It is one of the crucial iconic sequences in rock video historical past: Weapons N’ Roses guitarist Slash, bare-chested beneath his leather-based jacket, a cigarette clamped between his tooth, striding purposefully out of a white wedding ceremony chapel, Gibson Les Paul in hand, to wrench out November Rain‘s hovering and splendidly melodic guitar solo. Filmed from a low-flying helicopter whipping up mini sand storms within the desert bordering New Mexico’s Freeway 41, it is a scene which labored out much more strikingly cinematic than the video’s English director Andy Morahan had initially imagined.
“You begin to see [footage] on the screens as you are filming it, and also you go, Fuck, I’ve by no means seen something like this, that is wonderful,” Morahan informed Weapons N’ Roses fan podcast Urge for food For Distortion in 2020.
It seems that Morahan wasn’t the one one taken unexpectedly in the course of the shoot, for in a brand new interview with The Instances, Slash reveals that he hadn’t been forewarned in regards to the director’s plan to fee aerial pictures of his solo showcase.
“I simply mentioned, OK, I’m going to do my guitar solo – out by the church,” he recollects. “However then the director got here up with this concept of flying at me with a helicopter and as we have been doing it, I believed, Properly, this would be the final thing I ever do.”
“I believed, This’ll be my final day on Earth,” the guitarist beforehand admitted in a 2022 video interview with Yahoo. “It was the type of factor the place you’re simply resigned to the truth that you’re most likely gonna die. And at that cut-off date, I just about had that [mentality] – I didn’t have very a lot concern of demise in these days.”
One of many stand-out songs on quantity one among Weapons N’ Roses’ epic and impressive 1991 twin-set Use Your Phantasm I and II, the 8 minute 57 seconds-long November Rain was chosen because the third single to be launched from the primary file. The only peaked at quantity three on the Billboard Scorching 100 chart on August 29, 1992, with a lot of its recognition attributed to its spectacular, and massively costly, video, which was based mostly on an unique story by Gn’R collaborator Del James, and has now been considered a staggering 2,2 billion occasions on YouTube,
The video’s narrative targeted on a troubled, grieving rock star (performed by Axl Rose) struggling to return to phrases with the lack of his late associate (portrayed by Rose’s real-life girlfriend, mannequin Stephanie Seymour) who died by suicide after uncovering the reality about her beloved’s repeated infidelities. However in a 2014 interview with HuffPost Dwell, Slash freely admitted that he wasn’t fully acquainted with the idea, answering, “To let you know the reality, I don’t know,” when quizzed about its which means.
“We did some actually theatrical, monumental stuff within the early Nineties,” he notes in his interview with The Instances, “however that was all Axl. I identical to a dwell efficiency from a live performance. Paradise Metropolis is my favorite Weapons N’ Roses video.”
Not less than one admirer of Weapons N’ Roses would disagree with Slash’s opinion.
In her 2021 memoir Talking For Myself, former White Home press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders revealed that newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump considers the November Rain promo to be nothing lower than the best music video of all time.
“The president informed Hope [Hicks] and me within the Oval [Office] he wished the traditional Weapons N’ Roses track November Rain added to his rally playlist,” she wrote. “He informed us it was ‘the best music video of all time’, and made us watch it to show his level.”
For his half, director Andy Morahan admits that the video is “bonkers”, and its visuals inexplicable at factors, however he argues that the success of the video is simple in purely industrial phrases.
“Use Your Phantasm had finished 12 to 14 million [sales] after they began doing the massive movies,” he recalled to the AFD podcast “and the albums went [on to sell] over 25 million after that… I feel it turned a seminal second for lots of followers.”
