DUFF MCKAGAN Talks About Balancing Home Life And Being In Rock Band

Carol Anne Szel of Goldmine magazine recently conducted an interview with Duff McKagan (GUNS N' ROSES, VELVET REVOLVER, DUFF MCKAGAN'S LOADED). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Goldmine: How do you balance a normal home life and family in the often-hectic lifestyle in music?

Duff: Well, I've been through a lot of crap. And I met Susan [Holmes McKagan, Duff's wife], frankly, honestly, after I got sober. Not that I haven't had trials during our marriage, and I've had challenges. But we've been together now for a long time, and I know she's got my back. We have fun with it, you know, my family goes on the road, my little daughters have been all over the world. It's just the glass-half-full syndrome with us. It's like "OK. Check it out, we can go to Europe!" or if it's in America, we can go and bring our dogs. We do what we can do and make this work and make it a family vacation. It's great for the girls and their education, because they've seen the world. Many times. So they understand that we live in a world, not just the United States, and all that stuff's really good, I think. They understand that if I'm spitting onstage, they let me have that space. They know I need to release from another angle, they know that it's not personal, and all that kind of stuff.

Goldmine: I understand you are also releasing a feature film, "The Taking", this summer?

Duff: It's just one of those coffee ideas. A lot of times I'll have some amazing coffee ideas. Coffee ideas are when we're all sitting around drinking coffee or we're on the phone and drinking coffee and we'll solve all the world's ills and come up with some of the best ideas that, thank God, by 10 a.m., they've gone by. A lot of them are just insane ideas. But this film thing it was at the same point as we were listening to this record and we realized this thing sounds cinematic: "We gotta make a movie!" People love our sense of humor in our webisodes, so we'll make a real long webisode and it will be about Issac getting kidnapped and we have to raise money to get him back because we have a gig that night. So it's kind of a nod to "Hard Day's Night". Just a madcap journey through a day of us trying to raise ransom for Isaac, and it's all to the soundtrack of the record. We'll see how it comes out, there's some really, really great vignettes already. It's mostly done, I think.

Goldmine: So you get theatrical with all this?

Duff: I guess. It's not really theatrical. We had some fun and we had a great filmmaker who got our vision and we did the film for beg, borrow, and steal, so here we are.

Goldmine: Who is producing it?

Duff: Jamie Chamberlin. He worked on the series "Sex & the City" for five years, and he's a Seattle guy. He did a little indie movie. Billy Gibbons and Iggy Pop saw whatever it was and got a hold of this guy Jamie. He loves rock music. He did a ZZ TOP movie-like DVD and was with the band for two years. We're managed by the same people as ZZ, and came up with this idea for the movie. Our manager said, "You know, this guy Jamie Chamberlin lives in Seattle and he might be a guy to talk to." Jamie came down and loved the idea, and he's been the champion of this thing, really.

Read the entire interview from Goldmine magazine.