Adriana Smith

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Presenter of the Fred Coury Career Achievement Award – 19th Annual LA Music Awards

During the mixing sessions at Mediasound Studios in NYC, Rose brought a woman named Adriana Smith, who was drummer Adler’s girlfriend at the time, to the studio and had sex with her so that the sounds that Smith made could be recorded and put over the bridge of the song. Steve Thompson, an engineer of the album, said:

Axl wanted some pornographic sounds on Rocket Queen, so he brought a girl in and they had sex in the studio. We wound up recording about 30 minutes of sex noises. If you listen to the break on Rocket Queen it’s in there.

Another engineer, Michael Barbiero, did not want to record the sex session, so he set up the microphones and left the task to his assistant, Vic Deyglio. Deyglio said the studio was “like a Ron Jeremy set”, and he even had to enter the booth to adjust a microphone which Rose and Smith had crashed into. The Appetite for Destruction liner notes jokingly acknowledge Deyglio’s contribution by crediting him as “Victor ‘the fucking engineer’ Deglio”.

It was later stated in the music magazine Classic Rock, as well as Rolling Stone, that the person who had been recorded performing sex noises on the song was indeed Adriana Smith, an on-off girlfriend of drummer Steven Adler. She also allegedly had an intimate relationship with frontman Rose. Smith revealed in an interview that Adler “freaked out” when he discovered about the recorded sex session, and she spent some years using alcohol and drugs “because I had this extreme shame and guilt and stuff.