It's So Easy: And Other Lies (44 page)

I called Joseph about my plan. I didn’t want to just show up one day at his facility with a raging drug addict.

“Joseph,” I said, “I have a situation. I play music, I’m in a band, and the new singer wants to get clean.”

“Oh, you play in a band?” Joseph said.

“Yeah, we’re starting this new band.”

I filled him in on some of the background.

“Oh fuck, I didn’t know you were in Guns N’ Roses,” he said. He didn’t know who Stone Temple Pilots were, but it didn’t matter.

“I need to get this guy out of L.A.,” I said. “Is there a time I can bring him in so we can work out every day? I don’t want to spring some guy who’s jonesing on your dojo.”

“Tell you what,” Joseph said. “It does sound like you have a situation. I can help. Until you are ready to go back to L.A. and start with Benny.”

“Great,” I said.

“Listen,” said Joseph. “I live on top of a mountain. I live in a place where there’s no way out. If you guys stay at your place, he can get on a bus, go to an airport, and get out. Up here, there is no way out. Why don’t you just stay with me?”

Joseph had never faced the challenge of detoxing someone, but as soon as I had told him Scott had two kids, he wanted to do anything he could.

Dave Kushner was a big part of the plan, too. He actually had the most sober time of all of us and his calm, steady mind would help out immensely. He saw this as his band, too, and wanted to help Scott any way he could. Dave took me and Scott to a doctor in L.A. who specialized in helping addicts get off opiates. The doctor supplied us with detox drugs to take up to the mountain.

Honestly, this was probably the point when I first got a little cocky in my sobriety. Here I was with a backpack full of Buprenex, Soma, Xanax, and syringes, left totally in my care with a doctor’s note to get me through airport security. A year earlier, my life had been so damn normal and far removed from all of this kind of nonsense.

It’s okay. Just focus on the mission: to get Scott sober, productive, and reliable—and to help a friend be a father to his kids again.

Scott, Dave, and I flew from Burbank to Seattle and stayed the first night in my house there in the city. I got my first lesson on how to shoot up another person in the thick of their ass muscle that first night. Sexy. Scott was a trouper. He was in the throes of a brutal jones but did not waver in his determination. Before we left the next morning, I took him through a meditation that Sensei Benny had taken me through many times before. It felt good to be able to pass on to someone else something that had helped me so much, and it allayed—rightly or wrongly—some of the doubts I harbored about my ability to play the role of teacher.

During the car ride out to the mountains, Dave and I listened to music and talked and joked while Scott slept in a drug stupor in the backseat. We met Sefu Joseph in a Safeway parking lot about twenty miles from his mountaintop retreat. In Safeway, we bought healthy food, razors, soap, and little else. This was not going to be a pleasure cruise and the bare essentials would suffice.

Sefu Joseph may have been a little surprised at first about Scott’s state, but he did not show it. Tailing Joseph and his girlfriend Addy and their big black Lab named Blue, we drove toward what would serve as our home for the next month. I had no idea what to expect. I had been to Joseph’s dojo many times, but never to his house. The steep road wound through switchback after switchback and just kept going up. A beautiful lake appeared and then receded, smaller and smaller as we climbed even higher. Then we turned off the main road and onto a dirt road that burrowed farther into the wilderness.

The brake lights on Joseph’s pickup indicated we had finally arrived. I was stunned by the scenery. The setting was like a hidden Chinese monastery in an old kung fu movie—there were meditation pagodas, wooden dummies, fighting platforms, and a covered area with heavy bags. A man-made waterfall disappeared into a well-kept Zen garden. Beyond that was a tree-lined path. And to top it all off, there was an impressive wrap-around view of the surrounding Cascade Mountains and Lake Chelan far below. I suddenly had high hopes—and not just for Scott. I was here to learn and grow as well. If there was one thing that the ardent study of martial arts had taught me, it was to continue to try to learn and grow until the day you died: never get set in your ways.

As we climbed out of the car, I noticed stairs ascending a huge grassy mound. There, at the back of a deck, a glass door was set into the mound. The house appeared to be underground. My jaw dropped. Scott must have been shitting his pants at this point. When Joseph had first tossed out the idea of us staying with him, he had mentioned something about his home being an “earth berm” house, but having no idea what that meant, I hadn’t given it a second thought. Now, as we climbed the stairs to the deck in front of the mound, that conversation came back to me. From the outside, his place looked way too small for five adults and a large dog, and I thought I had made a mistake committing sight unseen to stay here. When we entered the house, though, I could see I was completely wrong about the size. It was amazing inside. Flat-screen TV, fireplace, phone, full kitchen, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms.

As we unpacked the groceries, I made a mental checklist of the meals that would hopefully help to cleanse Scott’s drug-ravaged bloodstream of its nasty toxins. Fresh fish and free-range chicken. Lots of green vegetables and corn on the cob. Irish steel-cut oatmeal. Pineapples, bananas, melons, and apples. Tons of espresso roast coffee. And my trade secret, baked beans. I’m not really sure whether beans have any cleansing properties, but they sure do get out a lot of hot air.

I put Scott on the diet that had done me so well during my first year of sobriety: fruit for breakfast, grilled fish over greens for lunch, and barbecued chicken with corn and beans for dinner. I added oatmeal to Scott’s diet because I supposed with all the exercise we’d be doing, he could use the extra carbs. He did not have fifty pounds of booze weight to lose—he was a rail. The larder was filled to the brim and there was nothing left to do now except what lay directly in front of us: getting Scott detoxed and keeping his body too exhausted and confused to do anything more than sleep.

