Forty years and two months ago, Duff McKagan first arrived in Los Angeles as a fresh-faced punk rocker with ambitions of taking over the world. The city, a few months removed from hosting the 1984 Summer Olympics, was losing some of the shine from the Games. McKagan remembers Hollywood then as being a maelstrom of crime and drugs, with helicopters patrolling the area, gang wars and the crack epidemic.
He was even mugged while walking to work. “It seemed like the Wild West, and not in a good way,” he recalls. After a few weeks of sleeping in his car, McKagan moved into the Amor building on Orchid Street in Hollywood, behind what’s now Ovation Hollywood, and began a musical journey that saw him and his bandmates in Guns N’ Roses become one of the most recognized bands of all time, accumulating accolades, selling out stadiums and earning induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The band’s 1987 debut, “Appetite for Destruction,” remains an album inextricably linked with Los Angeles. As the Guns N’ Roses bassist says, the songs that comprise that album were rooted in the reality of 1980s Hollywood. “It’s all there on ‘Appetite,’” McKagan says.
“Those are true stories. That was Hollywood, and in L.A.
We’re in the home-invasion phase of Los Angeles crime. It’s not so much with drive-bys anymore.” In between, McKagan moved to several apartments, including one in Miracle Mile near the El Rey Theater, where he’s performing Wednesday on his Ligh.
