It's So Easy

and other lies

Duff McKagan

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781451606645
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451606652
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

In his New York Times bestseller, Duff McKagan, founding member of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, shares the story of his rise to fame and fortune, his struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, his personal crash and burn, and his life-saving transformation via a unique path to sobriety.

In 1984, at the age of twenty, Duff McKagan left his native Seattle—partly to pursue music but mainly to get away from a host of heroin overdoses then decimating his closest group of friends in the local punk scene. In LA only a few weeks and still living in his car, he answered a want ad for a bass player placed by someone who identified himself only as “Slash.” Soon after, the most dangerous band in the world was born. Guns N’ Roses went on to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide.

In It’s So Easy, Duff recounts Guns’ unlikely trajectory to a string of multiplatinum albums, sold-out stadium concerts, and global acclaim. But that kind of glory can take its toll, and it did—ultimately—on Duff, as well as on the band itself. As Guns began to splinter, Duff felt that he himself was done, too. But his near death as a direct result of alcoholism proved to be his watershed, the turning point that sent him on a unique path to sobriety and the unexpected choices he has made for himself since.

In a voice that is as honest as it is indelibly his own, Duff—one of rock’s smartest and most articulate personalities—takes readers on a harrowing journey through the dark heart of one of the most notorious bands in rock-and-roll history and out the other side.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Back Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part One: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
• Part Two: Just An Urchin Living Under the Street
• Part Three: Loaded
• Part Four: I’d Look Right Up At Night And All I’d See Was Darkness
• Part Five: A Good Day to Die
• Part Six: You Shined A Light Where It Was Dark, On My Wasted Heart
• Part Seven: Fall to Pieces
• Part Eight: You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Photographs
• Copyright