Somewhere in The Great Beyond, Lennon and Cobain are saying WTF to each other

I saw GNR that same year, and Axl did an a capella version of Queen's "Sail Away Sweet Sister" at the same point in the show. I might have been the only person in the arena who recognized it.

 

Wow, that's really cool. I saw them twice on the tour with Metallica. They did a cover the first time and I didn't know what it was. It wasn't a Queen song, but it wasn't one of the songs that they covered a lot at the time, like most of the stuff that went on the Spaghetti Incident album like Attitude and stuff like that. It's funny, you look up the setlists from those shows and they leave a lot of that stuff off, which is unfortunate. From the second show, Axl did "The One" and Slash did The Godfather theme and neither was on the setlist.

 

That show was nuts as I recall. From the time Matt Sorum and the rest of the rhythm section (Gilby Clarke and Dizzy Reed, I believe) took the stage and started playing until when Axl finally walked out was like 10 minutes. You could tell the rest of the band had no idea what he was going to do from minute to minute.

However, Soundgarden — then fresh off the release of Badmotorfinger — was the opening act and was outstanding.

 

I saw GNR five times. The first was them opening for Aerosmith in 1988. The second was them opening for The Rolling Stones in LA in 1989. I saw them as the headline act in 1991 and twice on the tour with Metallica.

The shows with Metallica were interesting. There was so much time in between the shows (at least two hours both times). The first show was incredible where I felt like both bands were at the top of their game. The second one, which was one of the final shows of the tour was exactly as you described, where the rest of the band didn't seem to know what was going on. When Duff is singing three songs in and Axl isn't even on the stage, I'm guessing that wasn't planned. It was a bad start, an amazing middle and then a disappointing ending.