It's one of the most iconic sequences in rock video history: Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, bare-chested beneath his leather jacket, a cigarette clamped between his teeth, striding purposefully out of a white wedding chapel, Gibson Les Paul in hand, to wrench out November Rain's soaring and wonderfully melodic guitar solo. Filmed from a low-flying helicopter whipping up mini sand storms in the desert bordering New Mexico's Highway 41, it's a scene which worked out even more strikingly cinematic than the video's English director Andy Morahan had initially imagined.
"You start to see [footage] on the monitors as you're filming it, and you go, Fuck, I've never seen anything like this, this is amazing," Morahan told Guns N' Roses fan podcast Appetite For Distortion in 2020.
It appears that Morahan wasn't the only one taken by surprise during the shoot, for in a new interview with The Times, Slash reveals that he hadn't been forewarned about the director's plan to commission aerial shots of his solo showcase.
“I just said, OK, I’m going to do my guitar solo - out by the church,” he recalls. “But then the director came up with this idea of flying at me with a helicopter and as we were doing it, I thought, Well, this will be the last thing I ever do.”
"I thought, This’ll be my last day on Earth," the guitarist previously admitted in a 2022 video interview with Yahoo. "It was the kind of thing where you’re just resigned to the fact that you’re probably gonna die. And at that point in time, I pretty much had that [mentality] - I didn’t have very much fear of death in those days."
One of the stand-out songs on volume one of Guns N' Roses' epic and ambitious 1991 twin-set Use Your Illusion I and II, the 8 minute 57 seconds-long November Rain was chosen as the third single to be released from the first record. The single peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on August 29, 1992, with much of its popularity attributed to its spectacular, and hugely expensive, video, which was based on an original story by Gn'R collaborator Del James, and has now been viewed a staggering 2,2 billion times on YouTube,
The video's narrative focused on a troubled, grieving rock star (played by Axl Rose) struggling to come to terms with the loss of his late partner (portrayed by Rose's real-life girlfriend, model Stephanie Seymour) who died by suicide after uncovering the truth about her beloved's repeated infidelities. But in a 2014 interview with HuffPost Live, Slash freely admitted that he wasn't entirely familiar with the concept, answering, "To tell you the truth, I have no idea," when quizzed about its meaning.
"We did some really theatrical, monumental stuff in the early Nineties," he notes in his interview with The Times, "but that was all Axl. I just like a live performance from a concert. Paradise City is my favourite Guns N’ Roses video."
At least one admirer of Guns N' Roses would disagree with Slash's opinion.
In her 2021 memoir Speaking For Myself, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders revealed that newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump considers the November Rain promo to be nothing less than the greatest music video of all time.
"The president told Hope [Hicks] and me in the Oval [Office] he wanted the classic Guns N’ Roses song November Rain added to his rally playlist,” she wrote. “He told us it was ‘the greatest music video of all time’, and made us watch it to prove his point.”
For his part, director Andy Morahan admits that the video is "bonkers", and its visuals inexplicable at points, but he argues that the success of the video is undeniable in purely commercial terms.
"Use Your Illusion had done 12 to 14 million [sales] when they started doing the big videos," he recalled to the AFD podcast "and the albums went [on to sell] over 25 million after that... I think it became a seminal moment for a lot of fans."
