With the painfully obvious major exception of the personnel involved, it was a throwback to the heady metal days of the pre-Nirvana late ’80s, replete with chicks in the audience baring their chests for a roving cameraman, plenty of pyro, and rock star Axl Rose taking his sweet time backstage before finally, at 10:45 p.m., gracing the ravenous but tiring crowd with his larger-than-life presence. That’s just about when you’d expect most acts who are big enough to headline the FleetCenter to be moving in for the kill with a second or third encore. But Guns N’ Roses are, uh, different. And Axl Rose is, well, he’s special, which is a nice way of saying that he’s narcissistic, difficult, and so habitually late that his unpredictability has become almost routine.

Indeed, after almost a full decade away from the road, Rose kicked off the current "Chinese Democracy" tour on November 7 with a move straight out of Guns N’ Roses’ early-’90s playbook: he was a last-minute no-show for a gig at the General Motors Place arena in Vancouver, where angry fans showed up at the gates and proceeded to riot. Officials in Vancouver don’t have to worry about a repeat performance at a make-up show: this past Sunday, after only a month on the road, Guns N’ Roses missed a second show (at Philadelphia’s First Union Center), then announced that they were canceling the remainder of the tour, which was supposed to continue through the end of the year.

Boston-area fans, however, were given no such reprieve by Axl and his traveling rock-and-roll sideshow. Having parted ways with the last of his original Guns N’ Roses bandmates six years ago, Rose has rebuilt the band into what resembles a circus of professional rock-and-roll freaks: it features the three-guitar assault of masked shredder Buckethead, former Nine Inch Nails/Cirque du Soleil ax man Robin Fink, and thin-as-a-rail LA hired gun Richard Fortus. Also along for the ride is/was Tommy Stinson, the former Replacements bassist, who still favors loud plaid suits as his stagewear; one-time Primus drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia; and two keyboardists, Tool sideman Chris Pitman and Use Your Illusion session man Dizzy Reed, who stands as the touring outfit’s only tie to Axl’s Guns N’ Roses past. The king of these freaks is Rose, whose blond cornrowed hair looked like a mass of spaghetti surrounding his beefy and reddened meatball of a head when he strode on stage at the FleetCenter a week ago Monday.

Rose may have built this current version of the band — most of whom have been involved to varying extents in his beyond-comical six-year-long attempt to record a new studio album — as a means to bridge the decade-long gap that’s elapsed since the last proper Guns N’ Roses studio album. But there was little or no indication of any updating in the set he treated the FleetCenter crowd to. Even the cover tunes — Paul McCartney’s "Live and Let Die" and Bob Dylan’s "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door" — were drawn from the old Guns N’ Roses songbook.

Of course, with no new album to support, everything on this band’s set list is a cover of sorts: nobody in the current line-up had anything to do with writing GNR favorites like "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child o’ Mine," and "Mr. Brownstone." And as an obvious easy moneymaking scheme, the truncated "Chinese Democracy" tour was clearly designed to give audiences nothing more and nothing less than what they wanted — the crucial classics from 1987’s Appetite for Destruction and 1991’s Use Your Illusion parts I and II (all on Geffen) tossed together with a couple of crowd-pleasing covers from GNR’s salad days. That may seem a small payoff for fans who have been waiting all this time for Guns N’ Roses to re-emerge. But at least the band showed up for the FleetCenter gig.