By Aaron Small
"You always want what you don't have," explains Duff. "I wouldn't have been able to go to college back then anyway because our family was too big. Every kid couldn't go to college. Financially it was not possible. My dad was a fireman and my parents got divorced when I was a little kid. It was no big deal. It just wasn't an option. I've always read, even when I was really f**ked up, trying to expand my knowledge. Guns N' Roses, financially, did a lot. Throughout the course of all that, it's either learn about it or get ripped off. In the course of learning about it, I actually started to like that side of things. A lot of people think that's really boring but to me it 's kind of like a crossword puzzle, I like it."
Do the other students harass Duff because of his past in Guns N' Roses? "Not during class. They're real cool. It's a close knit little school. People are totally conscious of me being there but they're also totally conscious of it being their school and school is really hard. Everybody's in it together; the professors just throw it at you and you have to keep up. Nobody's got time for that shit. We have a school email system, and at night I'll check my email and some chick will say, 'hey can I get an autograph? It' s my boyfriend's birthday.' That's cool."
Returning to the topic of music, Duff's first solo album, Believe In Me was released in 1993 on Geffen. He recorded a second solo album that currently sits collecting dust in a warehouse. Duff relays the not so happy story of why he opted to form a new band rather than continue to release music as a solo artist.
