EP 315: Duff McKagan - From Guns N' Roses: Surviving Fame, Addiction & Finding What Really Matters!!

Host Mark Pattison sits down with Duff McKagan, founding member of Guns N' Roses, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, author, entrepreneur, and father who grew up in the same Seattle neighborhood as Mark before becoming one of rock's most iconic bassists, revealing why watching Joe Strummer stop a Clash concert at the Paramount in 1979 to defend fans from security taught him that there's no difference between performers and audience because we're all in this thing together which became the foundation for everything he does on stage decades later, how leaving Seattle at 19 with a broken drum kit and a Slant 6 Maverick to escape the heroin epidemic that destroyed his entire scene led him to sleeping in his car outside a Black Angus restaurant in Northridge while waiting for his first paycheck before meeting Slash and Steven through a newspaper ad that would change music history, and why waking up one morning in the house he just bought in Seattle unable to move because his pancreas had burst from years of cocaine and alcohol abuse became the turning point when his mother arrived in a wheelchair with Parkinson's and he realized the order of things was completely wrong because he should be taking care of her not the other way around. In this deeply authentic and inspiring conversation between two elite athletes from the same Seattle neighborhood who both made it to the top of their respective fields, Duff shares his extraordinary journey from being the youngest of eight kids in a firefighter's family in the Bryant neighborhood playing football basketball and baseball with Mark's teammates to discovering punk rock at 13 when flyers for bands like the Mentors appeared around Seattle and realizing he needed something of his own in a family where nothing belonged to just one person, to forming his first band at 13 and getting welcomed into Seattle's punk scene where it didn't matter that he had teen acne or was younger because the community was completely open, to playing with Dead Kennedys and Black Flag on tour at 17 and 18 before heroin devastated everyone around him in 1983 forcing him to sell his drum kit and drive to Los Angeles hoping to escape drugs only to discover you can't pull a geographical because drugs exist everywhere, to living in his car for two weeks outside the Black Angus in Northridge where he worked as a cook while saving money for an apartment and asking an older cook for directions to Hollywood only to learn it was 25 miles away, to meeting Slash