The rock ’n’ roll accountant

These days, Duff McKagan is more excited by spreadsheets than by sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, said Adam Sherwin in The Independent (U.K.). The Seattle-born musician spent 12 years in the 1980s and early 1990s playing bass with notoriously debauched rock band Guns N’ Roses. He snorted piles of cocaine and drank 10 bottles of red wine a day, and in 1994 ended up in the hospital with a burst pancreas. Doctors told him to give up drinking or die. Bored and in recovery, he decided to look over his Guns N’ Roses financial statements. “I wanted to learn to read these, but I didn’t trust anybody,” says McKagan, 48. “I just got a light bulb in my head and said, ‘I want to go to school.’” So he took business and accountancy classes, and today runs a fund-management company focused on financial advice for his guitar-slinging peers. McKagan’s big regret is that he wasn’t business-savvy in 1988, when Fox TV called him to say they planned to name a beer—Duff—after him in a new animated series. “I knew nothing about branding yourself or royalties. I just thought, ‘Cool, they wanna use my name,’ and boom, The Simpsons was born. Yeah, if I had a nickel for every time…but it’s fine.”

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