Guns N’ Roses video director Nigel Dick has revealed Axl Rose’s original concept for the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” music video. Dick said the idea was changed because it was “too dark.” He spoke on the Appetite for Distortion podcast.
Dick described how the first concept came together and what it involved.
“The original idea came together over the one social meeting I had with Axl and Alan over lunch and was very dark,” Dick said. “[It] involved him being in a mental institution and looking through a window and there he sees his girlfriend on the other side of the glass.”
He then explained why the idea was dropped.
“Eventually somebody says, ‘You know what? This is too dark’ or ‘This is too expensive’ or ‘This just needs to be done in one day,’” Dick continued. “Whatever the conversation is, often the first idea is not the best.”
The version that reached audiences was much simpler than the story Rose first imagined.
Dick directed the clip, and it was filmed at Mendiola’s Ballroom in Huntington Park, Los Angeles. The ballroom had been a short-lived punk club in the early 1980s. The video shows the band rehearsing in the space. It was shot in grainy black and white, with crew members surrounding the band.
The girlfriends of the band members also appear in the video, including Erin Everly, the woman the song is widely associated with. Their presence gave the clip a personal feel. It was a long way from the psychiatric ward Rose had first pictured.
The mental institution idea was not the only dark concept Rose had. In a 2006 radio interview, he said another version of the video centered on drug trafficking. In that idea, a woman carrying a baby would turn out to be smuggling heroin.
Dick was behind the camera for the band’s early visual run. He directed the first five Guns N’ Roses videos. Unlike the cinematic productions the band later made for “November Rain” and “Don’t Cry,” the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” clip kept things raw. The song took about six months to climb the US charts. It reached No. 1 in April 1988.
