Duff McKagan Finds His Light

Duff McKagan is still the same rowdy punk with a million-dollar smirk that he was 40 years ago—well, mostly. Before achieving immortality as one-fourth of Guns N’Roses, he cut his teeth on the bass stylings of Lemmy Kilmister and Paul Simonon and Randy Rampage and learned how to make music through listening to Prince’s 1999, McKagan has drifted in and out of chaos, fast-living, generational tunes and near-death experiences. He’s one of rock ‘n’ roll’s last great journeymen, having been the rhythmic conductor and pace-setter on the greatest hair metal album of all time (Appetite for Destruction) and a conspirer in some of the toughest and loudest supergroups of the last three decades—including Velvet Revolver, Loaded, Neurotic Outsiders and the Gentlemen, to name a few. McKagan almost died from acute pancreatitis catalyzed by alcoholism in 1994 and got sober soon after. Now, having outlived the curses and benders of the Reagan-era Sunset Strip, he’s just released his most important rock project yet, the impressive and beautiful Lighthouse.

I hop on a Zoom call with McKagan on an off-day between GN’R shows in Lexington, Kentucky. He’s hanging out in his hotel room, making sure that his camera paints his side-profile in a good light. Perhaps this is your first time hearing that the Seattle musician is also a solo artist, or that he, uncharacteristically, plays guitar on the work he makes under his own name. While he still maintains his longtime role as a bassist in a renowned, hall of fame rock band, his Duff McKagan racket is a pretty damn good one. It transcends a side hustle at this point; it is the hustle. Building on influences ranging from Mark Lanegan’s acoustic stylings to the instrumental diversity of The Stranglers to the risk-taking of Prince, McKagan honed his self-taught finger-picking and has parlayed it into two beautiful, off-the-beaten path (at least for him and his punk and hair metal roots) albums, Tenderness and Lighthouse.

In the original Guns N’ Roses run, from Appetite for Destruction to The Spaghetti Incident?, McKagan amassed some songwriting credits here and there. Now, however, he’s got this mode he can pivot to and be the sole voice. He recorded 60 songs for Lighthouse, but only 10 are seeing the light of day right now. It was just him and his longtime producer Martin Feveyear, alone, cranking out a record during COVID. It’s a different cosmos entirely from the work he’s most famous for, the big-budget, loud, quintet brilliance that colored the legacy of rock ‘n’ roll for a lifetime. But, to arrive at this place where his solo work is such a bright, moving endeavor, McKagan had to, first, perfect his place in the company of talented peers and friends. He had to, first, learn what it meant to make a record and take the stage with four other people who shared a trust with one another. And then, he had to keep teaching himself new ways to keep all of that alive.

“You’ve gotta be good at being in a band and serving the band. That’s your gig,” McKagan explains. “Any younger rockers, listen to this: Be about serving your band and not fucking trying to get off some licks every time you can. I love being in a band, that’s what I wanted when I was a teenager—I wanted to be in a band, serve my part in the band, have that band be a greater expression of the individuals. But doing it myself is a whole thing. I love creating songs from beginning to end myself. I know what background vocals, almost immediately, I want to put on it. I know how I’d like the drum kit to sound—which is always, to me, ELO/Jeff Lynne drum sounds. I tried to achieve that, haven’t achieved it yet. I’ve gotten better at recording and better at guitar plainyg. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I practice and I record a lot. You tend to get better at things, and I’ve really been working for the last 30 years at finding my place in my singing voice. But, at the end of the day, you’ve got to write music for yourself. And, if it sounds good to you, hopefully it sounds good to somebody else.”

McKagan put out his first solo album, Believe in Me, in 1993, just two months before Guns N’ Roses would put out The Spaghetti Incident?, their last record featuring him on it. That record, though, was a pretty close-knit extension of McKagan’s work in his longtime band, as he called upon folks like Slash, Matt Sorum, Dizzy Reed, Gilby Clarke, Sebastian Bach, Jeff Beck and Lenny Kravitz to help fill out the arrangements. Believe in Me peaked at #137 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 100,000 copies; it was a bonafide, stone-cold hard rock bruiser that couldn’t be further away from what McKagan is doing now, and it’s likely he didn’t foresee this kind of solo career spawning from that project. Tenderness became, in many ways, a reinvention—as if, after years of being in one of the biggest bands in the world, he had to go back to square one. It takes me back to when McKagan was bright-eyed and rebellious, playing in a punk band called The Living and opening gigs for Hüsker Dü and D.O.A., just climbing the industry ladder slowly and surviving and making a name for himself by getting up on stage every night. All of it still influences him in 2023, especially with the construction of each song on a molecular, technical level.

