Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan has long maintained that Duff Beer from The Simpsons was named after him. However, one of the show’s producers and writers has now claimed the showrunners didn’t even know who he was when they dubbed the fictional beer brand years ago.
The Simpsons first aired in late 1989, aligning with Guns N’ Roses rise to fame with 1987’s Appetite for Destruction. So, the timing would have been right for McKagan’s name to have inspired Homer’s cheap beer of choice. The bassist originally claimed he was contacted about the use of his name in his 2011 autobiography, It’s So Easy: and Other Lies.
“When Guns N’ Roses began to break into the public consciousness, I was known as a big drinker,” he wrote. “In 1988, MTV aired a concert in which Axl introduced me — as usual — as Duff ‘The King of Beers’ McKagan. Soon after a production company working on a new animated series called me to ask if they could use the name ‘Duff’ for a brand of beer in the show.”
McKagan’s claim has since been refuted by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and former showrunner Mike Reiss further denied it in his book Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons.
“We needed a name for Homer’s favorite beer, and (writer) Jay Kogen came up with Duff,” Reiss noted. “No, it was not named after Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns N’ Roses; we’d never heard of this guy. Have you?”
But McKagan recently doubled down, telling Stereogum that he distinctly remembers being approached about his name being used for a beer in a cartoon in the late ’80s.
“Our management, I remember they called me and said some arthouse-like cartoon wants to use your name as the beer, like a college arthouse cartoon … I didn’t know about branding or anything like that, but that show took off,” Duff said. “And then they started selling merch and stuff. I never went after him, but I’m like, ‘Hey, motherfuckers,’ you know?”
He added, “So I think it’s very probably business savvy of them to say that’s not true. But if you just do your own math behind it, look at when they started off with the King of Beers, and I had my King of Beers belt I wore all the time.”
Despite Duff’s insistence, The Simpsons‘ camp is still standing its ground on the matter. The aforementioned writer who apparently conceived the name, Jay Kogen, told TMZ this week that McKagan is plain wrong and the writers had no clue who he was at the time.
“We named it Duff because it’s a synonym for butt, tushy, booty, and so on,” Kogen said, adding that they were only familiar with one member of GN’R — Axl Rose — and that there was no deep reasoning behind the nomenclature.
McKagan doesn’t seem concerned with seriously pursuing any naming rights disputes, even if he stands by his original claim. The veteran bassist and singer-songwriter is currently set to embark on a solo tour this fall in support of his recent solo album Lighthouse (get tickets here).
