Appetite For Dysfunction

For Duff Mckagan, it started again with a single pill. Sober for more than a decade after beating a drugs and vodka habit so monstrous that his pancreas once burst, he was on his first major tour since the original Guns n' Roses left the road in 1993. Velvet Revolver's European shows in the summer of 2005 were an endless blur, and the band members were starting to drive one another crazy. Even McKagan and Slash, his friend of twenty years, were barely talking.

"I was so fucking stressed out with all this shit," says McKagan, 43."I couldn't go fucking talk to my guitar player like I used to." McKagan is sitting in his guesthouse, which is whimsically decorated with memorabilia from his Guns n' Roses career (platinum plaques, a G n' R pinball machine, a vintage Duff portrait painted by a Japanese fan), and pictures of his wife, Susan Holmes, a former swimsuit model. Outside, it's a sparkling L.A. morning in the upscale neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, where the couple and their two preteen daughters live on the former estate of Western star Tom Mix.

McKagan had suffered from a panic disorder for years, and he always carried a bottle of Xanax with him on the road, just in case. One day, he opened it. "'I'm going to just take one of these, it's going to chill me out,'" he remembers. "Next day: 'Oh, one doesn't feel like it did yesterday, I guess I'll take two.'" Before long, he was taking twentytwo milligrams a day of the sedative — more than three times the usual dose. He headed to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and then to a rehab facility. Kicking Xanax, it turns out, was harder than heroin. "I think I needed to go through that again," says McKagan. A martialarts devotee since getting sober, he is fearsomely fit — still framed by long blond hair, his face looks more like the Duff skull on the cover of Appetite for Destruction than it does the partiedout puffiness of Guns n' Roses' heyday. "I'd been sober for twelve and a half years at that point," he continues. "And I thought, 'I'm good.' I'm not good, I'm a fucking junkie, and I'm an alcoholic."