"Rock ain’t dead. To who?!" Duff McKagan talks Guns N' Roses, punk rock and how Velvet Revolver proved the haters wrong (2024)

Duff McKagan might have turned 60 this year, but at heart he’s still the same punk kid who set out from Seattle in 1984 with a dream of changing rock history. With Guns N’ Roses, it’s fair to say he did just that. Forty years later, Duff remains the ultimate rock’n’roll romantic – a constant presence on the rock and metal landscape thanks to his work with everyone from Velvet Revolver and Loaded to his solo project, whose latest album, Lighthouse, came out last year. He’s also found time to work with legends like Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne on recent releases.

In fact, as Hammer chats to him over Zoom, he disappears off camera, only to return proudly brandishing a gold record he was presented for his contributions on Ozzy’s 2020 record, Ordinary Man. “I don’t have my own records up at home,” he admits. “But I’ll have an Ozzy Osbourne album any day!” But what pearls of wisdom does he have to share on a four-decade-plus career?

YOUR ENVIRONMENT SHAPES YOU

“Back when I was in my first punk bands [in the early 80s], I always thought there was a special sound to Seattle – even pre-grunge. We’d be in the garage with our friends playing and end up with kinda wet strings because it’s always so damp here! Nobody had a tuner, so you’d tune to whatever the other guys were playing and it created this really heavy sound. When the Seattle sound formed, around bands like Tad, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains… It was like, ‘That’s the sound of wet strings and guys who have to play in puffy jackets!’ Ha ha!”

BE YOURSELF

“Punk rock really informed who I am, and still does to this day. Bands like The Clash and D.O.A. really made me want to give a sh*t and that’s a big part of who I am. At the same time, I don’t define myself musically – I like anything that’s good. Whether that’s Cheap Trick, Ghost or Prince, it doesn’t matter so long as it kicks ass.”

NOBODY ARGUES WITH MOTÖRHEAD

“I can remember getting my nose broken at a metal show, just for being there. The biggest spike in the land between metal and punk was Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades. They made it OK for those things to mix.”

GETTING AWAY ISN’T THE SAME AS GETTING OUT

“A bunch of heroin came into [Seattle] around ’83 and started taking out people really specific to my musical future. I had to stop and think, ‘I either get out, or I’m stuck.’ So I moved to LA and guess what – heroin was there too! I learned you can’t always get away from stuff like that, but while I was there I met Slash, Steven [Adler], Izzy [Stradlin] and Axl [Rose] – the rest is history.”

ALWAYS PLAY THE LONG GAME

“My car wouldn’t make it to New York, so I decided to move to LA instead! It was that simple. I had been playing since late ’78; my first gig was in 1979 opening for Black Flag. By ’84 when I moved, that original spirit of punk was dead and dying. In California especially it was more punk gangs and it just wasn’t cool. So to me, I knew I had to be thinking about what comes next.”

DON’T SETTLE

“For so many bands, you’d say, ‘They’ve got everything but…’ I wasn’t going to move to Los Angeles and go into a band that had ‘everything but!’ Playing with Slash and Steven [in Roadcrew, a pre-Guns N’ Roses jam group] I was the singer so we’d got everything but the singer. It was super-fun to play with, but I knew it wasn’t going to be The Thing; even though they’re the best players in the world, we were missing something. So when we finally did get in a room with Izzy and Axl, from the first chord you could just tell.”

INFORM YOURSELF AND STAY SAFE

“I brazenly went through [the AIDS epidemic of the 80s] just like ‘knock on wood’, you know? In America, it was first called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency syndrome. So it had this stigma about being purely related to gay people and the thinking was just, ‘I’ll be OK, I’m hetero.’ Then it was like, ‘Oh, intravenous drug use can cause it too’ and I was like, ‘Yeeesh’, because that was closer to home. I knew a few people who got AIDS – I was really close to this guy called Black Randy [a punk singer who passed away in 1988 from complications of AIDS], but I still didn’t want to get tested and we just hoped for the best.”

ALL THINGS IN MODERATION

“The first – and only – time I met Prince, I was too drunk. [Guns N’ Roses] were on the Use Your Illusion tour and got invited to see him play, then see him backstage and say hi. I went in the room and it was dark with all these candles around, and I just didn’t know what to say because I was too f*cking drunk! Years later, I wrote a column in the Seattle Weekly about taking my girls to see Prince andhow it was magic. I get this call a few days later from this manager, and it’s like, ‘Prince loves your column, he wants to use it in his new tour programme.’ So clearly we had a positive interaction the first time!”

PROVE ’EM WRONG

“Velvet Revolver were a perfect band for the time. Around 2003, you started hearing this ‘Rock ’n’ roll is dead’ chat and it’s like… f*ck that! It ain’t dead. To who?! We formed that band and once Scott [Weiland] joined it really became a fire-breathing, ‘f*ck you’ kind of band. We put that first record out and went on the road with a chip on our shoulders.”

ENJOY THE SMALL STUFF

“A bunch of years with Velvet Revolver were logistically challenging. I’d be somewhere like Des Moines, Iowa and it’d be like, ‘I miss my family and that gig we just did was… OK, but not worth me being gone.’ My kids are grown now, so being out with my wife, for the last eight or nine years and not worrying about the kids, we’ve really got into travelling.

We see a lot of stuff – museums, attractions… you name it, we do it! We actually did some of that with Velvet Revolver; Scott, Slash and I might have our kids with us at the same time, so we’d end up going to a swimming pool or whatever and really seeing stuff. That was such a change from Guns N’ Roses when I was drinking and might not even leave my hotel room.”

ALL THINGS END

“We had a great relationship in [Velvet Revolver] and with the audience. We took Velvet Revolver around the world, but there were things in the band that we just couldn’t get around. I don’t dwell on that stuff – I remember those days fondly – but I don’t think we’ll ever come back together with Scott gone.”

STAYING BUSY CAN BE GOOD FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

“Peace of mind and feeling good about a day is like a first-place championship trophy for me. I’ve struggled with things – as we all do – but now I have good week after good week, with no panic attacks or bouts of depression. The road does that for me too – I stay so busy that I literally can’t focus on things.”

TAKE TIME TO SMELL THE ROSES

“I’m not used to taking my foot off the pedal. It’s something I had to learn how to do as I was doing it. We got done touring [with Guns N’ Roses] on November 6 and came up to Seattle with our new puppy, so it was like, ‘I’m not going on the road for a while – how do I relax while still being productive?’ I went to Stone [Gossard, Pearl Jam guitarist]’s studio just to do some writing as I’d come up with another 16 or so songs while out on the road. I stay busy, but not overloaded, by any means.”

GET BETTER

“When I started writing songs for Lighthouse I had a lot of songs written. I had so many that I didn’t really take stock of how they were sounding or what the overall theme might be. But I’ve realised that I like to try and better myself, especially with my acoustic guitar playing. I’ve been playing drums again, honing my vocal technique and really trying to hone my lyrics.”

BE OPEN TO OPPORTUNITIES

“I’ve got friends I’d like to make some records with. I don’t know about getting a bunch of different singers in to sing because I really like doing the solo thing where I do basically everything, but doing something like getting Jerry [Cantrell] to come and sing on Lighthouse suits me fine. And Slash – he played on my record from all the way in 1993 [Believe In Me], so I do like to work with my friends.”

Lighthouse is out now via The World Is Flat. Duff's UK tour starts in Glasgow on October 2.