The first time Slash felt Guns N’ Roses went too far: “It was getting out of hand”
While it may no longer be the case, for a while, the music industry was drowning in money, and Guns N’ Roses were on hand to take advantage of the never-ending supply.
When they formed in 1985, it was shortly after the rise of MTV, and less than a year later, they were signed by Geffen Records. However, not every step of the way was smooth sailing for the rock ‘n’ roll group, and initially, nobody really paid attention to their debut album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction.
Although it didn’t chart upon release, it was still a success for Guns N’ Roses to be out on the road playing gigs and having a record on the shelves. Like many bands of their generation, it was MTV that propelled them to superstardom thanks to the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ music video, and from that point, they never looked back.
As music videos played a pivotal role in their success and their rise to the top of the rock realm, Guns N’ Roses treated their promotional videos with a no-expense-spared approach. In fact, Guns N’ Roses constantly pushed things to the limit with each avenue. Examples of this are Axl Rose’s behaviour during their live shows, which regularly saw the band in trouble and gave them a reputation as hell-raisers or spending a reported $13million on making their long-awaited Chinese Democracy album.
By the early 1990s, Guns N’ Roses were now accustomed to having the red carpet rolled out for them, and this had become their new normal. The days of playing sweaty shows at The Roxy felt like a distant memory, and nothing was off limits, as they proved with the video for ‘November Rain’ from Use Your Illusion I in 1992. Rather than being a simple music video, it was more of a theatrical short film, directed by Andy Morahan, which cost a staggering fee of $1.5m to produce. For comparison, the first Rocky movie only cost $1.1m.
Even by Slash’s standards, ‘November Rain’ was a step too far, which went above and beyond what any fan demanded. During an interview with Q Magazine in 2004, Slash was asked about the video he was “most dubious” about, to which he answered ‘November Rain’ or ‘Estranged’, which arrived a year earlier in 1991.
Slash explained, “We got into doing these huge production videos, and by ‘November Rain‘, it was too much, just too involved. At the end of the day, it was a great video, but that’s when I started realising that it was getting out of hand. Was I ever worried about looking a bit silly?”
He then noted how, for his part, all that mattered was coming across with his dignity intact, which wasn’t the case with ‘Estranged’ that saw him sacrifice cool points. “For me personally, I like my own scene, so if we’re going to do this big whole thing, I just want my part to be cool,” he said.
The guitarist continued: “In the video for ‘Estranged’, Axl and the director had come up with this one part where I come out of this fucking water, and I’m just like, ‘I’m not doing it’. Of course, Axl, as usual, threatened to quit if I didn’t do it, so I did it. Was my wedding anything like ‘November Rain’? No.”
Another reason why Slash felt the video for ‘November Rain’ was unnecessarily ambitious was because one scene made him fearful for his life. Speaking to Yahoo, the guitarist revealed he was unaware of the plot before arriving for the shoot, and nobody informed him beforehand that Morahan planned to do bomb shots with a helicopter.
Slash recalled: “I thought, ‘Well, this’ll be my last day on Earth’. It was the kind of thing where you’re just resigned to the fact that you’re probably gonna die.”
However, it was worth it at the end, with Slash adding, “Anyway, we shot it, and I had no idea what it was going to look like afterwards. But it ended up looking pretty cool. But I didn’t know it was going to be as memorable as it turned out to be.”
While filming ‘November Rain’ was an unenjoyable experience for Slash, it’s now iconic and one of the most-watched videos in rock history. On a deeper level, the extravagance that oozes out of both the song and the music video provides a snapshot of where Guns N’ Roses were at that moment in time. They may have lost sight of normality and have been drenched in excess, but Guns N’ Roses were enjoying every second of the ride.
