By Aaron Small

Known the world over as the original bassist for Guns N’ Roses and current four-stringer in Velvet Revolver, Duff McKagan is also a proud member of a third band. One in which he plays guitar and sings lead vocals, that band is Loaded. Best described as vintage garage rock with a punk undertone, Loaded’s new album, Sick, features 13 of the most honest songs the former “King of Beers” has ever recorded.

Loaded’s debut album, Dark Days, was released in 2001, subsequently receiving a digital release several years later. In 2008, Loaded resurfaced with the same lineup still intact: guitarist Mike Squires, bassist Jeff Rouse, drummer Geoff Reading and of course singer/guitarist Duff McKagan. The quartet issued the Wasted Heart EP – strictly limited to 7,000 copies worldwide – which served as a precursor to the new full-length, Sick. “I think that’s just kind of a testimony to the fact that we’re friends; we hang out,” says Duff. “We didn’t plan on waiting seven years between records, but those guys had other bands they were doing and obviously Velvet Revolver kind of came up out of nowhere. So everybody understood. They said, ‘Duff, go do your thing.’ There was never any weird or hard feelings. In Loaded, we never take ourselves too seriously and I think that has helped in our music. When we landed on these songs to start recording last summer, we didn’t put too much pressure on ourselves and the songs were really able to breathe because of that. It turned out to be one of the most inspired records I’ve been a part of. It was really fun. One song would be better than the last one. Good things happened. The UK/European/Japanese tour we did last fall – every gig was kick ass and fun and packed. I think the allure of Loaded has grown bigger than the band ever, ever was before.”

Aiding in that growth is Loaded’s new record company, Century Media. Albeit, Duff and his mates stick out like a sore thumb on a label renowned for extreme metal bands such as Napalm Death, Old Man’s Child, The Haunted and Arch Enemy. “I guess that’s what attracted Century Media to us,” comments McKagan. “We weren’t really thinking last summer, we were recording. We do everything on the cheap ‘cause we don’t have any money; as a band we don’t. It’d be cool to get an indie deal to help us pay for the recording and put the record out. Century Media came out of nowhere and approached us. They were so excited! They’d heard a couple songs from us tracking and said, ‘You guys are the band we’ve always wanted.’ It turns out, one of the guys at Century Media had seen every gig we played in LA. So he’d seen us like eight times. He had the whole company really pumped up. I think with the black metal, it’s fucking – you go down to their office and it’s metal all the time! They have a mosh pit at the office; it’s incredible. I don’t really get that kind of metal. It’s not that I don’t like it; I just don’t get it. But I went down there and they’re really organized. They’re used to working records really hard. They said, ‘This is the first band we’ve ever had that has a chance of being on Letterman.’ That was really exciting for them, which spilled over into our little camp.”

Duff’s lyrical approach on Sick is incredibly personal and straightforward. ‘IOU’ is a prime example with the lines: “Sweetheart mother to my girls, Your softest touch cures all my ills, When I got down, You came through, Here’s my lifelong gratitude.” Duff recalls, “When my manager heard that song he said, ‘Are you sure you want to sing that every night? That’s really kind of personal.’ I don’t really know how to write lyrics any other way. Even a song like ‘Flatline’, which isn’t about my relationship, but I definitely pulled stuff that any of us as dudes can relate to. Some songs like ‘Wasted Heart’ and ‘IOU’ are really personal. You can really tell what it’s about. Maybe too much so? But I don’t really care. I’ve got nothing to hide. I think I probably hid stuff in my 20s. When you’re unsure of yourself, you hide stuff. Not that I’m completely confident, but in a sense I am. I’ve got this far without doing some stupid fucking reality show. I’m not going to sell myself out commercially. Cathartic is an overused word, but for me to write a song it is cathartic.”

It’s ironic that ‘Flatline’, which begins: “I’m so over you, I don’t think you have a clue why I’m leaving” and ‘IOU’ are back to back in the tracklisting. “I love you I hate you. I love you, you fucking bitch. Not about the same chic,” clarifies Duff. In fact, when he played ‘Flatline’ for his wife Susan, the subject of ‘IOU’, “She thought that was about her too. She started crying. I felt so bad! I felt like a fucking dick. I said no honey; it’s just a song I wrote. It’s not about you. She gets it now. Of course it’s the first single. Everybody’s going to be looking at her like – ‘what are you doing? Are you fucking with Duff?’ It’s just rock ‘n’ roll.”

Album opener and title track ‘Sick’ spouts: “Well I’m sick, Yeah I’m sick of you, You’re like Typhoid Mary mixed with Asian Flu.” “‘Sick’ is just a kind of commentary. It starts off maybe about a chic and then it goes into I’m sick of fucking everything. That’s the way I feel sometimes, but we all feel that way. That song makes me want to break stuff, which is all good. I walk this really fine line. I’m a father. I’m responsible. I have two daughters. I make them call me Father, just ‘cause I think it’s something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They joke and call me Father, but I’m Dad. I’m a husband, all these upstanding things that I never thought I’d be. But on the whole other side of it, I want to break shit. Burn down a house some place and loot and get in a fight. So I walk this razor’s edge.”

Unbeknownst to many, Loaded has a behind the scenes fifth member, Martin Feveyear. He produced the Dark Days album as well as the Wasted Heart EP and Sick. He also serves as the band’s tour manager and live sound engineer when they hit the road. “And when road gay happens after about ten days, he’s the object of all of our affection,” jokes Duff. “Martin’s that guy. I bounce all the lyrics off of him. He’ll look at me kind of cross-eyed on some lines. He says, ‘Dude, really? That’s not the line you want to sing.’ So we’ll sit down and work on the lyrics for every song. I trust him. He’s not there to fucking make fun of me. Trust, especially when you’re writing music, you can’t feel like somebody’s looking at you like you suck. He genuinely likes the music and cares about it enough to go through lyrics line by line, go through the songs with us and make sure the arrangements are right. Out on the road, he takes care of us and makes sure our sound is great every night. He’s a great guy to be around.”

