Duff McKagan still has an appetite for L.A. and making rock music that lasts
Forty years and two months ago, Duff McKagan first arrived in Los Angeles as a fresh-faced punk rocker with ambitions of taking over the world. The city, a few months removed from hosting the 1984 Summer Olympics, was losing some of the shine from the Games. McKagan remembers Hollywood then as being 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 seemed 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’s now Ovation Hollywood, and began a musical journey that saw him and his bandmates in Guns N’ Roses become one of the most recognized bands of all time, accumulating 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 with Los Angeles. As the Guns N’ Roses bassist says, the songs that comprise that album were rooted in the reality of 1980s Hollywood.
“It’s all there on ‘Appetite,’” McKagan says. “Those are true stories. That was Hollywood, and in L.A. We’re in the home-invasion phase of Los Angeles crime. It’s not so much with drive-bys anymore.”
In between, McKagan moved to several apartments, including one in Miracle Mile near the El Rey Theater, where he’s performing Wednesday on his Lighthouse tour. Though it’s not quite a full-circle moment (at the same venue in 2019, McKagan performed a solo show to support his first solo album, “Tenderness,” that was released as a live album), he can’t help but marvel at becoming a rock survivor.
“Forty f— years ago!” the 60-year-old McKagan exclaims as he laughs over Zoom, sitting at a table at his Seattle home that overlooks the water.
Since 1994, McKagan has traveled back and forth between his native Seattle and the place where his band came together before conquering the world. His daughters went to school in L.A., and “I still have this really great relationship with L.A. I identify with Hollywood because I earned it. I’ve put in so much time there that I’ve earned a bedpost notch. [Laughs] L.A. did a lot for me.”
Eight years after Guns N’ Roses improbably reunited, the bassist still loves playing with them and can balance that with his solo career. McKagan beams as he recaps his recent European tour, his first in support of his second solo album, “Lighthouse.”
Released in October 2023, “Lighthouse” was produced by Martin Feveyear, who worked on two Loaded albums with McKagan. It sees the singer-songwriter mix tales of tenderness (the title track 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 it needs to get it together before it’s too late) that reflect his worldview. McKagan estimates he wrote and recorded nearly 60 songs, primarily during the pandemic, and played nearly every instrument on the album. “Lighthouse” also features contributions from longtime pals Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, Iggy Pop and Guns N’ Roses bandmate Slash.
After spending the better part of the past seven years on tour, McKagan took off most of the first part of 2024. He jokes that he celebrated the album’s release at a hotel room in Boise. To decompress, he spent time in Hawaii and at his home in Washington, but he didn’t stop writing. Following his break, he went into Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s Seattle studio (McKagan’s studio in the city was damaged by a fire at a nearby building), where he crafted 15 new songs.
“I thought to myself that they (the songs) can’t just sit on my GarageBand as acoustic demos. I have enough of those,” he says with a laugh. Since 2015, McKagan has been on a creative kick. Armed with just his acoustic guitar, he constantly writes new songs, as demonstrated by the ones he’s written earlier this year. “I have stuff squirreled away for all kinds of stuff,” he says. Melodies and subjects came naturally, and the near decade has been one of the most prolific periods of songwriting of his career.
In October, McKagan released two of those songs, the raucous “All Turning Loose,” trading vocals with Lee Ving of Fear, and uptempo rocker “My Name Is Bob” featuring Joey Keithley of D.O.A. (“They were my KISS!” McKagan says of D.O.A.), as well as a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” recorded live in London with his longtime 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 bunch of super players,” he says of the group of Seattle-based musicians. “I knew it was great while we were rehearsing. Why? Because I’d walk in (to rehearsal) and they’d be playing something and I’d think, ‘I hope I don’t f— it up.’ It’s one of those situations as a musician that is really pleasing.”
Some of the demos have shifted from his computer to the stage. At soundcheck before some of the European shows, McKagan presented some of those ideas to his band and they came up with a sound he’s excited about.
“I’m not used to that,” he says. “I’m used to imagining what a keyboard part would be, and this and that. Now, they’re all right there.”
As his tour winds down, in the foreseeable future, McKagan plans on recording, and says that there’s “always Guns stuff around the corner, which I’m always excited for.”
For now, “I’m in a really good spot in my life,” he says. “I always say in my songs that everything is going to get better. And I really believe that. I don’t know what that ‘everything’ is, but it’s hope and for goodness and kindness, and being a badass. Don’t be a d—.”
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