Thirty years ago, Guns N’ Roses released The Spaghetti Incident?, an album of covers, and brought a load of mostly obscure, mostly punk-rock tracks to a wider audience. We take a look at the originals that fired up Axl and co. enough to want to record their own versions.
Thirty years after it was released, The Spaghetti Incident? remains the strangest and most misunderstood album Guns N’ Roses released.
Coming on the heels of the blockbusting Use Your Illusion pair, this collection of (mostly) punk covers recorded during the UYI sessions and between dates on the subsequent tour was a curve ball from one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.
“These were all songs we played in soundcheck or live over the years,” GN’R bassist Duff McKagan explains to Classic Rock. “There was no plan to start with. We recorded a few songs, and then it was like, let’s just make a record.”
Guns N’ Roses were a hard rock band with punk rock in their hearts. Duff had played in punk bands The Fartz and The Fastbacks in his native Seattle, but everyone was on board.
“It was Axl who loved the UK Subs, he found Down On The Farm,” says Duff. “We figured, if we make this record and it sells, then if nothing else some of our heroes can get some royalties.”
The reviews that greeted The Spaghetti Incident? upon its release in November 1993 veered between the perplexed and the hostile. It sold just a million copies in the US – small change next to Appetite For Destruction, but enough to boost both the profile and the bank balance of those who wrote the songs that GN’R had covered on it. These are the stories behind those original songs.
Since I Don’t Have You
The Spaghetti Incident? may have been a Guns N’ Roses punk-rock covers album, and the most punk-rock thing they did on it was to kick the whole thing off with an unironic cover of Pittsburgh doo-wop group The Skyliners’ 1958 single Since I Don’t Have You.
The song dated back to an era when rock’n’roll had yet to fully get its claws into America’s youth. In their pressed suits, shirts and ties – and in the case of co-vocalist Janet Vogel, billowing dress – The Skyliners looked more like trainee accountants than like pop stars, but their version of Since I Don’t Have You reached No.12 in the US in early 1959. In a 1993 radio interview, Slash revealed that Axl constantly sang the song when the two of them lived together during GN’R’s early days. “I don’t know why I really liked that song, I just did,” Axl said, adding wryly: “Punk rock at its finest.”
New Rose
It’s the greatest recycled intro of all time: “Is she really going out with him?” First heard in 1964 as the opening of The Shangri-Las’ immaculate teenage death-ride anthem Leader Of The Pack, it was repurposed 12 years later by The Damned for New Rose, t
