The frontman Duff McKagan was honoured to play with: “You’d better be prepared”
Playing with Axl Rose in his prime must’ve been like having a pet tiger. Sure, there are moments where you get to marvel at its prowess, but that comes at the cost of everyday formalities and the threat of being mauled to death at any given moment. Duff McKagan contended with that – never drinking water for over 11 years perhaps proving symptomatic.
At best, Rose would show up late, at worst, he’d show up in a cell. So, from his station behind the bass in Guns ‘N Roses, McKagan got to witness the highs and lows of showmanship. And since then he has also played with the likes of Scott Weiland in Velvet Revolver and Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, too.
However, there was one star who always had him on guard for different reasons. Iggy Pop pogos about the stage like a lemur behind a jackhammer, inventing genres in a whirl of flesh and wizardry. In the early 1970s with the Stooges, he was a one-man health and safety nightmare, in the subsequent decades, he might have shed less crimson, but the carnage was merely refined.
Answering fan questions, McKagan spoke of what an honour it is to play with the pioneering star behind blood-pumping hits like ‘Lust for Life’. “Well, I’ve done it a couple of times now, I’m fortunate enough to say, in my lifetime. He is a hero and he is a badass. He’s the real deal,” he said.
That isn’t an accident either. Contrary to the chaos, Pop’s performative ways arose from a real sense of discipline. Acting insane requires a sober disposition, just ask Jack Nicholson. “You get in a room with Iggy, you’d better be prepared,” McKagan explained.
Most recently, the bassist got to craft some songs for Pop’s album Every Loser, and he added, “Getting to write some music for him on this latest record was super fun. We got to play some shows with him – me and Chad [Smith], [Andrew] Watt, Jamie [Hince] from The Kills and Matt [Clifford] from The Rolling Stones. A really killer band.”
You have to be a good band playing with Iggy. The frontman is a prisoner to upholding energy, so the songs are always dancing to his whims. Thusly, the bassist adds, “When you get into rehearsals, you’d better know your shit, and when you get on stage with him in front of an audience, know your shit well enough to be able to let it all go because you’re on stage with Iggy and that’s not gonna happen very many times in your life.”
His mission is to rip up the mundanity of the everyday. As he once put it himself, “If I don’t terrorise, I’m not Pop.”
Whether that was rolling around glass in his youth or whipping up such a storm that even McKagan is left shaken in his late 70s, that treatise to terrorise has remained.
