Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan was interviewed by pro wrestling icon and AEW wrestler Chris Jericho on his podcast, Talk is Jericho. Here, McKagan reacted to the Fozzy frontman explaining why Axl Rose didn’t fire the ‘Chinese Democracy’ era replacement members and stick to their original “core five” for the Not In This Lifetime tour. Alternative Nation transcribed McKagan and Jericho’s comments.
Jericho: I was thinking about this before, like when you guys first started with Guns N’ Roses because you go from a five piece and now it’s a seven or eight piece. It’s almost like The [Rolling] Stones where it’s Duff [McKagan], Axl [Rose], Slash and you got five or six other players, four other players?
Duff: Four other players, yeah.
Jericho: Because I was always thinking and people always thought: “well why isn’t it the original five”, this, that and the other thing. Yet, Axl has been playing with those guys for about ten years, some of them. Axl isn’t going to ditch all of his guys.
Duff: Right.
Jericho: I didn’t think that was ever anything that was going to be possible. Was it cool to melding the two bands together?
Duff: Oh yeah, I didn’t really look at it like that. Drummer Frank [Ferrer] I had played with and Richard [Fortus], they are great players and they are fellas. You know, I don’t if you were on the tour when they were in the Dead Daisies.
Jericho: Yeah! The KISS Cruise we played with them, Richard was on it.
Duff: Okay, I did the Monster Uproar Tour with Loaded and the Dead Daisies were on that. The guys in Loaded are like the guys in Fozzy. Guys you like to hang out with – so it didn’t seem like melding a band together. Frank is a great drummer and Richard is ridiculous. Great player, great rhythm guitar player, so it was like, okay cool. Dizzy [Reed] has been there since Use Your Illusion and adding Melissa [Reese] in, she is wonderful in so many different aspects. Her backup vocals especially. I sing a lot and her and I sing together. So that’s a whole another trip, her discipline, singing backups to Axl. A lot of falsetto.
Jericho: You sang a lot too, I was watching, on that tour.
Duff: A lot of backup vocals so her and I were working on all of that stuff, so she’s kind of invaluable when it comes to that. All the stuff she does – God knows all the stuff she does over there.
Jericho: A multi-instumentalist you would say.
Duff: Right.
