During a recent conversation on ‘The Triple R Podcast,’ Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan talked about ongoing coronavirus outbreak and shared his concern about this deadly disease.
Duff has revealed how he’s coping with the situation. He said that he and his family take this virus seriously, and they follow the important rules of social distancing and isolation.
He also said that the authorities must be given the necessary help to people who were economically affected and lost their jobs due to this coronavirus.
Here’s what Duff McKagan stated:
“We’re looking at it very seriously. I have two kids and a wife. We live in Seattle, so that was the first hotspot [in the U.S.]. We were down here [in LA] as a family.
I was rehearsing with Guns, ready to go out and do a South American tour, into Europe, into America.
So, as the virus hit, we stayed in place in LA. [My daughter] Mae had come home from college, from New York, on March 11, and that’s kind of the day and days that things started really getting serious.”
He added:
“I don’t know what the outcome of this is gonna be in jobs. My most important thing right now is keeping the people that work for me employed. We have 80+ people on our crew that we’re terrified about right now.
“We have to figure out what we’re gonna do and keep them from losing their house or something like that. The only thing I can do is keep the people that work for me employed. I’m able to do that.
“I think it’s a responsibility. I think it’s patriotic – whether they’re working or not.
“We have truck drivers. And we have hotels that we’ve booked, we have all the people that work in those hotels, the people who are working in parking lots and concessions, and everybody works for us, which is a big traveling group.
“We have riggers and carpenters and lighting people. And then, of course, the backline, people at the monitor, the sound people. And it adds up. Every time we go into a city, people come from outside the city and get their hotels to come stay and see us play and buy food at restaurants and all that kind of stuff.
“So we bring small economies to these cities we go to, and everybody’s gonna feel it, of course.
“So, yeah, we feel a responsibility to get back out there. Of course, we can’t until it’s safe. So we sit here. We talk about it. We try to keep abreast of everything that’s going on daily.”
He continued:
“It’s an exponential thing, and people who maybe invest money and know [about] compounding of interest – if you get eight percent on your money compared to seven percent on your money, how much is more money you can have over 20 years? This is compounding.
This is an exponential thing that happens when people don’t stay home. I’m not blaming it on all the people that aren’t staying home, but it’s really f*cking important to stay at home. Don’t go out.”