The recording process and studio experience in Loaded is vastly different compared to that of GN’R or Velvet Revolver. “We’re not a major label band. We have limited means. We do everything as a band. It’s not like the guys look at me and say, ‘Hey dude, pay for the record motherfucker. You Guns N’ Roses guy.’ It’s not like that at all. Everybody takes care of the band financially. Saying all that, we got a rehearsal place for $300 a month for two months. Huge fucking place and we got it for nothing really. But Martin’s studio with Martin, you get the whole service, is about $500 a day. He’s the producer and the engineer. But still, it’s $500 a day; that goes pretty quick. So we had to have our shit together. From start to finish, mixed and mastered, Martin also does that, three weeks.”

Dark Days was released by Loaded. The Wasted Heart EP and Sick are Duff McKagan’s Loaded. Obviously Duff’s name was added for recognition purposes to increase sales. However, he’s intent that Loaded be seen as a band and not a solo project. “I’m the one who’s most against it. The guys in the band were for it. Obviously it was Century Media’s idea. It went to us and I said no. The other three guys said yes. It’s a democracy. Hopefully this record will get us to a point that we can play… my goal for this band is to go out and tour anywhere we want, playing 1,000 – 1,200 seat rooms, selling t-shirts. That way you’re out doing it, you’re actually making money and the band is commercially viable. It pays for itself. These guys won’t have to have day jobs. Then we can bring our name back to just Loaded. I hate that shit – a guy’s name in front of a band. Slash had Snakepit and the record company demanded he call it Slash’s Snakepit. I know he hated that. We all just want to be in a band. From the time you start playing at 12 or 13, unless you’re Prince; then it’s cool.”

In addition to his musical endeavours, Duff is working for Playboy now. He writes a weekly online financial column titled Duffonomics. After achieving sobriety in 1994, Duff enrolled at Santa Monica College, which led to Seattle University where he graduated from the Albers School of Business, earning a degree in finance. “All my friends I grew up with are like, ‘Dude, can you get me into the (Playboy) mansion?’ No, I can’t. There’s no real big bench full of perks being the financial columnist. I suppose I probably could get into the mansion, I haven’t really tried.” Truth be told, Duff has yet to meet Hugh Hefner. “I deal with the real straight up – you’ll be able to appreciate this – the publisher. They’re in New York, tenth floor of some building in midtown Manhattan. It’s commerce, except there’s Playboys laying everywhere. I just deal with the editors of the words, not the layout people.”

Being the father of two daughters, Daddy working for Playboy didn’t actually require any dinner table discussion. “No. It’s not like when you and I were kids man. There’s that show on TV with the three chics and my wife watches it, so my daughters watch it with my wife. They watch parts of it, so they know the whole thing. My wife was on the cover of Playboy once, so they’re pretty familiar with what it is. It’s no big deal to them. Anything I do, to my daughters, is pretty stupid and Dad-like. They just see me on my Mac writing shit all the time. They think that’s really boring.”

The complete antithesis of boring is the buzz surrounding Velvet Revolver’s quest for a new singer to replace the departed Scott Weiland. Duff offers the following closely guarded details. “It’s safe to say we’ll be cutting a record in 2009. I think we’re really close to finding the guy. We have about five guys and they’re all really, really good. One guy in particular for me, again it’s a democracy. Everybody’s got to be 110% behind whichever guy we choose. That’s going to be the challenge because we all have to go to war together. We listened to something like 400 singers, which is brutal. It gets to a point where you don’t even know what you’re listening to.” Much like reading 400 resumes. “Yeah, yeah, it is! After a while it’s like, is it good that he went to Harvard?”

Is it safe to say that the five are relatively unknown? “It is safe to say the five I’m talking about are unknown. I don’t want to say much beyond that because I did a bunch of press a couple weeks ago and I was talking about it. I think the other guys (Slash, Matt Sorum and Dave Kushner) were a little bummed out that I was talking too much about it. To me, it doesn’t add any pressure that we’re talking about it. You go out to some fucking function and ten people want you to tell them about the singer. We’ve all talked about it, but really, at this point, we don’t want any drama. We just want to find the guy. We’ve written fucking killer music! The best music we’ve ever written. We’re really confident because we have that music. That’s about all I’m willing to say at this point.”

Earlier in this interview, Duff mentioned that he hadn’t sold out by being on “some stupid fucking reality show.” Unfortunately the same cannot be said of original Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler, who has appeared on both Celebrity Rehab and Sober House. “It’s really sad. It’s just sad. He’s still strung out and that’s the most tragic part of that whole story. I love the guy. I’ve always looked at him like a little brother, always cared for him. We didn’t want to kick him out of the band – no way! We just thought we were going to scare him. We were all using then. But he was using way above us. We came to him and said, we’re all fucking using and we have this sort of invisible line that we don’t cross and you’re well over it. Look who’s telling you that you’re too fucked up! It might seem funny from the outside, ‘what do you have to do to get kicked out of Guns N’ Roses?’ That’s the tag line. But when you get into it, this is serious. The reality show thing – I hate all that. I really do. I hate it all. It’s just my opinion. I can play guitar and I can write songs about whatever I want to. It’s my thing and if I fall because of it, that’s fine. It’s my music – fuck you! If you do a reality show – and I’m not talking about Sober House in particular – just to get on TV so you can sell t-shirts or whatever the hell you’re trying to do, especially if you’re a musician, it really cheapens anything you may have achieved.”