Personal Life
On May 28, 1988, McKagan married his first wife, Mandy Brixx; the couple divorced less than two years later on April 1, 1990. He remarried in September 1992 to Linda Johnson, but this marriage too ended in divorce in September 1995. McKagan married his current wife, model and swimsuit designer Susan Holmes, on August 28, 1999. They have two daughters together, Grace (born August 27, 1997) and Mae Marie (born July 16, 2000). McKagan and his family reside in his hometown of Seattle, Washington.
McKagan was one of the last people confirmed to see Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain before he died on April 5, 1994. He sat next to Cobain on a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle on April 1. McKagan later recalled, "I didn't have any foresight that the guy was going to do what he did. I could tell he was bummed out, and I'd been that way before....I thought I'd ask him to come stay at my house, I turned around and he was gone."
On May 10, 1994, at the age of 30, McKagan became gravely ill due to acute alcohol-induced pancreatitis, which caused his pancreas to swell to the size of a football and leak digestive enzymes into his body, causing third-degree burns. He was taken to Northwest Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle, where he was monitored until the swelling went down. He was told by his doctors that he would be dead within a month if he did not stop drinking. Although McKagan had made previous attempts to curb his alcoholism, this health crisis was his incentive to become sober for good.
A high school drop-out, McKagan enrolled in a basic finance course at Santa Monica Community College in 1994; he explained that going over the financial records from his Guns N' Roses days had made him want to understand the process more, stating, "I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't know how much we had made or lost on the tour. As a 30 year-old millionaire, how do I admit to somebody that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing?" In 2000, after attending several more classes at Seattle Central Community College, he enrolled full-time at Seattle University's Albers School of Business and Economics. When Velvet Revolver took off in his final year as an undergraduate student, McKagan took a hiatus from business school to go on tour; he is still one semester short of graduating.
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