MUSIC REVIEW: The Spaghetti Incident?

I’m an eighties kid; not as in I was born in the eighties; but, I was living in the eighties. Madonna was Queen. Michael was King and the great controversy of our time? The mullet versus the mohawk.

I worked for the now defunct 97 KROY Radio. DJ’s spun discs and the long haired rocker boys sold out stadiums. And then the CD came along and changed the world. I mean, literally changed the world.

I belonged to the school of thought that prophesied the CD, as a passing phase. Turned out, I was right.

It was over twenty years later when Beck released an album on vinyl–and the Renaissance began in earnest. Still, nothing sounds better than records, that were made to be records; that scratchy, raw quality that is somehow pleasing to the ear.

When I first arrived in New York, I bought an unlimited metro pass. I would catch random trains and visit my new city. I found myself in The Village, a place I had an instant love affair with; the ghosts of bohemians past wandered cobblestone streets, hand painted storefronts graced walkways and Mom & Pops shops still rule.

It was here I discovered, a great vintage vinyl shop; Generation Records on Thompson Street. From the weird to the obscure, the bins runneth over.

And then I spied it–a forgotten treasure, buried deep in the used and abused bin. I fished it out, tattered corners, worn face and fading paint. The first time I bought this album, I paid nearly $15.00; a small fortune in 1993. I had stood in line at the, now defunct Tower Records, to make my sacred purchase at 12:01a.m.

Seventeen years later, I would pay $1.99 for the same record. I could smell the vintage-ness of the Frisbee-like disc. I handed over $2.08, and The Spaghetti Incident?, was mine again.

The mid-’80s Los Angeles rock scene that gave birth to Guns n’ Roses was a curious thing, neither quite punk scruffy nor given to glam excess, largely populated by hip kids who were too young to remember that Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith had long been completely passé. In retrospect, the original Guns n’ Roses formula seems obvious enough, but no one had ever before successfully crossed the grungy street attitude of the underground Hollywood bands with the polished, riffy sound of the pouf-haired Sunset Strip pop metal bands, and the result was a giant paradigm shift in rock & roll.

But although the tremendous success of G n’ R may have all but erased the few vestiges of the underground rock scene that still existed in Hollywood, the legacy of punk rock continued to thrive, at least as a hip influence: Punk rock codified the underground anti-establishment groove that was now mandatory for any artist harder edged than Whitney Houston, and rock groups as mainstream as Skid Row and Mötley Crüe now considered it more or less obligatory to include Sex Pistols songs in their sets.

In The Spaghetti Incident?, an album of mostly punky cover versions of drunk rock classics, Guns n’ Roses reassert their roots in hard-edged rock & roll – some punk rock, some not – the way that U2 tried to with Rattle and Hum when their “authenticity” had become suspect. But in recording half an album’s worth of punk-rock songs, Guns n’ Roses reveal themselves as a glam-rock band, and a good one, as if T. Rex and the Dolls had come out of early punk rather than the other way around.

“Black Leather,” a post-mortem Sex Pistols song written by Steve Jones, sounds better than the original – more bounce, heartier groove – and the tough swagger of G n’ R on this track may be what the original Pistols aspired to before Malcom McLaren pushed Johnny Rotten on them.

There are quick, goofy versions of the Damned’s “New Rose” and U.K. Subs’ “Down on the Farm,” which Axl delivers with an English accent as contrived as that of any Orange County hardcore singer; there is a loose, sloppy version of Iggy’s “Raw Power” that would be a hit at any Whisky Jam Night.

Punk rock is sometimes best read as a vigorous howl of complaint against one’s own powerlessness, but Axl doesn’t quite connect to the punk-rock material on Spaghetti as anything but a conduit for pure aggression. He can’t even seem to curse right. In his version of Fear’s punk rock chestnut “I Don’t Care About You,” his is not the fuuuuuuck youuu of Fear’s Lee Ving, the epithet of the misfit yelling at the cop car after it has safely rounded the corner, but the fuck you the tavern bully says as he shoves you hard in the chest.

When Chris Cornell sings, “I want to fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you,” in the Sound Garden anthem “Big Dumb Sex,” Cornell’s voice is filled with longing and desire; Axl, reprising that Sound Garden chorus as a tag to the T. Rex song “Buick Makane,” sounds like a guy reading cue cards on the set of a porno movie.

But the Nazareth anthem “Hair of the Dog” is almost a primo Guns n’ Roses song to begin with, muscular riffing, forged-iron arpeggios, enraged lyrics just built for Axl’s manly scream, exactly the sort of thing G n’ R are best at – hip wiggle music, ’70s sounding without being explicitly retro – powered by the sort of glam-groove Slash guitar and oddly baroque Matt Sorum drumming that seem merely overwrought elsewhere on the album. “Buick Makane” works the complex riff until it screams.

Punk-rock virtues are most apparent in the Duff-sung version of Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” which features irregular arrangements, wavery vocals, even a splash of vulnerability.

It’s also the one song on the album you will probably fast-forward through in the car or skip on the record.

Still, I love The Spaghetti Incident? It takes me back to a simpler time–when gas was still a buck, Beavis and Butthead were controversial and it was only the parking lot of the World Trade Center that got bombed.

#VinylBlog