Guns N Roses Music Tour Dates: Hedgefinger: Duff McKagan: From .

According to Fortune, in 1994, Duff McKagan's pancreas exploded.The old Guns N' Roses bass player says years of dot and alcohol abuse caused the rupture, which left him sidelined for months. As he recovered from the incident at home and sobered up, he found himself with hours of free time and little to do.

McKagan wandered into his basement one day and came across a file cabinet containing GnR's financials from the old six years.

While thumbing through the reports, he realized he had no thought what they meant. Then, he panicked.

"I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't know how much we had made or lost on the tour," McKagan recalls. "As a 30 year-old millionaire, how do I have to somebody that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing?"

Now, 17 years later, McKagan is starting his own wealth management firm for musicians. The company, called Meridian Rock, will be headed by McKagan and Andy Bottomsley, a British investor. Their end is to educate rockers about their finances instead of pandering or lying to them - no small movement in the music world, where businessmen, a.k.a. "suits," are often seen as the enemy.

McKagan, 47, says his epiphany in 1994 was a wakeup call. He enrolled in a basic finance course at Santa Monica Community College, which he says gave him a lust for academia. McKagan moved to Seattle four years later and signed up for more classes at a local community college.

"It took me twice as long as an 18- or 19-year old just out of high school to do the homework, but I got through it," he says. By the time he was accepted into in Seattle University's Albers School of Business, McKagan had become actively involved in managing his portfolio, which included everything from stocks and mutual funds to property.

A few months into his final form of business school, McKagan, who had left Guns N' Roses in the late 90's, formed a new rock supergroup, called Velvet Revolver. The band - which also included GnR's Slash and Scott Weiland, the singer from the Stone Temple Pilots - was a surprise hit. Velvet Revolver's album debuted at No. 1, and McKagan took a suspension from business school to go on tour (he is still one semester short of graduating). When Velvet Revolver broke up a few years later, he played a short stint with the band Jane's Addiction, and then fronted his own outfit, Duff McKagan's Loaded.

It was almost that time, McKagan says, that discussion started spreading that he knew something about managing money. He began getting regular calls from musician friends with questions about everything from whether to buy a base to where they should post their money

http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/04/pf/duff_mckagan_meridian_rock.fortune/index.htm#TOP