Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagan revealed during a live Grammy conversation that his new solo song “Feeling” was inspired by his late bandmate Scott Weiland, who died in December 2015 from a drug overdose. McKagan also described trying to save Weiland.
“When I met Shooter [Jennings], I had these chords, and I all I had was ‘Feel. When the lights go down, you are still here. All you hoped here remains.’ It was coming from Scott Weiland, who I worked with and really tried to help a few times — intensely, one time; like, going to the Cascade Mountains for a month, intensely — and saw that it just took him over…
“[GN’R] were on the road, and if anybody has their ‘thing,’ my thing is Prince. He’s this magical entity to me. Everybody has that record that ‘saved your life,’ and ‘1999’ gave me the impetus to get out of a heroin-infested Seattle in 1983 and move to L.A. I was in Mexico City — we were playing — and Axl [Rose] texted me, ‘I’m really sorry. Turn on the news.’ Because they know, like, my lifelong [fandom]. I actually cried…
“Then Chris [Cornell]. Susan [Holmes McKagan, Duff’s wife] and Susan Silver [Cornell’s first wife] were pregnant at the same time. They had [their daughters] two weeks apart, and we hung out with them and our babies. That’s just real-life shit, and then Chris going… the fucking weird thing about that is, that night, about 8 o’clock at night, Axl came into rehearsal and said, ‘Let’s do ‘Black Hole Sun’. Let’s try that song.’ We rehearsed until 12:30 that night. I got home, and [GN’R guitarist] Richard Fortus texted me — ‘Chris is dead.’
“And then Chester [Bennington], who’s a friend of ours, and we’re friends with his family. These are just my friends… I don’t name them in the song, and I gathered up the energy of those four — of the loss, the sense of loss — and it’s just a song of… there is a little hope, like, we’re going to remember you, and you’re still here – these four in particular, and so many more before that. It’s been tragic, but the celebration is, I get to work with Shooter now, and do something really fucking bad-ass and cool. I celebrate every fucking day.”