“Even writing a song like ‘Lighthouse’—three chords,” McKagan says. “Susan and I have a radio show, we call it Three Chords & The Truth. We try to play songs that we think are honest rock ‘n’ roll songs. Once I started playing bass, once Guns really started happening, [I said], ‘Okay, I am a bass player. I’m not a guitar player, I’m not a drummer. I’m a bass player in this band. Those performances I saw—and the way that songwriting was approached—it was just these guys, bleeding hearts and these great three-chord fucking songs. How do you get so much melody out of that? It’s beautiful. When I sit down to write a song, I think of that. I don’t need a bunch of riffs. I don’t need to make a hard rock record right now. I play hard rock every other night. It’s a great band, I can’t compete with that—and I don’t want to. I’ve been leaning towards going this way since the early 2000s. And, finally, with Tenderness, I got Shooter [Jennings] and I’m like, ‘Dude, I want to go this whole other direction.’”

Lighthouse begins in a place of love, with a title track that was written as an ode to Susan Holmes, McKagan’s wife of 24 years. Where other moments on the record are subjective, “Lighthouse” and “Fallen” are two explicit, wholehearted depictions of devotion and reciprocated care and affection between two people who saved each other. But Lighthouse is an album born out of the forced closeness we all faced during the pandemic, and McKagan used moments on the tracklist to articulate just how much he and Susan saved each other again during COVID.

“I try to be somewhat reserved with my lyric writing and, sometimes, have a few meanings—none are wrong,” McKagan explains. “But ‘Lighthouse,’ I wrote as my wife being the lighthouse, my life. Our kids are grown, and she and I have been through so much stuff together. And then we got a worldwide pandemic that we were going through together. The way she really supported me—I had just got my own studio right before COVID started, and I had recorded two songs. I was supposed to be off on a Guns N’ Roses tour and, of course, that all came crumbling down. I really realized, with her, in our time when when you’re not in contact with other people, it was just her and I thought, ‘Fuck, man, we’re solid.’ We’d heard about people splitting up during COVID; we got drawn closer to each other during that [time]. I’m a fortunate guy, to have met her, that girl, Susan Holmes, when I was 32, two years into sobriety—because there was something that clicked and, hopefully, for both of us, that really has made my life make sense. Even in the darkest times, even when I’m suffering a panic attack or some other malady, I still know I have her.”

Enveloped in-between those chapters of love and partnership are earnest, empathetic reflections on survival and injustice. Lighthouse is, at its core, a political record—but not explicitly so. McKagan calls the societal and global issues unfolding around us “malarkey” but, on the album, he paints vivid and precise portraits of disparity that he’s encountered. On Tenderness in 2019, he visited the Jungle in his hometown of Seattle so he could honestly write about homelessness and addiction. They were moving accounts, told only by someone who’s had such an intimate history with it—and McKagan delivered that to us without missing a hitch. On Lighthouse, the work moves farther beyond his own backyard, as he ruminates on global conflicts in Ukraine and Afghanistan. On “I Saw God on 10th St.,” he sings about conspiracy theories and religion and who gets the privilege to repent their way to eternal forgiveness and who doesn’t; on “Just Another Shakedown,” he casts admonishment on how the rich suits in Washington and in statehouses across America use poor families and folks as pawns in their ladder-climb to the very top; on “Hope,” which features his longtime bandmate Slash, he questions the relationship between faith and fear and its convergence in war, before landing on images of children becoming our beacons of hope that we can, if we put our hearts into it, prevent from falling victim to the cyclical violence that is ongoing.

“I’ve always considered myself, even when I was drinking and even in my 20s, an intellect,” McKagan says. “I would travel to places, other countries—and I get to do that, and I’ve gotten to do it for a long time now, since the ‘80s. What I’ve started to figure out what to do, in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, is observe—observe other cultures. On tour, you’d hear other people [say] ‘Oh, these fucking Spanish, why don’t they just speak English?’ or some bullshit, whatever. I would just observe and try to learn languages. And then we’d start going to Islamic countries and Israel, it’s really cool to observe, man.”

McKagan has a pretty receptive outlook on what his place is in all of this. He plays bass in a band that, back in 1988, came under great fire for using racial and homophobic slurs in the song “One in a Million.” 30 years later, the song was cut from the Appetite for Destruction box set completely. Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose also became one of the loudest (and, possibly, most unlikely) opponents of Donald Trump during his presidency. McKagan has gone on record in the past as explaining that “One in a Million” has never been a reflection of the band’s real views, that it’s a story told from a bigoted protagonist. His appreciation for the world he gets to play music for upholds that continuity and rebels against the de-humanizing pedagogy that much of our world is built on. It’s a real treasure to watch musicians you’ve long adored grow up, too, and not harden their morals in a cast of regression. It seems that McKagan—and Guns N’ Roses as a unit—are fully capitalizing on just how uniting music can, and should, be—and that bleeds into his own solo work.