By the mid-1990s, any band named Guns N’ Roses was practically being held together with string and duct tape. No one was happy when they came off tour, and since Axl Rose seemed content to do whatever he wanted in the studio and began treating people as afterthoughts on the road, everyone except the frontman was absolutely miserable trying to get anything done in the studio. If they couldn’t make original tunes together, though, getting a covers album done was the next best thing.
Cover albums might seem like mindless cash grabs for rock and roll bands, but not all of them are completely worthless. John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is an excellent look into his back catalogue, and if we had to put a limit on the number of cover songs that any band puts onto their records, we would have had to do away with nearly half of Elvis Presley’s discography. And for a band cutting loose, “The Spaghetti Incident?” was a welcome change of pace from Use Your Illusion’s overblown production.
GNR Lies was them embracing acoustic instruments and having a jam session, but this is the version of Guns if they were reimagined as a punk band. It’s not without a few tasteless moments like covering a Charles Manson song, but when looking at the state of the band during the making of the record, most people would be considered lucky that they got the song ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ out of them at all.
But what about the cover and title of the album? Rock stars have done their fair share of partying, but judging by their knack for misbehaviour, that kind of title only sounds like the result of a food fight that happened at some ritzy Italian restaurant. But before they started their massive tour in the early 1990s, pasta first entered the equation when original drummer Steven Adler was forced out of the group.
So, what does spaghetti have to do with Guns N’ Roses?
Adler was the perfect drummer to pull off Appetite for Destruction, but after becoming more and more unreliable during the next record, the group had truly reached the end of the line with him. He had tried his best to clean up, but Slash remembered him and Duff McKagan doing wellness checks on him every now and then and still finding his stash either behind the toilet or carefully hidden away from them.
Back in those days, Adler tried to have code words for his lethal medicine cabinet, and ‘spaghetti’ was normally his word for cocaine. So when McKagan testified in court when Adler tried to sue his bandmates after his firing, that title fell out of the air, saying, “I’m in court, with a jury and the whole thing. And this fuckin’ lawyer gets up, and with a straight face says, ‘Mr. McKagan, tell us about the spaghetti incident.’ And I started laughing.”
But like all forms of spaghetti, Guns N’ Roses’ covers adventure could get more than a little bit messy in a few places. It’s nice to hear them playing more gritty rock and roll in the same vein as their earlier stuff, but looking back at their dynamic, this was not the remedy that they were looking for. This was like trying to put a bandage on a gaping wound, and when things went south, it didn’t take Slash very long to call the whole thing off.
When they tried one more cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, Slash realised that he couldn’t bear working with Rose any longer, eventually quitting and McKagan following his lead a few years afterwards. “The Spaghetti Incident?” might be a morbid curiosity for any Guns N’ Roses enthusiast, but for those reminiscing on the good times, it’s hard to take the record in as a whole without thinking of it as the bittersweet end to their glory years.
