But worse was to come a few months later when Spaghetti was diagnosed with stage-3 oropharynx cancer and was compelled to undergo radiation therapy. “Last year was easily the worst time of my life. We had a pretty shitty year last year,” Spaghetti says. While the campervan accident had made a mess of Spaghetti’s plans to balance his touring commitments with quality family time, the cancer diagnosis caused him to stare mortality in the face.
As dire as his situation was, Spaghetti was determined to overcome his illness, and to return to the rock’n’roll stage that had become an intrinsic part of his life for the past few decades. “They say that your state of mind is extremely important when you’re dealing with physical illness,” Spaghetti says. “So to have this goal of getting back onstage, and to have my family and my three kids that I wanted to see grow up, I had plenty of motivation to stay alive. So getting me motivated to get on board was easy.”
With a massive outpouring of support from Supersuckers fans – who provided financial backing through the Eddie Spaghetti Cancer Fund – Spaghetti entered radiation treatment for his cancer. Then in October 2015, Spaghetti announced on his Facebook page that he’d been given the all clear by his doctors. While Spaghetti has been able to return to the stage – against doctors’ orders, mind you – his entire lifestyle has had to change to accommodate his post-cancer, post-treatment existence.
“I totally have to take it easier now, just because my reality is so different,” Spaghetti says. “My body feels different, my tastebuds are completely different – foods that I used to be into I’m not anymore. The whole lifestyle change you go through with is massive, for sure.”
It was perhaps prescient, and serendipitous, that Supersuckers’ new album Holdin’ the Bag – which had been written and recorded before Spaghetti’s health problems – returned to the more contemplative country rock aesthetic explored on the 1997 album Must’ve Been High.
“Yeah, that was fortuitous,” Spaghetti says. “The doctors don’t really want me out on the road right now, but here I am. They’re telling me to take it easy, but for me this is taking it easy, even though it’s a pretty high octane affair.”
Supersuckers had previously flirted with a follow-up to Must’ve Been High, but the creative stars hadn’t aligned. “We had thought about it around the tenth anniversary of Must’ve Been High, around 2007,” Spaghetti says. “So while we were thinking about doing a country record, I guess we weren’t feeling like it then. And now we were. So the time was right.”
Creatively, Spaghetti says two elements underpinned the return to country: firstly, the all-out rock’n’roll attack of the Supersuckers’ 2014 album, Get the Hell; secondly, Spaghetti’s satisfaction with his most recent solo album, The Value of Nothing.
“Maybe it was the good feeling I got from my last solo record, which was the first record I did on my own that I wrote all the songs for. It was such a great experience that it got me thinking about songwriting in that way, so I kept going in that direction. And Get the Hell was a great rock’n’roll record and we really rocked ourselves into oblivion with that record, so we were ready to embrace the country.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
