November Rain: A Legendary Rock Love Story

When I look into your eyes
I can see a love restrained
But darlin’ when I hold you
Don’t you know I feel the same?

Nothin’ lasts forever
And we both know hearts can change
And it’s hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain

The dimly lit bedroom; Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose swallowing pills; the band, backed by a full orchestra, performing to a packed crowd at The Ritz in New York; the band hanging at the Rainbow Bar And Grill on LA’s Sunset Strip; the scenic church; Rose’s then-girlfriend, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, wearing a garter-revealing gown, marrying him; sharing a kiss; climbing into a vintage white convertible while being showered with white petals; Guitarist Slash performing a guitar solo of all solos in front of a remote church in the New Mexico desert; the cheerful wedding reception interrupted by a sudden rain shower; guests fleeing for cover; a man diving into the wedding cake; wine being spilled; a dead Seymour in a coffin covering half her face; Rose weeping over her grave as rain pours from the sky;  Seymour tossing her bouquet in a flashback; the bouquet landing on the casket and bleeding from red to white.

This was a fascinating montage – costing a reported $1.5 million, making it the most expensive music video of its time. The video quickly went into heavy rotation on MTV and helped the single climb to No. 3 on the charts.

The song was a sprawling hard rock epic of cosmic proportions- a lushly arranged power ballad segueing into an ominous metal dirge. It was beautiful without being maudlin, tormented without being bruising. It ebbed and flowed, bobbed and weaved, ducked and dived… It was as sad and delicate as holding a dead dove in your hand.

But what catapulted the great song into the stratosphere was the video – also epic in scope and production which told the story. The video became an ideal platform for music lovers to consume the story. The song became a multi-media experience with the music intersecting with the cast, cinematography, staging and costumes.

Rose began composing the suite in 1983. It was finally released in February 1992 as the third single from the band’s third studio album “Use Your Illusion” (1991). It was based on the story “Without You,” written by Del James. The story centred on a hard-living rock star (modelled on Rose) who comes unglued after his ex-girlfriend’s suicide. (“I basically was that person,” Rose wrote in an introduction to James’ short story collection, “The Language of Fear”).

Reportedly, the other band members did not want to participate in the production of this song. They were opposed to the band’s drift to symphonic ballads, feeling their choice of more direct rock songs were being overlooked by Rose. Eventually, Rose persuaded them. However, Slash disputed the claims of musical differences in his autobiography.

Rose maintained during the recording that he’d abandon the music business if his bandmates, producers, and other players on the track didn’t get the song to match exactly how he’d been hearing it for so long inside his head. After having lived up to Rose’s demand, the song was released.

This baroque nine-minute rock opera is a timeless tale of love gone wrong. The video left a generation of music fans with questions that linger to this day. “How and why did Stephanie die?” “Why did that man dive into the cake?”  “What is Slash doing in the desert?” All these unanswered questions are part of rock ’n’ roll folklore now.

At the Video Music Awards, Guns N’ Roses was honoured with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, the MTV equivalent of a lifetime achievement award.

The song came at the time when decadent hard rock was on its way out and grunge was ascendant. The song looked, sounded, and felt like the final triumphant moment of classic rock’s original era with Slash providing the ideal closing notes to the very art form that defined a generation.

Over the ensuing decade, the network would steadily cut back on music videos. But, notwithstanding the slash, even to this day November Rain reigns supreme. It has been viewed 2 billion times on YouTube already. It is a blockbuster that continues to resonate decades after it was made.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1985, Guns N’ Roses was responsible for ushering in an era of grim, gritty rock n’ roll. It focused on the grimy underbelly of the urban jungle, with guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin cranking out badass riffs that matched the dark fantasies of Rose.

Rose countered his nasty tendencies with a romantic side, as shown on Sweet Child O’ Mine, the soaring ballad that went to number one in 1988, turning the band into superstars in the process. Over the next few years, the band’s 1987 debut album, “Appetite for Destruction”, sold in monstrous numbers, with Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City both reaching Billboard’s Top Ten and Patience, from the 1989 “GN’R Lies”, also reaching that exalted position. During this peak, the band became synonymous with controversy; they avoided trouble by staying inside the studio crafting their sprawling twin albums “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II”. Released simultaneously in September 1991, the albums were rooted in hard rock, but Rose also pursued lofty, grandiose balladry that reached its apotheosis in November Rain. In 1993, came “The Spaghetti Incident?“  composed of covers of songs mostly in the punk rock and hard rock genres. By that point, the rise of alternative rock coincided with the erosion of the original band lineup, a slow attrition that left Rose as the lone remaining founding member by the end of the ’90s. He spent much of the 2000s working on his magnum opus “Chinese Democracy”, which he delivered in 2008, by which point the band were out of the mainstream. The situation eventually changed. By 2015, Slash and bassist Duff McKagan rejoined the band, providing the band with a core of original members that helped in making the lineup stable into the 2020s, when the group showed signs of returning to active recording status courtesy the 2022 EP Hard Skool.

All in all, in the forty years since they’ve been in business, the band’s success story has been punctuated with modest number of studio albums of original songs, frequent line-up changes and long intervals of no releases.

In 2012, the band’s classic lineup was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I finally heard November Rain live in Gurgaon when the band toured India in December 2012, a tour twenty years in the making. In 1992, the band had been slated to play in Bombay, but the show was cancelled due to the riots. They played in Israel instead.

Rose took the stage amid roaring guitar riffs, and the band thundered immediately into the title track of their latest album, “Chinese Democracy.”

As Rose began his trademark shrieking vocals, many in the audience were wondering whether Rose would still be the vocalist of yore. By the end of the show, it was clear that Rose’s distinct sound was still in service; the low register, the high-clean sound, the old-man rasp as well as the vicious rasp were all on display.  The legendary screams in songs like Welcome to the Jungle, Live and Let Die and Paradise City were spine-tinglingly close to the originals. Rose was truly a powerhouse on stage – with at least 6 jacket changes, one shiny black plastic hair wig, one mask, a snake dance (with age limiting his hip thrusts), his famous slamming of the mike stand.  But he did not climb on to the grand piano – or fall off it, like he had done at concerts before coming to India. 

November Rain was the show-piece, and though no live act can fully capture the magic of the real deal, the band did a great job, even in the absence of Slash who, along with Rose, will forever be linked to the song.

In all, the band played a three-hour set, rolling out newer songs and revisiting some classics as well as throwing in a handful of covers, such as Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall and AC/DC’s Riff Raff.

Each band member got to showcase a song: the bassist Tommy Stinson sang one of his own, called Motivation, while the pianist Dizzy Reed did a rendition of Led Zeppelin’s classic No Quarter.

Rose dedicated the show to Pandit Ravi Shankar who had passed away the same day.

 In 2005, Rose was voted a “cool” old person to teenage girls worldwide. He was No. 2 — behind only the collective “grandparents” — in the poll of 10,000 teenage girls taken by Ellegirl magazine. Rose topped the celebrity list even though it had been more than six years since the band had released a new song and no one had actually even seen him for years. He was ahead of Clint Eastwood and Mick Jagger, amongst others.

That was the impact he and his band have had!

(Photo Credit: GUNS N’ ROSES – November Rain @khenross_p)