It's So Easy: And Other Lies by Duff McKagan

Friendship from strangers couldn’t have come at a better time.
    I tried Donner’s number from a pay phone at the gas station and he actually answered.
    “Dude, here’s the deal. We broke down in Bakersfield and we’ve been hitchhiking for a day and a half. We’re in Medford now and some girls are going to drive us as far as Portland. We’ll be there early this afternoon.”
    Donner grew pot. He had grow operations going in a couple of unused buildings. He always had dough. And he had already met some of the other members of the band—Donner had visited me in L.A.
    I asked him, “Can you help us out somehow?”
    So we started talking: Could he arrange bus tickets maybe? Then he blurted out, “Fuck that, I’ll pick you up. We’re going to have a party at my house tonight, we’ll have a feast, there’ll be girls, it’s going to be a Seattle welcome.”
    We made it to Portland on Monday afternoon, and Donner was there. By the time we arrived in Seattle, it seemed everyone I knew had apparently heard of our trials. They welcomed us with open arms, open liquor bottles, and open drug stashes. People in Seattle knew me as a drinker—they knew that as a result of my panic attacks I was not into drugs back then. For this reason, I guess, nobody offered anything hard. I think Izzy was a bit disappointed by this, and by then perhaps a tad sick from withdrawal.
    Donner had, however, baked a batch of pot brownies. I think they were intended for people who would be coming over to the party later that night—people familiar with the potency of local weed.
    Izzy just needed to catch a buzz off something, and I guess he thought pot brownies would be a lightweight short-term fix. Axl followed suit so Izzy wouldn’t be alone.
    “This shit is strong,” Donner warned them. They ignored him.
    In the 1980s, Seattle led the nation in the fine art of hydroponic pot growing. I’m not sure why the city excelled at it so, but the weed up there was getting potent. Really potent. Around 1982, a new strain of weed was developed for the basement water growers—the luckiest and most deep-pocketed started to cultivate what would be known as “a-strain” and later as “chronic.” Up in the Northwest, we knew the strength of this shit, and also knew it was nothing to trifle with. It was like a mix between a strong muscle relaxer and LSD. Until you knew what was right for you, the best thing to do was to take just the tiniest puff and see where that got you; you had to build up a sort of tolerance.
    Next thing I knew, Axl and Izzy went and curled up on Donner’s couch with wide, scared eyes. I went over to make sure they were all right.
    “What the fuck did they put in these brownies?” Izzy asked me.
    Nothing, I assured them, it was just very strong weed.
    “No way, man,” he said. “I think there’s acid in here.”
    They were completely paranoid. I told them not to worry. I felt horrible. I was hyper-sensitive to what my new bandmates were experiencing that first day in Seattle. They were a curiosity to my friends, that’s for sure. But we were all dead tired and hungry and I wanted to make sure that Axl, Izzy, Slash, and Steven were well taken care of. I was proud of my city and my friends and wanted to cast them in the best light. It took Izzy and Axl hours and hours and a lot of beers to come down off of their first a-strain high. Fortunately, by the time the party started to get into full swing, they were returning to earth. But to this day, I am sure, they still think they were dosed with something.
    Donner threw a barn burner that night: barbecue, beer, girls. Life was suddenly, really, really good.
    Danny, Joe-Joe, and our gear still hadn’t arrived when we played the show on Wednesday night at Gorilla Garden. We were sloppy on borrowed gear, though on the plus side only about a dozen people were subjected to our set. Kurt Bloch of the Fastbacks is always nice, and made a point of telling all the guys we had played