#73, “November Rain,” Guns N Roses (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #73, “November Rain,” Guns N Roses (1991)

I did not grow up a Guns N Roses fan. My dad hated the band, for one—he thought Axl had one of the singularly most awful voices in rock and roll, and made fun of him every time he heard him sing. By the time I was old enough to get into music on my own, GNR were also incredibly corny, a consequence of the harsh vibe-shift that hit right around the time “November Rain” came out.

That shift came in waves. Nevermind came out on September 24, 1991, one week after GNR released Use Your Illusions I, the album that contained “November Rain.” (That same day, the band also released Use Your Illusions II, one of the all-time pretentious moves from a band that was ostensibly formed to puncture all of the pomposity and excesses of ‘80s hard rock.) Nevermind was a slow burn, though—it took a year for it to be certified Gold, which means it sold 500,000 copies. Use Your Illusions I and II both hit that mark, according to the New York Times, in about two hours. I dunno. I wouldn’t really get into music for another year or two, when I would discover Weird Al and the Aladdin soundtrack. I remember “November Rain” being in the air, a little bit—there’s a video with Axl in a tux, and then at a grand piano dressed like normal? Slash walks down the aisle in a church looking exactly like Slash?—and I’ve always been drawn to grand, dramatic music, which “November Rain” certainly is.

But it took several long magic summers to go by before I actually cared about music that wasn’t a Disney soundtrack or a Weird Al parody, and by the time I was actively seeking out music, Guns N Roses were basically the poster child for how corny, tacky, and embarrassing rock music had been before Nirvana came along, and brought with them followers who found the theatrics of “November Rain” incredibly embarrassing.

Because, like, listen to it. Strap in—we’re going to be here for nine minutes—but listen to what is going on here. We start with Axl on the piano, playing some schmaltzy chords that Billy Joel probably tried out and was like “….nah, too much.” Swirling around him is a full orchestra, strings and flutes and all of that. The drums come in, and after a minute, Axl starts singing nonsense lyrics. “when i look into your eyes / i can see a love restrained / but darling when i hold you / don’t you know i feel the same?” which I guess means “you don’t seem to be feeling this and I’m not really either,” just phrased as dramatically as possible. This theme gets explored over and over (and over and over (and over and over (and over))) again throughout the next several minutes, as Axl wants to break up with this young lady but can’t make himself actually do it. It’s all on her, he sings. “if you want to love me / then darling, don’t refrain,” he offers, “or i’ll just end up walking / in the cold november rain,” which is quite the endorsement of being in a relationship with Axl Rose! Through it all, the schmaltz is still high, the piano still there, a full choir making sighing noises to back up Axl’s whine. Slash drops a guitar solo at right about the four-minute mark, a kind of hazy distillation of the musical themes to that point—which is to say, it sounds good (Slash is good at guitar) but it’s also schmaltzy, because it is in “November Rain”—and then does the same thing after another pointless Axl bridge, where he sings “don’t you know i need some time on my own?” for a few stanzas, before Slash pours all of his corniness into another solo, with flutes fluttering behind him. And so on, for seven full minutes.

Finally, after seven minutes of this mid-tempo power ballad, everything goes quiet, and then the song shifts. The strings get angular and the choir drops a few octaves, the drums approximate a martial stomp, and Axl’s lyrics—while still nonsense—are at least a little more pointed. “don’t you think that you need somebody? don’t you think that you need someone?” the choir sings, with Axl leading them. And Slash, recognizing that the song has experienced its own vibe shift, comes in, delivering this soaring, face-melting solo that feels like he’s delivering a catharsis from the experience of listening to the first part of “November Rain.” Even if you’re an avowed “November Rain” hater, that solo fuckin’ rips, I’m sorry. The tension of Guns N Roses was always between Axl as the sleazeball poet and Slash as this barely-there force of nature. At the band’s best, it can be thrilling, a tension that builds to the two of them putting up a unified front. Here, it’s more of a relief.

And yet. This is not my blog listing my 150 least favorite songs, or my 150 guiltiest pleasures, or the 150 guitar solos that make me feel something despite myself. Because the truth is that, even with all of that, I love “November Rain,” honestly and sincerely and purely, with my whole heart. I’m just not sure how it happened.

The battle lines around rock and roll in the ‘90s were drawn before I was old enough to take a side, but once I reached draft age, I knew where I wanted to be: With Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, and Liz Phair and Hole and Tori Amos, and definitely not with the relics of the ‘80s. Everyone wanted that. Motley Crüe released an industrial album in 1994, and Jon Bon Jovi found the one ticket out of hair-metal land by trading the spandex and bangs for flannel and a thoughtful-looking goatee. GNR broke up, more or less, for a long time. I didn’t really give them much thought.

And then, years later, the war of coolness in rock and roll stopped being important. None of it was all that cool—Pearl Jam occupied roughly the same cultural space as the Dave Matthews Band or Hootie and the Blowfish—and I heard some Guns N Roses songs removed from the context of my teen years, and it turned out those songs slapped. My appetite for corniness only grew, and I put on “November Rain,” maybe ironically at first, and whatever distinction there was between sincerity and irony disappeared. It’s still impossibly schmaltzy, but like, that stuff works because it works, you know? If it had cut off at the seven-minute mark, it might not have landed, but we do get those final two minutes of Slash playing with his whole heart, and “November Rain” transitioned from guilty pleasure to pure pleasure, a song I listen to now and think, “oh, hell yeah.” I can’t quite identify the catalyst, but who am I to argue with three guitar solos?

For fun, here’s a version by Nicole Atkins, which she recorded as a duet with Mark Lanegan. It runs a downright economical six minutes and twelve seconds, and features zero guitar solos. It’s funny; the first time I heard it, I assumed that Lanegan, who had been a Seattle grunge scene guy in the ‘90s, probably hated the song when it came out because it was on the other side of the coolness wars from him. When I read his memoir, I learned that he wasn’t at all invested in any of that, being infinitely more focused on finding and procuring heroin every day. Eventually, he got sober—because Guns N Roses bassist Duff McKagan, whom he didn’t even know, heard that he was going into rehab and offered to let him stay at his house in Los Angeles, away from the temptations he’d find if he went back to Seattle. He credited Duff, along with Courtney Love, with saving his life. Which all just made the rock and roll coolness war seem downright pathetic. Lanegan sings the hell out of his parts, along with Atkins, who always delivers.