Duff McKagan's Personal Best

“‘Jungle’ was interesting for me to pick, in that it's one of the big hit singles off of Appetite. I was gonna go like, ‘Michelle’ or ‘Brownstone’ but I [thought] I’d go with ‘Jungle’ because the verse riff was the first riff that we wrote. We discovered our funky backbeat, and I think that was such an important element to Guns. I was listening to Cameo and Prince at that time and I think ‘Jungle’ was an attempt at getting that Cameo backbeat. It really influenced our songwriting from then on. You hear it on ‘Rocket Queen’, you hear it on that whole record – this funky, backbeat without trying to be too funky – and ‘Jungle’ was the first time where we had the ‘A-ha’ moment.”

BEST FIT: It’s interesting how those pieces came together: the metal, punk and funk influences, because ‘Welcome To The Jungle’ is the kind of song you could dance – or fight – to!

“Exactly. If you have the right groove, you can do anything. AC/DC’s early stuff, I've played that stuff, I played it with Angus [Young], so when I play something with an artist, I want to be at least as good as the record, right? So I'll go to school, and I'll study the artist, playing-wise, and then I'll play to it. And they were uncannily funky. If you break it down and go to school on AC/DC, the drums even make it more funky, like that single kick drum, and the bass is cool shit. You don't notice it until you study it. They make you want to fight too.

“With Guns, we could talk about the vocals, we could talk about the guitar playing, but I wanted to talk about the beat and the groove of that. There's Axl’s [Rose] vocals, guitar, all this stuff, but without the groove, none of that would have happened. So you got to start with the thing that got you there.”

Did having the level of backbeat you guys found surprise you?

"I mean, I grew up with a lot of Sly and the Family Stone. I gravitated to punk and to Motörhead, AC/DC and Thin Lizzy, MC5, The Stooges, but also Sly, Parliament, Prince – I was born in the right year that I was able to get into Prince while he was still on his first two records, you know, like, ‘Oh, shit, who's this guy who can play everything?’ It's kind of like Sly and the Family Stone, but it's kind of not at all – and it's cool. So I gravitated toward groovier shit and thinking, ‘How can I play that?’ You’ve got to play what you're comfortable with, but that's why it was important, to me, at least, that we found this groove that was legit. It wasn't some white dudes trying to be a funky group, it was just very legit swing.”

“This is when I started putting the acoustic guitar up against my chest. I went down on my couch and I started listening to what the reverberation of the acoustic guitar was doing to my chest, leading me where to sing – what register, cadence. I just let it happen – didn't force it, and things came out cool. Shooter [Jennings] produced it. My brother and his group played with Guns back in the day, they were the horn section on our first EP [Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide] for ‘Moved To The City’ and then later on ‘Live And Let Die’. So getting my brother and his two other guys back again into the thing was radical. It's one of the songs that totally wrote itself.

That whole group of songs since Tenderness to now has been amazing. Once I open myself up to listening to the instrument I'm playing and how it's feeling physically up against my body, it seems like I'm getting melodies easier. I'm getting little catchphrases, like ‘Long feather’ or, ‘Oh, long feather is gone’. What does that mean? The song is telling me what to write about. Not to sound like a fucking hippie, but songs do come to you out of thin air. It’s one thing I've always been mystified about since I was writing punk rock songs when I was 14 years old. You don't sit down and go ‘I'm gonna go to a G and a C and a D chord, and I'm gonna sing about this.’ I don't write like that. You sit down and it just comes to you from somewhere. I've had lyrics come to me walking my dog… It's a bizarre, really cool thing.”

“‘A little tenderness is what we need’, speaking of! I was very influenced by my friend Mark Lanegan. We became friends in the mid-’90s. He had just got sober for the first time, and he was doing his record Field Songs. We became friends and I played the drums on a couple of songs, but listening to that is when I became hip to his first two solo records. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Whiskey For The Holy Ghost, but nobody's gonna sing like him ever. One of the best male baritone voices that ever existed.

But, this scarcity of guitars… I was very influenced by the way he approached it. I can't sing like him. I can't fill up a room with my voice. He can. But just watching him… and he had a band with Greg Dulli from The Afghan Whigs – the Gutter Twins. It all influenced me starting to pare back on my music. What's the acoustic guitar got to say? And maybe, you know, a little soulful organ with it, who knows? Then getting Jamie Douglas, Shooter’s drummer, to play. That fucking scarcity of drums on there… that song fucking wrote itself. The imagery of just a few lines paints a whole picture. You don't need to say a lot. I read a lot of really good authors, and some of my favourite authors, like Cormac McCarthy, where there's one line in there that’ll rip your heart out. I have these high benchmarks! [Laughs] Like, say it all in one line if you can, and I think that ‘Tenderness’ is really solid. I was able to say a lot with just a few lines.”

That in itself though becomes an art form – if it’s not the right exact words, it falls flat.

“Yeah, and if it's too much writing, it's like, ‘Jesus, what's going on here?’ So there's that happy middle ground, and I felt like ‘Tenderness’ was a minor songwriting victory for myself.”