The Long Road to “November Rain”
Long before most people had heard of Guns N’ Roses, Axl Rose was already writing “November Rain.”
The week’s detour — one story from off the tape
The Long Road to “November Rain”
Long before most people had heard of Guns N’ Roses, Axl Rose was already writing “November Rain.” In the early 1980s, broke in Los Angeles, he worked it out on piano, and some early drafts reportedly ran close to twenty minutes. The band demoed it during the Appetite for Destruction era but left it off that album and off G N’ R Lies, since a sweeping piano ballad didn’t fit their raw street-rock sound. Axl refused to give it up.
The song finally appeared on Use Your Illusion I in September 1991, complete with grand piano, lush strings, and two soaring Slash solos. Despite running nearly nine minutes, it climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992.
The video matched the song’s ambition. Directed by Andy Morahan for a reported $1.5 million, it drew on “Without You,” a short story by Axl’s friend Del James about a rock star whose girlfriend dies. Supermodel Stephanie Seymour, Axl’s real-life girlfriend, played the bride, which blurred fiction and reality, especially after the couple split in 1993. Its images became iconic: Slash’s solo outside a desert church, the rain-soaked reception, and the funeral.
Nearly a decade after Axl first sat down at the piano, his most cherished song finally reached the world, proving that his stubborn refusal to compromise had been well worth the long wait.
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