Guns N’ Roses toured in South America in 2014, and bassist Duff McKagan revealed in a new Classic Rock interview that he gave Axl Rose pills to avoid sickness or passing out due to the thin air. Jimmy Page called out Robert Plant for pulling an Axl Rose a few days ago.
Classic Rock asked, “In 2014, two years before you officially rejoined Guns N’ Roses, you played bass for the band on a South American tour, standing in for Tommy Stinson, who was doing reunion shows with his old band The Replacements. You told Classic Rock that you and Axl got really close again on that tour.”
McKagan responded, “Oh yeah. We had such a great time together. We played a show in La Paz, Bolivia, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. I’d done mountain climbing. I said: ‘Ax, man, the air is thin up there.’ Seriously, people pass out when they come off the plane. They have oxygen at the airport.
And we gotta play a rock show there, in a soccer stadium where they don’t have games any more because no other team will go and play because it’s not fair. So I was taking Diamox, mountain climber shit, and I gave some to Axl. We go through this journey together, and to watch him sing up there… man, it was an amazing experience.”
After performing as a guest intermittently with GNR, since 2010, Duff McKagan officially returned to the band in 2016 replacing Tommy Stinson, while Slash returned after DJ Ashba and Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal left.
