Duff McKagan's Loaded

[Seshmeister]

Apparently without ever hearing his solo stuff I'm on the guest list to his show tonight.

Anyone seen him? Worth a look?

[clarathecarrot]

They were great live 3 years ago, real good.

and I paid to see them.

[jero]

Yep, seen em once as support act of Crue in Cologne! okay, but nothing more than that.

The beers were great though

[Nitro Express]

Duff McKagan sounds like the name of a Irish whiskey or beer. Aye bartender, I want another jigger of Duff McKagan.

[Satan]

Duff's first band was called "The Fartz". He's playing drums here, but he eventually switched to guitar.....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQpsPdZTu3g

[binnie]

Good live band with frankly average songs. If Duff handed over vocal duties he'd be doing that band a big favour, but they're a lot of fun.

[Seshmeister]

Good live band with frankly average songs. If Duff handed over vocal duties he'd be doing that band a big favour, but they're a lot of fun.

They were ok.

It seems almost a bit churlish to criticize someone with tens of millions of album sales playing in a bar but I will anyway.

I left early which was maybe a bit unfair. They were trying but I have a theory on this. First up Duff as a singer would be fine for a bar band. Duff would be fine as a guitarist in a bar band. Not great ticket sales had moved them to the bar of the venue so maybe 250 people at most. Which is a good turnout on a Tuesday for a bar band. Apart from Duff being famous I found it difficult to see any difference from a bar band.

My theory is this and I think anyone who has been in a band will recognise it.

Say I ask you to join my band and I have sold 30 million albums and you have never sold anything. How difficult is it for you to say that melody doesn't work or that song is average? This is the huge problem. There are occasional people that can do this like say Prince but I can't and neither can Duff. The guitar riffs were reduced to the lowest common demoninator which is Duff.

There have been examples of bass players making great contributions to writing by adding a ton of rhythm that you may not usually get like in Love/Hate or Rush which are two of my fave bands.

Didn't happen here.

Good luck to him I don't want to be critical, what else is he going to do at this point but I'm sorry I felt the people that had paid £18 had made a mistake. I missed the support bands though.

[FORD]

It's really too bad Neurotic Outsiders didn't stick around. They had the misfortune of releasing their one and only album the same year that the Sex Pistols got back together (the first time) so with Steve Jones unavailable they couldn't really tour the record, and this was right about the time that MTV stopped playing music, so even though they had a couple videos out, not many people saw them. And about the time Steve Jones was available again, John Taylor decided he would give Duran Duran another shot, with that band's actual lineup reforming.

Of course that didn't last long, and the Pistols never produced new material either, so arguably both would have been better off staying with Neurotic Outsiders. Duff, for his part, put out his solo albums, did the Vomit Retriever thing, played some reunion shows in Seattle with The Fartz and their spin-off band 10 Minute Warning (I think an album was even made with the latter, though I've never actually seen or heard it) and even played a show somewhere with AxHole's Scabs N Posers. So you can't say the guy isn't keeping busy, at least......

This has to be the best Guns N Roses song that was NOT on a GnR album...... (Duff on vocals, naturally)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czj9cUEtKfc

[Seshmeister]

His bass playing in Guns N Roses was perfect. Really great. That set of skills whereby you are a really fucking tasteful solid bass player who wrote almost nothing is not going to suddenly make you a singer guitarist front man guy.

That's fucking rare.

Like winning the lottery twice except as I said guys that won once are actually less likely to do it second time.

Dave Grohl did it, I can't think of another one.

[FORD]

Well, like Grohl, Duff started out as a drummer in The Fartz, and had switched to rhythm guitar by the time the band had morphed into 10 Minute Warning. Don't know exactly when he decided to be a bass player, but I'd guess it probably was because he moved to LA where every guitarist was trying to be the next Eddie Van Halen, and his punk rock guitarist background couldn't really compete in that setting. For some reason though, a lot of the better bass players are actually "former" guitarists who switched because there were either too many guitarists in the band already, or the other guy who wanted the job was better (i.e. Geezer Butler in Sabbath, John Entwistle in The Who, Ronnie Wood in the Jeff Beck Group, etc.) And with GNR you had a bass player who had been both a drummer and a rhythm guitarist, so he was able to work with Izzy and Adler (before he was too smacked up) or Sorum to build a fucking hell of a foundation. And did something similar in Neurotic Outsiders with Sorum and John Taylor.

[sadaist]

Crue in Cologne!


Motherfuck!


/jealous

[binnie]

They were ok.

It seems almost a bit churlish to criticize someone with tens of millions of album sales playing in a bar but I will anyway.

I left early which was maybe a bit unfair. They were trying but I have a theory on this. First up Duff as a singer would be fine for a bar band. Duff would be fine as a guitarist in a bar band. Not great ticket sales had moved them to the bar of the venue so maybe 250 people at most. Which is a good turnout on a Tuesday for a bar band. Apart from Duff being famous I found it difficult to see any difference from a bar band.

My theory is this and I think anyone who has been in a band will recognise it.

Say I ask you to join my band and I have sold 30 million albums and you have never sold anything. How difficult is it for you to say that melody doesn't work or that song is average? This is the huge problem. There are occasional people that can do this like say Prince but I can't and neither can Duff. The guitar riffs were reduced to the lowest common demoninator which is Duff.

There have been examples of bass players making great contributions to writing by adding a ton of rhythm that you may not usually get like in Love/Hate or Rush which are two of my fave bands.

Didn't happen here.

Good luck to him I don't want to be critical, what else is he going to do at this point but I'm sorry I felt the people that had paid £18 had made a mistake. I missed the support bands though.

You're probably right, but I think you're over-analyzing.

Duff's just having fun - as long as he breaks even I doubt he cares about how big Loaded get and whether they make a contribution to the evolution of rock 'n' rolll.