At this point, I should have taken a step back and assessed the situation. Never before had I felt I had so many people depending on me. I was now juggling being a good father and husband with trying to get a guy sober so that he could do the same. But I was also doing this because I saw real possibilities for this new band with Scott as our singer. Other people recognized the potential there, too, and I was fielding phone call after phone call saying I had to make this happen.
The Hulk
had come out, and even though the movie did only so-so, it seemed like every rock radio station in America had picked up “Set Me Free.” With the national exposure there was a lot of interest in Velvet Revolver. Of course, everything hinged on the band actually existing. For the first time ever, I was mixing the spiritual healing of martial arts with commerce.

Seeing Scott nodding and jonesing up there reminded me of some not-so-pleasant memories. In hindsight I see this was the moment I swerved away from the path I’d been on, a path that shielded me from the dark parts of my past. Each of us makes a handful of decisions in life that can have a drastic impact on subsequent events. By getting involved with Scott, I had made one of those potentially life-altering decisions. We did start to have some fun up there after about a week, though. Scott had gotten through the worst of his withdrawal by that point and could start to do some of the physical stuff.

A typical day up there:

Breakfast

Meditate outdoors

Jump rope

Stretch

Work the punching bags

Train on technique

Lunch

Run and lift weights

Work on the wooden dummies

Practice tai chi

Write

Dinner

Talk with Sefu Joseph and write more

Read

Bed

This rigid regime we dubbed “Man Camp.” The idea was not only to test physical strength and endurance, but, through the talks and writing, to foster honesty and responsibility. Once in a while Sefu Joseph brought in someone from the community to pitch in. We went mountain biking with friends of his. We went fishing with other friends. A local SWAT guy even came up with an arsenal of guns and taught us how to clean, load, hold, aim, and shoot everything from riot shotguns to large-caliber handguns. It seemed as though the whole town was pitching in and pulling for us to succeed.

After about two weeks of this, Susan and the girls came up to our cabin, which was about forty miles away from Joseph’s mountain redoubt. It was Susan’s birthday and I was more than happy to see them all. During the six years I had been with Susan, we lived in a safe bubble that we controlled. We now found ourselves in uncharted territory. Susan had my back and even felt some responsibility—after all, she was the one who had introduced me to Scott. Yet she and I had never had a conversation about the possible consequences of working with him. Suddenly her man was gone and she had to take care of our kids on her own—and shit, this was even before recording and touring started.

I continued to get daily calls from L.A.

“Do we have a singer?”

“Should we book studio time?”

I started to see glimpses of hope with Scott up on top of that mountain. Scott became so enamored of the area that he asked Joseph if he knew any local real-estate brokers. This from a guy who just weeks earlier was on a drug run for the ages. Crack houses in L.A. now seemed the last thing on his mind. Looking back, we made progress fast.

Slash and Matt were relieved to hear Scott was getting better, but I’m sure they were also still suspicious. I couldn’t blame them. But when we arrived back in L.A., they saw with their own eyes the results of our Man Camp. Here we were at the rehearsal space with an ass-kicking mountain man, practicing martial arts and meditating before band practices. Scott seemed inspired and focused now. He started to listen to more of the music that Slash, Matt, Dave, and I had written over the past year. We would sort of spoon-feed him two or three songs at a time; to throw everything at him at once would have been overwhelming given the fact that we had something like fifty-five songs by this point.

With the band lineup finally solidified and “Set Me Free” still on the radio, every major record label now wanted a piece of us. One of the people who wanted to schedule a meeting with us was the same executive who had dropped me from Geffen without so much as a phone call back in 1999. He was president of another company now and apparently didn’t remember the incident. But I did. I told the guys the story. At first, they said we should just cancel the meeting. Then they decided it would be more fun to have him in and fuck with him. He arrived at our rehearsal space and went through his routine, using all the standard industry buzzwords:
artistic freedom, artist-focused, personal touch, like a family,
blah, blah, blah. Then Scott asked him to talk more about the way he would personally take an interest in the project. Scott listened thoughtfully and then started talking—seemingly off-the-cuff—about a friend who had been dropped one time without a call from the label.

“Look, we know the industry is changing,” Scott said, “but we don’t want to work with people like that.”

The guy took the bait: “No way, I treat my artists like family. That would never happen with me.”

Then Scott dropped the bomb: “That friend was this guy here,” he said, pointing to me, “and you’re the asshole who didn’t have the decency to make the courtesy call. Get the fuck out of here.”

We also flew to New York to meet the legendary Clive Davis. He had helped develop everyone from Janis Joplin to Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé. When Clive Davis said he believed in our band, I was sold. Even guys like us, who had been through it all in this industry, respected Clive. After that, the process was just an exercise as far as I was concerned. I knew we would go with Clive from the very beginning of that summer. Done deal.

Another interesting aspect of these meetings was that I found I did in fact understand the lion’s share of what was going on financially with the band. I also learned that word had gotten around about my studies. People took me more seriously in business meetings. Cool shit. Sometimes I looked into the eyes of industry types and saw a flash of panic:
Shit, I wonder if Duff knows more than I do.

I also started to get requests to make media appearances as an expert on the business of music. It was nice to be thought of as an intellectual equal at least. After I did interviews on PBS’s
Frontline
and in the
Wall Street Journal,
I started to get calls from other artists with questions on how to manage their personal wealth and anticipated earnings. I had been in the exact place these people were in: I hadn’t known a damn thing about money, I’d been scared of who might be trying to rip me off. After getting at least a dozen different calls from peers about their dough, I started to think about perhaps one day starting a financial consulting firm of my own.

But that could wait. My new band was on a roll.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN