The beginning of the end of GNR can be traced to Use Your Illusion 1 and 2. The band always had drama, but it was then that it really surfaced.
Released simultaneously on September 17, 1991, the Use Your Illusion albums were, in the quarters housing the band’s many detractors, used as the stick with which to beat Guns N’ Roses. If you wanted a representation of how far the band had lost its way, they said, in the wake of Appetite For Destruction and their ascent from ‘Most Dangerous Band In The World’ to its biggest – trainwreck.
To that, said Axl Rose, ‘Hold my beer.’ Four years previously, the music video for Welcome To The Jungle had helped break the struggling band. Now, the next 3 videos would be some strange art project.
“I don’t necessarily know of anyone who’s made a video like it,” the frontman said. No shit.
Filmed and premiered between 1991 and 1993, the ‘Illusion trilogy’ of videos begins with Don’t Cry, kicking off with some kind of historic outlaw Axl stumbling around a frozen wilderness and ending with a green-skinned ‘Demon Axl’ shaking below his own grave. November Rain followed – at the time, reportedly one of the most expensive music videos ever made, and to this day one of rock’s most iconic – with its absurd wedding, that desert-based guitar solo, and a death seemingly caused by a spot of rain, and yet still it’s perhaps the only instalment to make even a degree of sense, kind of, in a way, if you ignore a bunch of bits and then don’t overthink the rest of it. Thank god, then, that Estranged exists to tie up all those dastardly loose end and fill in the cavernous plot holes by utilising dolphins flying out of airplanes, dolphins swimming down the Sunset Strip, Axl being rescued from the ocean by dolphins… loads of dolphins, basically. “The dolphins were to simulate a state of peace, or a state of grace,” Axl attempted to clarify. And who needs answers when you’ve got dolphins!
The director has now come out and talked about the process and how difficult things were on set.
“It was difficult; I’ve always said they were a bit like vampires. It was very hard to get them to do anything during the day – their hours were from when dusk falls to when the sun rises. Literally, things like that final scene in November Rain, we were filming all night and we had to keep them up just to get a daylight scene the next morning. The dynamic was difficult. I was wrangling not only the creative forces – Axl and Slash at that point – while also having to go and have meetings with the other members of the band to tell them what was going on. I’d have Duff [McKagan, bass] asking, ‘Axl has his big bit, Slash has his big bit, what’s my big bit?’ It was a constant state of juggling everything.
“To go back to the vampire comment, one of the days on November Rain, for instance, they just didn’t turn up [to set] – that was the day we shot the funeral scenes. Axl eventually came once it got dark, which is why you see him by the grave in his cape (at the end of the video) and it’s night time. He’s not in the scene with the priest and the extras. It was constantly trying to keep the whole show on the road. And of course, when things like that happen, the costs escalate, so the videos have these reputations as being the biggest, most expensive videos of the time – which was pretty much accurate! But they didn’t start like that. They just… evolved.” They attempted to wrap the trilogy up with Estranged.
Those videos were the beginning of the end. It would take nearly 25 years for the band to reunite. Hopefully the reunion holds. If we see dolphins in any of their new projects, run!
