Forty years and two months ago, Duff McKagan first arrived in Los Angeles as a fresh-faced punk rocker with ambitions to conquer the world. The city, just months away from hosting the 1984 Summer Olympics, was losing some of the Games' shine. McKagan then remembers Hollywood as a maelstrom of crime and drugs, with helicopters patrolling the area, gang wars and the crack epidemic. He was even mugged while walking to work. “It felt like the Wild West, and not in a good way,” he recalls.
After a few weeks of sleeping in his car, McKagan moved into the Amor building on Orchid Street in Hollywood, behind what is now Ovation Hollywood, and began a musical journey that took him and his Guns N' Roses bandmates to become one of the most recognized artists. bands of all time, racking up accolades, selling out stadiums and earning induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band's 1987 debut, “Appetite for Destruction,” remains an album inextricably linked to Los Angeles. As the Guns N' Roses bassist says, the songs that make up that album were rooted in the reality of 1980s Hollywood.
“It's all there in 'Appetite,'” McKagan says. “Those are true stories. That was Hollywood, and in Los Angeles we are in the home invasion phase of Los Angeles crime. It’s not so much about the vehicles passing by anymore.”
Meanwhile, McKagan has moved into several apartments, including one on Miracle Mile near the El Rey Theater, where he will perform Wednesday on his Lighthouse tour. While it's hardly a full-circle moment (at the same venue in 2019, McKagan held a solo show to promote his first solo album, “Tenderness,” which was released as a live album), you can't help but marvel at becoming a rock survivor.
“Forty fucking years ago!” exclaims McKagan, 60, laughing over Zoom, sitting at a table in his Seattle home overlooking the water.
Since 1994, McKagan has traveled back and forth between his native Seattle and the place where his band formed before taking on the world. His daughters went to school in Los Angeles and “I still have this great relationship with Los Angeles. I identify with Hollywood because I earned it. I've spent so much time there that I've earned a notch on the bedpost. [Laughs] Los Angeles did a lot for me.”
Eight years after Guns N' Roses improbably reunited, the bassist still loves playing with them and is able to balance that with his solo career. McKagan smiles as he recaps his recent European tour, his first in promotion of his second solo album, “Lighthouse.”
Duff McKagan performs to a sold-out crowd in Munich, Germany.
(Lucas Shadrick)
Released in October 2023, “Lighthouse” was produced by Martin Feveyear, who worked on two Loaded albums with McKagan. In it, the singer-songwriter mixes stories of tenderness (the title song is an ode to Susan, his wife of 25 years) with astute observations of the state of the world (in “I Saw God on 10th Street,” he warns society that it needs fix it before it's too late) that reflect your worldview. McKagan estimates he wrote and recorded nearly 60 songs, mostly during the pandemic, and played nearly every instrument on the album. “Lighthouse” also features contributions from old friends Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, Iggy Pop and Guns N' Roses bandmate Slash.
After spending most of the last seven years on tour, McKagan took most of the early part of 2024 off. He jokes that he celebrated the album's release in a hotel room in Boise. To decompress, he spent time in Hawaii and at his home in Washington, but he did not stop writing. After his break, he entered Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard's Seattle studio (McKagan's studio in the city was damaged by a fire in a nearby building), where he created 15 new songs.
“I thought to myself that (the songs) can't just sit in my GarageBand as acoustic demos. I already have enough,” he says, laughing. Since 2015, McKagan has given creative impetus. Armed only with his acoustic guitar, he constantly writes new songs, as evidenced by the ones he wrote earlier this year. “I have things saved for all kinds of things,” he says. The melodies and themes came naturally, and the next decade has been one of the most prolific songwriting periods of his career.
In October, McKagan released two of those songs, the raucous “All Turning Loose,” trading vocals with Lee Ving of Fear, and the dynamic rocker “My Name Is Bob” featuring Joey “Shithead” Keithley of DOA (“They were my KISS !,” McKagan says of DOA), as well as a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” recorded live in London with his old friend and Neurotic Outsiders bandmate Steve Jones.
On this tour, McKagan assembled a new group of musicians to bring his songs to life. “It's an honor to play with these guys. “This band is a good band, a group of super musicians,” he says about the group of Seattle musicians. “I knew it was great while we were rehearsing. Because? Because I'd walk in (to rehearsal) and they'd be playing something and I'd think, 'I hope I don't screw this up.' It is one of those situations that, as a musician, are really pleasant.”
Duff McKagan backstage at a show in Paris.
(Lucas Shadrick)
Some of the demos have moved from your computer to the stage. At sound check before some of the European shows, McKagan presented some of those ideas to his band and they created a sound that he's excited about.
“I'm not used to that,” he says. “I'm used to imagining what a keyboard part would look like, and this and that. “Now they are all there.”
As his tour winds down for the foreseeable future, McKagan plans to record and says that “there's always Guns stuff around the corner, which I'm always excited about.”
For now, “I'm in a really good place in my life,” he says. “I always say in my songs that everything is going to get better. And I really believe it. I don't know what that 'everything' is, but it's hope, kindness and goodness, and being a badass. Don't be ad…”
