Revisiting the Magnificent Excess of Guns N’ Roses' Use Your Illusion Video Trilogy - Pitchfork article

Gackt · April 15, 2016

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1104-revisiting-the-magnificent-excess-of-guns-n-roses-use-your-illusion-video-trilogy/

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After breaking his foot at a warm-up show, Axl Rose was forced to perform his somewhat-reunited band’s first big gig of the year sitting down. He didn’t just plop down in a La-Z-Boy, though. His extravagant chair—think Games of Thrones-meets-Spinal Tap—turned out to be a loaner from Dave Grohl, who used it when it broke his leg last year. Grohl, you may have heard, once played drums in Nirvana, a band that many people credit for dismantling Guns N’ Roses’ arena-rocking pomp in the early 1990s and ushering in the alternative age. The two groups weren’t just symbolic enemies—they had actual beef.

Legend has it that Rose and Kurt Cobain nearly came to blows backstage at the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards when Courtney Love started yelling at Axl, who responded by saying to Kurt, “Get your bitch to shut up, or I’ll take you to the pavement.” And then Kurt turned to his wife and deadpanned: “Shut up, bitch.” At that point, everyone in Nirvana’s camp laughed at Axl. “That was a really weird night,” Grohl recalled in the oral history I Want My MTV. “It felt like I was back in high school, and that’s one of the reasons I’d dropped out in the first place.” Fast forward 24 years, and Rose is thanking Grohl for his generosity while Grohl nods along in the crowd. Now, they’re both a couple of middle-aged guys who feel lucky to be there, who live in another century, who combat their own mortality with a silly throne.

Of course, Cobain would have never sat in such a contraption. But vintage Axl wouldn’t have, either. Around the time of GNR’s pair of Use Your Illusion albums (1991), Axl Rose would have likely cancelled a show rather than suffer such indignity. Back then, he was making grand music that aimed to carry rock’n’roll forward—10-minute suites that conflated ambition and delusion. He was the biggest rock star on the planet, a designation that made him feel invincible and also scared the shit out of him. He was an immense asshole who allegedly hit women and pissed on (excited) fans from hotel balconies. He was also a music video visionary. Given that Use Your Illusion was “the last great moment for tyrannosaurus rock,” as critic Eric Weisbard writes in his excellent 33 ⅓ book on the LP, then the Andy Morahan-directed Use Your Illusion video trilogy—“Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged”—marks that moment’s strange and stupefying pinnacle. They are worth another look—particularly on the occasion of GNR headlining Coachella—if only to remember Rose as an artist who stood for something.

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In the realm of these videos, that something includes—but is not limited to—excess, pretension, misogyny, death, beauty, sex, anger, and, perhaps, interspecies reincarnation. These issues are brought to the screen through bombastic visual metaphors, many of which are downright odd upon close examination. Take, for instance, “Don’t Cry,” perhaps the trilogy's most symbolically wrought installment. We first see Axl as a mythic Frozen Man, doomed in a snowstorm, a bottle in one hand and a revolver in the other, his upper lip plastered with fake ice snot—then things cut quickly to present-day Axl raising a pistol to his head before a woman (played by his then real-life girlfriend, model Stephanie Seymour) wrestles it away from him. The implication being: Maybe Axl Rose’s ancestors were a bunch of drunk, suicidal fuck-ups who ended up cold and alone, but messed-up modern Axl might not end up like that because he’s got someone to save him.

Aside from the specifics of the clip—which also involves a green-body-painted “demon” Axl who lives below his premature gravestone, as well as a therapy session in which Axl trembles with significance while wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt—the limitless scope of the video is something to behold. It’s all there—life, death, GNR power-ballads played from the top of a building—but it’s particularly obsessed with mortality, as if Axl knew this was his shot to make this wildest dreams come true. And that those dreams would soon stop.

For each of the three videos, GNR also released hour-long behind-the-scenes documentaries, which originally sold separately for $14.95 each. They are as bloated as anything else the band did during this era, but they can also be genuinely candid in a way that’s disarming. In the “Don’t Cry” doc, Axl is seen wearing a blue Nirvana hat during an on-set interview; though he would physically threaten that band’s singer only a year later, he loved their music. The backstage film also shows Axl taking a sledgehammer to his own gravestone in a bizarre act of self-help. He is seen cutely cuddling up with Seymour by a pool; the two had just started dating around then. “We’ve never fought, especially not physically, but never even verbally,” Seymour says to the camera when asked about the scene in which she forcibly takes Axl’s gun away. “We’ve never had a disagreement.” Only a couple of years later, she would accuse the singer of slapping her, punching her, and kicking her down a flight of stairs. But “Don’t Cry” is kind of like a honeymoon for both the couple’s relationship and Axl’s ambitions—he was coming off the best-selling debut album in history and he was setting his sights even higher for its follow-up.

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Filmed a year later, “November Rain” is the centerpiece of the trilogy in every way. It’s the most famous video of the three and often cited as one of the medium’s high points. But by the time it hit, the atmosphere of the music industry was changing. GNR played the song with Elton John and a string orchestra at the ’92 VMAs; Nirvana played “Lithium” backed up by nothing but their own angst. The video is once again ominous: Axl and Seymour get married; Slash stars in the most audacious and awesome guitar solo ever filmed; and then, suddenly and without explanation, Seymour is in a casket, with half of her face covered with a metal plate.

The behind-the-scenes footage also presents a tenser operation—gone are the goofy laughs of the “Don’t Cry” doc, replaced by Axl’s befuddled bandmates, who barely know what’s going on in the video, and a chillier vibe between the singer and his on-and-off-screen partner. Considering the clip’s ill-fated narrative, it’s no surprise that Seymour and Rose would soon break up. When it came to Rose, a small-town kid who dreamed of stardom before his fantasies eventually started to outpace his reality, the line between life and art could get very blurry. But that’s also why something like “November Rain” remains so captivating. It acknowledges that even the most platinum pop desires will end in a graveyard, that we all pay for the sins of the past in one way or another. It’s also got a shot of a dude inexplicably jumping into a wedding cake in order to take shelter from a rainstorm.

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It all ends with “Estranged,” the weirdest video of the three, and maybe the one that holds up best decades later. It’s also something of an improvisation; with Seymour out of the picture by 1993, the trilogy’s loose narrative had to be re-written. All three videos were based on a story called “Without You” written by one of Axl’s L.A. buddies, Del James. As shown in the docs, James is basically exactly how you would imagine him: long hair, mustache/goatee combo, speaking in a kind of weird accent. His writing is fairly blunt: “Without You” tells of a big time rock star who wallows in heroin and sorrow. At one point in the story, this main character pulls out a photo album with shots of his old girlfriend, douses his hands in expensive champagne, and proceeds to jerk off to the memories. “He had no idea how many times he’d masturbated to this photo,” James writes. “Every other day perhaps.”

Thankfully, there’s no such scene in “Estranged.” Feeling lost after parting with Seymour, Axl got metaphysical and surreal. In the clip, he’s seen hiding from a SWAT team in a child’s bedroom, and then jumping off a huge oil tanker into the ocean, and then refusing to be saved—before dolphins come to his rescue. Yes, dolphins. As Axl once explained, the sea creatures represent “a state of peace or grace.” And why not? He had already tried using his illusions to create love and happiness, and the plan backfired in spectacular fashion. So whereas the first two episodes of the trilogy generally stuck to a script that suggested salvation but fell back on hopelessness, “Estranged” is the outlier, the one where Axl basically admits he has absolutely no clue about what to do next. Thus: dolphins (and the end of GNR as we knew it and years without any new material).

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So the trilogy never explained how or why Seymour’s character actually died. This became something of a mystery, one that Del James figured he had the “answer” to considering he wrote the story that everything was based on. “The cool thing for me personally is that people now have to read my book,” he says in the “Estranged” doc, sounding like a real prick. “So for those people who are still curious as to how the chick died… that’s really the only way ‘cause I ain’t tellin’.” Well, I’ll tell: In “Without You,” the rock star’s beloved shoots herself in the head while listening to her boyfriend’s big hit. It’s about as pulpy as it sounds. I’ll take dolphins any day.

In a way that is both nostalgic and prophetic, trilogy director Andy Morahan sums up Axl’s fate at the end of the saga: “He finds his nirvana.” Looking back on the trilogy years later, Morahan zooms out a bit more. “In a way, Guns N’ Roses, myself, we became the dinosaurs, the kind of artists punk rockers hated,” he says in I Want My MTV. “We’d become overblown and indulgent and kind of stupid, and then Nirvana happened and suddenly everything was grunge and cheap, and thank god for it, you know?”

It’s easy to dismiss the bloated eccentricities of the Use Your Illusion trilogy as nothing but nonsense from a feral jackass with a temper and millions of major-label dollars to burn. But it’s more than that. It’s an outlandish last gasp from a genre desperately clinging to relevance. It’s a precursor, for better or worse, to the flash and bang of Michael Bay. It’s what happens when a tortured soul gets to blow up his therapy revelations into widescreen phantasmagorias. It’s not as smart as it thinks it is, but smarter than most people give it credit for. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun to watch than “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”