I ride all around kind of Western Washington, and there's a lot of great little towns and highways and, you know, back roads you can go on. And I went to this, I think it was like August or September, to this little town on the water north of Seattle by about 100 miles. And it was stopped, got off the bike. I was with a friend of mine. We got off the bike, we had our masks and all the stuff, and we walked into kind of the town square. And there was two guys playing acoustic guitars and singing. And they were sitting eight feet apart. And there was a crowd of like eight people, not a crowd. There was eight people, including us, watching it. And it was the first live music I'd seen in some time. And it was... You know, even for me as a musician, I'd go out and play gigs, but I loved to go see shows too. And just seeing that, like sparked a lot of different feelings in me.

R: So I've got a few questions. First one's about the strings, and since you've been a, you know, Rotosound player from very early on in your career, can you recall how you first got into playing Rotosound and why you've continued to use the strings over all these years?

Duff: Well, you know, as a bass player, and any young bass player will be able to relate to this. You know, you get a set of strings and they're not cheap. You know, getting your first, when you got a job and you're paying rent and whatever else, getting a set of strings if you're in that place where I was, getting a set of strings is an investment, you know, and you put them on your bass and if they don't sound good, you're stuck with those strings. You know, back in the days when we used to like boil strings to make them last longer, all that stuff. And when we got our, I think it was before we got our record in advance, I got a set of Rotosounds. Somebody, you know, this is a long time ago, this is 1985 or '86. I was getting very serious about bass playing. I was in Guns N' Roses, really we started to write great songs and we were kicking ass and I was really taking bass playing more serious than I had. Prior to that I'd been a drummer, a bass player and a guitar player and now I was just zoning in on one thing. I found my thing. I was like 20 years old. And so I was listening to what people had to say about gear and strings and everything else. And somebody must have mentioned Rotosound, make the best strings for bass. You should check it out. So I got a set of the swing bass, you know, the ones I've yet still to use, still use now. And the brightness and the roundness of the sound I was trying to get kind of appeared because of the string. So I just stuck with that and, you know, I haven't even tried other strings because I found what I wanted with the Swing Bass Rotosound.

R: So if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Duff: That's exactly right. And the quality of the string has remained the same. I know you guys at the company. If you look at my history, I'm certainly not a guy who goes out and endorses a lot of products or anything. I believe in the Rotosound kind of lineage. You look back to the 60s and the great, you know, like Entwistle playing these strings and you have the rest, back in the day when the whole band would do the endorsement for whatever musician it was, you have all in The Who in the picture and John Entwistle with his bass, you know. I love that historical part of Rotosound too. I'm just fortunate I found a string that helped me attain what I was looking for.

R: So I've got a question here and this one's from a fellow Rotosound endorser called Sol Watson. He says he really enjoyed your Prince unboxing videos and he knows that you're a huge fan. Have you ever covered any of Prince's tunes and which one do you think that Guns would do a great version of?

Duff: Oh wow! I covered a song called Bambi for a B-side on that record I told you about back in '93. It's not a great version. It was like kind of a punk rock version of a Prince song, which I don't know if it really works. You know, that's an artist that you can't really touch. I've done Purple Rain with this band, it is made up of like Chad Smith and Mike McCready and Josh from the Chili Peppers. And we've done Purple Rain and Josh can sing just like Prince. He's really kind of amazing. And that's an awesome song to do when you got really good players doing it. But Prince is an artist that I've been into since I was 17 or 18 years old, and just studying what he does. I don't play music like Prince because I can't, quite literally. I can't. But it's a high watermark. It's a high benchmark for just how to use drums, bass lines, guitar parts, vocal melodies, and whatnot. I don't know if Guns would cover a Prince song. I don't know which one it would be. Probably something early. But who knows? We do a lot of covers, so I'll never say never with that. But I don't know which one it would be. I'd have to think about that.

R: When I read that question, I thought Purple Rain was the one that I first came to mind. And you said that, although not with Guns, that's one that you've covered, say. Yeah.

Duff: That's an artist that you just don't really step in and suddenly cover it. And Purple Rain is like the obvious one. It's like covering Ace of Spades if you're doing Motorhead instead of a deeper track. Everybody does Ace of Spades. Everybody tries to do Purple Rain. So we'd probably try to find something, a deep track somewhere.

