The music video for Guns N' Roses "November Rain" is certainly among the band's most iconic. Even today, three decades later, the nearly 10-minute narrative is shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions, but one absurd – and seemingly unnecessary – scene has been explained after 30 years.
Use Your Illusion video trilogy , between "Don't Cry" and "Estranged," the clip follows the wedding of a rock star and his beloved, played by Axl Rose and model Stephanie Seymour , the vocalist's girlfriend at the time. Unfortunately, the video ends with the bride's funeral, a death under circumstances never revealed.
Vice investigation : the scene of a man throwing himself into a wedding cake when it starts to rain. A rather drastic reaction to escape a few drops of rain, wouldn't you say?
Andy Morahan , the music video director, explained that "November Rain" is about a nightmare where everything goes wrong. "It's like a bad dream. It was deliberately exaggerated. It's an allegory," he said. "It's an upside-down nightmare version of the wedding [from the movie The Godfather ]."
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Riki Rachtman , host of a metal show on MTV in the 1990s, who was in the video and is credited as the man with the heel on the cake, revealed that it wasn't him.
“We stayed up all night filming [at the Rainbow nightclub]. And then we went straight to the wedding reception scene the next morning. Axl wanted it to look like a real wedding, so all his friends were there. That’s why I was there. When I watch the video now, there are a lot of faces from the old scene. But the biggest misconception in the whole video is that I was the guy who was thrown into the cake. Everyone seems to think it was me, but it wasn’t,” he said.
The true identity of the person responsible for leaving Axl Rose's wedding guests without cake has not been discovered, but cinematographer Daniel Pearl , who served as director of photography on the trilogy, shared his memories of the improvised scene that was almost deleted from the final cut.
“The idea absolutely came about on location. All I know is that I received my instructions from Andy that we were going to film this,” he told Vice . “When we filmed it, I said, ‘Well, this isn’t good, man.’ It looks like the guy jumps on the cake, and we only had one cake. So that’s it, that’s what it is. My reaction at the time was that it looked wrong.”
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Morahan, the director, denies any deeper meaning to the scene, despite fan theories. The crew was tired after filming all night, they had already used all the artificial rain for the scene and decided to try it because they had nothing to lose.
“It was like, ‘Ah, fuck it. Let’s do it, because who cares if it works or not?’ That’s all I remember,” he continued. “When we were editing the video, I actually took the cake out,” Morahan said. “I agree with Daniel. It seemed a little too playful to me.”
The director even tried to leave that scene out of the final cut, but when he showed the clip to Axl Rose, the Guns N' Roses frontman questioned the cake scene, so Morahan reinstated the clip in the final video.
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