‘It’s So Easy And Other Lies’ Profiles Guns N’ Roses Bassist Duff McKagan

Rock n’ roll —real rock n’ roll— is a dirty business. You learn your skills in mildewed basements, move up to dive bars that smell of piss and beer and, if you’re lucky and make it, your worst qualities will be indulged. The music’s genuine rebel spirit all too often leads its practitioners down a perilous road of outlaw cliché’s and self-destruction. Coming out alive on the other end is the stuff of a million Behind The Music episodes and It’s So Easy & Other Lies, the somewhat confused but not altogether terrible documentary about Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan.

It’s So Easy & Other Lies is based on McKagan’s 2011 autobiography of the same name, and is currently available to stream on Netflix. The film vacillates between interviews, animated interludes and odd performance footage of Duff reading from the book while being musically accompanied by members of his various post-Guns outfits. While the formatting is clumsy and confounding, McKagan’s natural affability and genuinely interesting life make it a worthwhile way to spend an hour and half.

Duff McKagan has had a Zelig-like gift for being at the right place at the right time. He was born the youngest of eight children in a big, loving, working-class Irish family in Seattle, Washington. Like many kids of the 1970s, he grew up fast, smoking pot for the first time in 4th grade, drinking and dropping acid before he graduated grade school, and moving onto cocaine and car theft in junior high.
Fortunately his career as a carjacker was put on hold when at 15 he started playing in an endless succession of Seattle punk bands, including such underground legends as the Vains, The Fastbacks and The Fartz. Guns N’ Roses have always played up their punk rock bonafides, but in truth, McKagan was the band’s only legitimate link to the punk scene. A few years later, the scene he grew up in would mutate into grunge, but Duff was long gone by then, escaping “the heroin infested Pacific Northwest” to chase his rock n’ roll dreams in L.A.

With all the hype and histrionics over their breakups and reunions, it’s sometimes hard to remember just how fresh and vital Guns N’ Roses were when they first appeared. Much has been made about how grunge killed the hair metal bands, but it was really Guns N’ Roses who rendered men’s mascara irrelevant. Though they drank from the same well of ’70s hard rock influences as the hair bands, the GNR’s rougher, realer style made the glammers seem that much more fake (and they already seemed pretty goddamn fake to begin with). Guns N’ Roses looked cooler, played harder, wrote better songs and just rocked like a motherfucker.

This being rock n’ roll, you of course know what happens next; fame, fortune, woman, and drugs. Lots of drugs. And in Duff’s case, gallons of vodka. For McKagan, cocaine use enabled him to drink more. “Now I could drink until I finally had to sleep,” he says at one point, “and if you’re doing coke you don’t have to sleep for up to four days in my case.” He was also self-medicating for a pre-existing family anxiety disorder. In between whirlwind touring and recording sessions, he was suffering from crippling panic attacks, partially brought on by his alcohol and cocaine use, and then using vodka to take off the edge.

The riot that occurred at a Guns N’ Roses show in St. Louis, Missouri during the summer of 1991 is treated as a watershed moment in the band’s history, symbolic of the band’s fraying ends; however, they actually stuck it out for another couple years, and Duff didn’t officially quit until 1997. Still, Guns N’ Roses should have given the world at least four great albums. Instead we really only got one, their 1987 debut, Appetite For Destruction.

In 1994, a case of pancreatitis, exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse, almost cost McKagan his life and he decided to get sober. Kickboxing provided a mental and physical rehabilitation for his broken body and soul. Following his departure from GNR he moved back home to Seattle, eventually marring model Susan Holmes and raising two children. He even went back to school, studying business and economics at Seattle University and in many ways tried to live a “normal” life. But rock n’ roll came calling again.

In 2002, McKagan formed the super group Velvet Revolver with former GNR members Slash and Matt Sorum and Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland. Trading on their formidable pedigrees, the group had almost immediate success, and almost just as fast those old temptations would prove difficult to refuse. While other band members relapsed into drug and alcohol abuse, Duff developed a dependency on the prescription anti-anxiety drug Xanax.

With the help of friends and family, he was able to get sober once again and the film concludes on a high note of redemption and satisfaction for the bassist. It then somewhat awkwardly finishes up with Duff and friends performing a cover of Johnny Thunders’ junkie ballad “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” which then goes into an odd lumbering jam, ending with the final bridge of Guns N’ Roses “Patience.”
The clunky ending is emblematic of the film’s problem as a whole. It can’t make up its mind what it’s trying to do. Is it a straight documentary? Is it a concert movie? Is it a video profile? It’s kind of all and none at the same time.

Each new segment gets a text overlay, letting us know it’s another literal “chapter” from the book, before cutting to footage of Duff sitting at a stool, reading from a music stand, in front of an audience while his aging boho backing band plays acoustic instrumental treatments of famous GNR tunes behind him. It’s really corny as all hell. The short animated bits throughout, which are becoming an overused trick in music documentaries, also seem half-baked and not part of a coherent overall direction. Fortunately for the film, McKagan is genuinely likable; one of rock n’ roll’s true nice guys, and his story is interesting enough to keep your interest all the way to the end, making it easy to forgive the film’s various shortcomings.

[Watch It’s So Easy and Other Lies on Netflix]

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.