R: Cool. So we've got a question from Michelle Monstert on Twitter and she says that you've achieved a lot musically in your career working with many great musicians. I'm curious what you consider to be the pinnacle or greatest highlight for you.

Duff: God. You know, I always try to, I don't know if I've been there yet. I've had so many amazing experiences that I'm like, surely this must be the pinnacle. And then something tops it, you know? Really getting us getting back together and doing this whole tour, going around the world three or four times, from 2016 to... we played a couple gigs in 2020 before it shut down, but we played a lot of shows and that whole experience was pinnacle after pinnacle after pinnacle. We went through a lot. When you're together and you travel that much, people are sick or injured or whatever and getting through those gigs together... Axl breaking his foot at the beginning of that thing and us pulling through that whole part was really, really showed the strength of the history of that band, you know, as kind of having each other's backs. So that was, the whole tour was really quite great.

R: Yeah, the camaraderie of being in the band and putting in all those shows and getting back together for it as well, I reckon must, yeah, must be great.

Duff: Yeah, there was not one show that was like, okay, we're on automatic, just go. There's not, that's not how we operate. Every show is a real, like last show on earth type of feeling.

R: So we've got one more question from Izzy Jimmy's on Instagram and he asks what was your most wild show you ever played?

Duff: Well, the first one that comes to mind there's certainly plenty of them, we played the Limelight in New York and I want to say it was maybe '88 or so. And I don't think it was really a booked show, we just kind of we were in New York and I don't really remember what was behind the show, but we played the Limelight. And it was kind of a semi-acoustic show, it was some sort of toned down show. And I just remember that everybody was so hammered because it wasn't a planned show. It was kind of like last minute that everybody was in mid... you know, off day drink. We went to play the show and everybody except for... I just remember the last two people on stage were Axl and I we'd lost like, you know, Steven fell off, Izzy fell off, Slash fell off, and just I remember like Axl and I on stage and like, "Okay, what do we do now?" I'm sorry to anybody who went to that show, it was probably awful.

R: And someone called Bickrant Roy on Facebook, he asks, what was your first bass?

Duff: So I had a paper route, I was pretty young, I had two paper routes, and if people don't know what that is, back in the day, you know, young boys, mainly, some girls would go and deliver the newspaper to people's houses. And that's how you made income. It's before you have legal age to actually work a job at a restaurant or whatever. You could have a paper route. So I had a paper route and this older kid than me had this Gibson EBO base. It was 125 bucks. It was probably stolen from somewhere, who knows where the origins of that base. But it was a Gibson EBO. It was a short scale. I didn't know anything. It was the first real instrument I bought but I bought it with my paper route money. I had to save about 125 bucks. It was a lot of money back [?] '73, Gibson EBO.

R: And do you still wear that one?

Duff: I don't. Here's the thing, you know, like the later 80s, early 90s were quite a thing and quite an event in my life. Quite a period. I don't know what happened to that bass. If anybody out there knows, it has a black flag sticker on it, knows what happened to it, [?].

R: We'll put up some signs. That's how I got my first guitar as well from the paper round. I think it was a couple of years saving up and got that Les Paul, Epiphone Les Paul. Okay, got my last question here. Do you have a musical New Year's resolution?

Duff: Damn. I don't think so. I mean, no, I'm in a good place right now, creative wise. Going out and playing live, of course, wouldn't be a resolution. It's just a hope at this point. But I'm in a good place creatively, that a resolution musically. Maybe to play more drums, but that was already in the, you know, in the hopper.

R: Cool. Okay, well thanks so much, Duff. This has been really great. I know our fans are going to really enjoy watching this. It's a shame that the NAMM show's not on this year, but hopefully, you know, we can make some connections this kind of way. And I'm really looking forward to hearing whatever comes out of this lockdown session of yours. If anything does come out.

Duff: Yeah, cool. Yeah, there's a lot of songs. There's just a lot of songs. And like I said, where are they going to end up, who knows? But I'm just doing the work right now, and I'm very fortunate to have this space and have my health and all that kind of stuff. And I wish everybody out there who's watching this good health, happiness, and us getting back together and rocking again soon.

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