Guns n' Memoirs n' Me

I'm so glad Lara posted about poets behaving badly, because for the past week, I've wanted to post about the '80s rock band Guns n' Roses who were just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, sans original members Axl and Izzy, last Saturday night.

This has all been especially timely for me, as I took Guns n Roses' bass player Duff McKagan's 2011 biography/memoir, It's So Easy, to Arizona last month. This particular copy also happened to be one that I ordered for one of my libraries. The memoir was released not long after I met Duff McKagan at the 2011 Book Expo last May. At the Expo, I stood in his quickly forming book signing line, while pretending I wasn't standing in that line, all the while assuming that Duff would just quickly sign our promotional excepts assembly-line style, but no--Duff took the time to chat. He wanted to know what my work as a reference librarian entailed. I remember this experience as being so rattling I felt like I would pass out; on the surface, however, I remained calm and even tried to be funny. Then I made a super bold move and had his assistant take our photo with my little Android.

I finished Duff's memoir in about three days, but since it's not due back at the library 'til May, I'm keeping it around for awhile to revisit some scenes, like how the fledgling band rented a grimy storage shed for rehearsals in an alley behind the Hollywood Guitar Center, or about how the band hitchhiked from Bakersfield to Seattle to play an ill-fated gig in which Axl tried and failed to burn down the venue, and about Duff's descent into addiction, punctuated by his pancreas exploding. I've read many rock memoirs (Duff's bandmate Slash's, Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx's, the entire band Motley Crue's oral history, and heck--Iggy Pop's bio) and most seem to follow a similar paradigm of early family dysfunction, addiction, crisis stemming from addiction and at long last!--redemption and recovery. (Unless they end in death and then the genre is biography--except for Iggy who is very much alive.) Born the same year as me, Duff's trajectory is particularly compelling because much our respective lives corresponded: we got into the punk/hard core scene around the same time in peripheral cities: his Seattle to my Salt Lake, and we have similar memories of this time--but mine are all Mormonal: chastish and sober, which Duff's stories careen wildly in a lapsed Irish Catholic style. But Duff's story is unusual in that a big part of his recovery includes discovering a passion for academia, (which is where his life parallels mine again, I suppose). A high school drop-out, Duff enrolls in Santa Monica Community College as a 30-something and does well and then completes the courses required for acceptance into the highly selective Seattle University.

Duff rocking the Simon and Schuster booth

Along the way, he marries a supermodel; I marry a musician, and we separately have two daughters around the same time (just like that egghead Michelle Obama, alao born the same year as Duff and me).

Anyway, the above video is from Guns n' Roses' way recent Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Cleveland. The singer's a stand-in for Axl, but what's particularly heartening about this video is the appearance and performance of Guns' original drummer, Steven Adler, who had addiction problems so profound, he was kicked out of a band where four of the five original members had rehab-worthy addiction problems. I don't know if any of you witnessed Steven on the wretched Celebrity Rehab, but he was a mess, his situation seemingly hopeless. Yet in this video from last weekend, he looks triumphant, full of the childlike glee that Duff attributes to him in It's So Easy. This is especially evident at 3:41 and 5:27. I hope you watch, but you probably won't.

A word about Guns and Roses and me: I fell in love with this band the summer term of my last year at BYU. They had the raw, sloppy energy of punk rock and channeled blues like the Stones. Plus, they were pin-up cute and no one on campus looked remotely like them (which is a part of the reason I moved to San Francisco.) I still have the original vinyl of their first release Appetite for Destruction.  That last summer of college, I listened to it constantly, for at BYU, music was my only vice and this record made me feel like my life was a lot more interesting than it actually was (like the poetry of the infamous poets Lara listed on her blog post tonight).

After graduation, I moved to San Francisco and Guns opened for The Cult (whose first album I reviewed in the nascent Student Review) in a modest club down near Market Street. It was my first night in the big city, and I was too overwhelmed to attend. This was Guns nearing their apex: unhinged, hungry and on time. I will always regret not going.

Punx Win!

I have no idea where I'm going with this post tonight except that I do love the photo that opens it.  I spotted the graffiti in my neighborhood last Sunday afternoon, and had to take it home with me.  The phrase makes me happy on many levels.  It's fun to say--with your fist raised over your head, especially--and it has a solid, yet exhilarating retro feel.  It plays rights into my Gen X sensibilities.  After all, punx should win, and always do in my imagination.

After work, I met, for lunch, an old friend who works at Random House, where I love going, not only for my friend, but for the lobby.   I've posted a photo of their auspicious lobby below.  There is a matching bookcase on the other side of the lobby, and the books on the shelves are all RH books (BOOKS, you punx!) arranged chronologically by date of publication.  I did snap a first edition of Invisible Man before I left for the day.  Those books (plus the lighting) make the lobby seem like a temple.  The downside is is that the books are for display only:  museum pieces behind glass.  But still.  Punx win!

Didn't you find Lara's post so inspiring today?  After reading, I put lit candles on my dinner table, turned up the music.  Didn't you?  And while I wore no tights of note, I've been wanting to transcribe a beautiful tights' passage from Dana Spiotta's first novel, Lightning Field (Scribner 2001), which I read this past fall:  

"Mina bought cashmere tights, guaranteed to let you wear skirts through the most frigid days of winter. They were the most expensive hose in the store .  .  .  .  She had to admit the Viennese 70 denier strumpfhose in Pearled Cracked Cement, part of the Urban Disaster collection, tempted her, as well as the Semi-Sheer Velvet Finish Tights in Bruise and Blood Ultra Ultra Red . . . . But these couldn't match the feel--the promise, really--of the Cashmere Pure-Luxury, woven with the tiniest bit of nylon and Lycra (to make the cashmere cling and not bunch, barely detectable, a soft breath, a whisper on the skin).  When she spotted the last pair in medium, in the sort of oatmeal cream that would make her feel October and Ivy League, coed an coquettish, or at least like a sort of wrapped Xmas treat, all warm and inviting to the touch, she said, yes, knowing, in a sinking way, it was obscene" (78).  

Now do you see why tights are just as important as books.  The Punx in the audience will understand.