Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash has vivid memories of the massively theatrical (and expensive) music video shoot the band did for a track from their 1992 album, Use Your Illusion I, but not because of the sets, the storyline, or the cultural impact it had on the rock world at the time. No, Slash has never been able to forget that shoot because he thought he was going to die that day.
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And even for a rock star who has technically died before, that sort of thing has a way of sticking around in your brain for a while.
Slash Recounts Terrifying Guns N’ Roses Music Video Shoot
When it comes to rock ‘n’ roll melancholy, it doesn’t get much better than the nine-minute epic that was the Guns N’ Roses music video for their 1992 track, “November Rain.” A hard rock ballad and a video about a rock star whose wife commits suicide because he’s so busy, well, being a philandering rock star? Slash playing his guitar in the Mexican desert wearing a leather jacket with no shirt underneath and holding a cigarette between his teeth? It doesn’t get more peak “early 1990s music video” than that, dear reader.
Even decades after its release, people are still watching the “November Rain” music video, garnering it the record for the first pre-YouTube video to achieve one billion views on the video-sharing platform. While we don’t know if Slash was ever one of those billion, we think it’s a safe bet to say he wasn’t. After all, who would want to relive a time when they thought they were going to die?
In a 2025 interview with The Times, Slash recalled that fateful day. He was under the impression he would walk out beside a small desert church, play his guitar, and look very cool while doing it, obviously. “But then the director came up with this idea of flying at me with a helicopter. As we were doing it, I thought, ‘Well, this will be the last thing I ever do.’”
Slash expressed similar sentiments in 2022, saying, “I thought, ‘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 pretty much had that [mentality]. I didn’t have very much fear of death in those days.”
The Big Budget Theatrics Weren’t Really The Guitarist’s Thing
To be fair, director Andy Morahan certainly had a vision when filming the Guns N’ Roses music video for “November Rain.” The scene with Slash is no exception. As the guitarist plays his solo on his signature sunburst Les Paul, the helicopter whirls around him, whipping his curly hair across his face and kicking up the sand around him. Slash hardly looked bothered, taking on a power stance as he rocked out to his solo (unplugged, of course, but an amp in the sand and an extension cord running back to the one-room church behind him wouldn’t have looked as cool, we suppose).
As dramatic as this particular sequence was, Slash was never a big proponent of this theatrical approach to music videos. “I love movies and TV,” Slash told The Times. “But when MTV became the paramount way to promote music, I was never interested in the theatrical element, where you had acting and sets and all that s***. With Guns, we did some really theatrical, monumental stuff in the early Nineties. But that was all Axl.”
Considering Slash was just going along with what his bandmate wanted to do, we’d say his fearlessness in the face of death by helicopter propeller was quite impressive. Talk about a good friend.
Photo by Brian Rasic/Getty Images
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