Duff McKagan: Ye Olde Punk
» Velvet Revolver Postpone Australian Tour - December 3, 2007
My God. By the grace of Lester Bangs, I just made legendary bass-man Duff McKagan laugh. My journalistic career has reached a new peak of prominence. I quote a Stranglers song and Duff puffs out a small, cheeky giggle. Finally my affectation comes in handy!
Many will know Duff for his part in the legend that is Guns n’ Roses, but currently he is one slice of mushrooming supergroup Velvet Revolver. The band came to be when Duff, axe-men extraordinaire Slash and drummer Matt Sorum played together in 2002 after a 8 year musical gulf. They got together, wrote some songs and looked for a singer; enter ex-Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland. The whole experience felt “amazing”, and thus Velvet Revolver was born. And thank the rock Gods.
So, Mr. Duff McKagan, how are the dynamics of VR different to that of Guns?
“Not much different…the way songs are written are really the same…there’s a lot of similarities between Axl and Scott, personality-wise, so that part felt really familiar (laughs) in a way…the good parts of their personalities”. Better not to touch on the whole Axl-ground, moving on…
One key dissimilarity in the Duff of New is a cleansing sobriety; both Duff and Slash have given up their devil-may-care party attitudes for newly purified Family Man lives. “I think you pass into an area where it’s not tempting any more, you see the ugly aspects of either drugs, like when you see people just outta their minds on coke or heroin, just nodding off, or someone who’s just too drunk, that’s just in my case though, that’s just how I feel about it” Duff affirms, his sleek voice showing little of the damage done from a career during the decades of decadence Gunners experienced. Temptation has nothing on this man!
Duff had always brought the punk element to Guns- I think we agree on this. Slash was the blues man, Duff was the punk rocker, and Axl was the screaming banshee. It just worked.But how do an-aw-chy and the rock ideals of old come to play in Velvet Revolver? “It’s really an attitude, it’s a way you go after the music, and it’ll always be a part of me. I had a discussion with Dave Grohl about this- he came from a punk rock background as well- and his old punk band and my old punk band used to do gigs together back in the early 80s…were both fathers now, we live in the same neighbourhood here in the Valley of LA…were Dads, and we have wives, and were talking about punk rock and our punk rock-ness (laughs)”. I try not to the let the idea of punk rock Daves and Duffs playing together ruin my composure, but let’s just say my mind was aflame with the brilliance of such a thought. I ask Duff his take on punk these days, and his retort is a mixture of cynicism and nostalgia; “Punk rock as it was died in 1982…. there’s a real commercial element that they call punk rock now, but it’s not really punk rock… this is just my opinion. But there are some underground bands that are still really trying to do it… I mean, there was that whole Blink 182 thing, there were so many bands like that, they were calling that punk rock and it really wasn’t”. I feel his pain, but there’s little to no time in the mad mad world of rock journalism for compassion.
From the evolution of the music industry re downloading (“They’re in trouble. They really buried their heads in the sand and said this thing won’t disrupt the record business, and it has”) to Good Times with Gunners and the possibility of a reformation, for any nominal fee (“I dunno if money would be the factor, it never was. It’s never been a driving factor in my life, even though I’ve made a good living out what I do, I’m not complaining…it was an amazing time in life and that’s it”) time flies until a little voice pops into the discussion, alerting me my time with Duffy is almost up. I ask Duff where all the “Hero Bands” like the Gunners of Olde have gone; why the actual species of such epic groups with anthems that ring throughout the ages has been culled by rat-shit one hit wonders and NME; “I don’t know” he says with a sigh, “I know guitar heroes like guys like Slash have kind of disappeared, that’s never good. You need legendary guitar players. Foo Fighters are pretty big (laughs)” (As you can tell, this is where my well-placed tidbit of Stranglers data would have been…brilliant or what).
I say goodbye and rejoice at not having humiliated myself in front of a major celebrity. I like to think that while I was rapping away on my computer keyboard minutes later, he might’ve been teaching his young’uns to play Stairway, or organizing his leather pants collection, waiting for the roast to finish from the oven.
