It’s been 30 years since the release of the music video for Guns N’ Roses’ classic “November Rain”. We have discovered that Slash, the band’s guitarist, thought he was going to die recording one of its scenes. (via Loudwire)
It is impossible to forget the wedding scene, in which the Slash has a hard time looking for wedding rings for Axl Rose and Stephanie Seymour, who are waiting at the altar. After remembering that Duff McKagan has them, he gives them to the priest and, off the top of his head, leaves the wedding to play a guitar solo in the desert.
It was precisely in this scene that director Andy Morahan decided to shoot aerial shots of the guitarists, making a helicopter zoom in and out of the chapel, which also helped create the wind effect seen in the footage. However, for Slash this was something almost traumatic.
“[Morahan] didn’t tell me that they were going to be doing bomb shots with me with a helicopter! And when I got out onto the set and did my thing, I noticed that this helicopter would come back and forth at extremely fast speeds and get really, really low,” the rocker revealed to Yahoo!.
“And 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. And at that point in time, I was pretty much had that [mindset] — I didn’t have very much fear of death in those days. 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.”
The music video for “November Rain” was based on the short story ‘Without You’ by Del James, which is part of the book ‘The Language of Fear’. James is friends with Axl Rose, and, in fact, is the road manager for Guns N’ Roses. The story, in turn, is based on the stormy relationship that Rose had with Erin Everly, with whom the singer was for several years between the late ’80s and ’90s.
According to Matt Sorum, “November Rain”, “Don’t Cry” and “Estranged” were conceived as a single song and the three together take on a narrative sense. In fact, the musician plays the same drum fill on all three, apparently as a nod to bring them together. Even with everything, the story lacks details, such as the reason why the girlfriend dies in the video clip of the song.
Written by Axl, the original version was a whopping 25 minutes long, but was edited down to a much more reasonable 8:59. In fact, this is the longest song that has ever managed to enter the American top 10, as well as being the song with the longest guitar solo that has also managed to sneak into the list.
The production of the video for “November Rain” cost a whopping 1.5 million dollars. However, it paid off for the band to pay so much, since MTV played it so many times that the band recovered their investment.
Keep going for the video below: