November Rain was the second in a three part music video/movie hybrid series designed to portray Guns n' Roses' take on the life of a rock star, through their music. The first video is Don't Cry, and the third video is Estranged. I think most people remember the Estranged video, with Slash's guitar solo parting the seas, Axl jumping off a yacht and a dolphin saving his life, it's a pretty good video. The November Rain video, however, presented a little mystery not solved until recently, over a decade later.
If you don't quite recall the video, it starts out with Axl Rose waking from a nightmare, then goes into an elaborate wedding (Axl to model Stephanie Seymour) in a church in the middle of nowhere. After the wedding, Slash does an awesome solo in the desert... We go to a wedding reception, which is going good until it begins raining, and everyone dives for cover, presumably to get out of the rain. At the end of this scene, there is an ominous shot of red wine spilling. We cut to Axl on the piano, and Slash steps up onto the piano - this is where the song cuts to the heavy part at the end - and the scene cuts to a funeral. Axl is in tears as his bride is in a casket. At the end of the video, he's crying over her grave.
I would argue November Rain is the best music video ever made, but that's just an opinion. There's these three Guns n' Roses videos, and the Tool videos... That's pretty much the best of the best right there. Anyway, the video leaves the question of how she died, and therein lies the mystery. At the end of the video, there is a credit saying the video is based on the short story "Without You" by Del James. The problem is, "Without You" is a short story in a collection called "The Language of Fear." This book was published in 1995, but the publisher went out of business, and only a few hundred copies of the book were made. As you can imagine, those who had copies began selling them for outrageous prices on eBay. Usually the Internet is a place where no secret is safe, but for years no one would transcribe it or scan/OCR it. I assumed that the value of the collectible books would go down drastically if anyone on the Net could read the story online or download it, and thus no one who had saved up the money to actually buy the book would jeopardize the resale value of the book, once they had read it. I had regularly been searching via Google and the filesharing networks for an eBook/text dump of the story.
Well, finally I found it. It's not an OCR scan, so there are some typos. I cannot guarantee it's not edited. I can't guarantee it's authentic. I've talked to people who have claimed to read the book, so I'll have to ask them if it's real or not. I found it in MS Word format, and I've converted it to text.
What follows is a complete dump of the text file. It's the story less the header and the overstretched scan of the cover of "The Language of Fear". It's about 48kB, so it might take a few seconds over a dialup line. I considered posting it, but that's a heck of a long document.
But there's more. As many times as you may have seen the video, you may have missed a small detail that hints to the gunshot suicide answer. Watch the video again but pay special attention to the casket. Try to see the side of her face that is the farthest from the camera.
Is that...? Yes, there is a mirror there. A mirror cut to fit her shape and attached to the lid of the casket to give the illusion she's all there, when in reality (of the fictional event, not the actual filming) there is extensive trauma to that side of her face. Anyway, I didn't see this until someone pointed it out, and wouldn't have found it otherwise, even with the Del James story.
plus he spells his name Axl Rose...
I am a Guns N Roses master. I have no clue why Axl put that in the video, hell I have no clue why Axl does what he does. EDIT: Answer to that statement. THE HEROIN. With years of everything else.
