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.

"Don't Cry"

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.

"November Rain"

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