Former Guns N’ Roses bass player Duff McKagan has released a stream of the title track of his ‘How To Be A Man’ EP. The song, which is also the title of McKagan’s forthcoming book, features Izzy Stradlin, Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, and Stone Sour drummer Roy Mayorga. Both the book and EP are published on May 12.
“It’s certainly not an instructional, how-to book,” McKagan tells Rolling Stone. “It’s an observational study and hopefully there’s some humor in there. The ‘Other Illusions’ [subtitle] should be the headline.”
On working with Stradlin again, McKagan says, “His guitar playing is so fucking good. Not that it surprises me, but it’s like, ‘Oh dude, you’ve been playing a lot of fucking guitar. What are you doing out there?’ He’s got a little creative zone out where he lives, and I think he probably sinks himself into that.
“I write books, I write columns, I’m pretty public, and, of course you can write and still remain private, but he is really just off the grid. His comfort zone is off the grid. He doesn’t do any press, he doesn’t have a publicist, and he just puts out a record every couple of years on iTunes. He’s pretty pure.”
The book is a spin-off from McKagan’s column in the Seattle Weekly, and follows his first title It’s So Easy (And Other Lies), released in 2012.
McKagan can also be seen in an authorised documentary about The Damned, Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead. In March, he appeared onstage with another former Gunner, Slash, at a show in Buenos Aires.
