Nigel Dick Details Guns N' Roses Music Video Success in New Memoir Excerpt

Carjacked Trailers and Missing Drummers: How Guns N’ Roses Became Music Video Superstars

Director Nigel Dick shares the stories behind the visuals for "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," and "Sweet Child o' Mine" in excerpt from new memoir

By Jon Blistein

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September 15, 2026

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Nigel Dick was a “record company guy who thought he could direct” when he boarded his plane from London to Los Angeles in 1985. But, as he writes in his new memoir, Music Video Mischief , out today (Sept. 15), from the moment he stepped off the plane, if anyone asked what he did, he was definitive: “I was a film director.”

Luckily for Dick, Los Angeles has always been amenable to strivers, even if their journeys require some fake-it-til-you-make-it. Over the coming decades, Dick became one of the most innovative and in-demand music video directors in the world, helming blockbuster videos for Black Sabbath , Oasis, Celine Dion , Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Nickelback, Cher, and R.E.M.

But the band that helped make Dick’s career was Guns N’ Roses. He directed three of the band’s videos from their landmark debut, Appetite for Destruction — “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City,” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” — as well as their 1989 clip for “Patience.” In this excerpt from Music Video Mischief , Dick writes about his experiences working with GNR, including anecdotes about his one-on-one conversations with Axl Rose and the time Slash carjacked a trailer on set. Dick also opens up about how he admittedly “didn’t get” Guns N’ Roses when they first started working together, but came to understand them better through helping craft their distinct visual identity.

Welcome to the Jungle

In his second great rock and roll history book, Uncommon People , David Hepworth kindly credits me with creating the opening sequence of Guns n’ Roses’ first video, “Welcome to the Jungle,” in which Axl steps off the bus for the first time in Hollywood, a blade of straw in his mouth, Izzy offering him drugs and a hooker asking him if he wants to party. I would like to take full credit for coming up with this sequence, but sometimes the smartest thing a director can do when someone offers him an idea is to simply say, “Sounds good. Let’s do that!”

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I have a policy about starting a new project: keep your eyes and your ears open and figure out who on that job is wielding the most power. Keep that person on your side, and you’ll make your life a lot easier. Sometimes it’s the lead singer, sometimes it’s the record company/film company boss, sometimes it’s the actor’s agent, sometimes it’s the guitar player’s wife and sometimes it’s the lonely record company gal with an axe to grind. In Guns n’ Roses’ case, it was Alan Niven, their leather-jacketed manager. And it was Alan who’d pitched that memorable opening sequence to me, except that Alan’s style wasn’t so much about pitching as telling me what we were going to do.

“Welcome to the Jungle” was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard. I didn’t get it. To my eternal shame, I understood what made Great White tick but G n’ R were the first sign that I was no longer on the sharp end of all things musical. Great White loved the sound of Led Zeppelin and all the bands I loved. All they wanted to do was sound like Led Zeppelin — and did a passable job of just that. Guns n’ Roses were Zeppelin fans, too, and also cited the Pistols (who I liked) and Aerosmith (who I didn’t), but they wanted to take those influences and leap forward into the future. I wasn’t yet ready to take that leap with them.

I listened to “Jungle” a few times and told Alan I couldn’t or wouldn’t do the video. I was also busy doing videos with Was (Not Was) and the Japanese metal band Loudness. Knowing I had another Great White video coming, I already had enough on my plate.

Alan wouldn’t take no for an answer. It wasn’t just that he thought I was the right guy for the job, he seemed to think I was the only guy for the job. Other directors had apparently been considered but had either not passed the test or had turned the gig down flat. Whether it was true or not, he begged me to do him a favour and direct the Gunners’ first clip because, “You’re the only person I know who could handle them.”

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Alan and Axel (as I then thought his name was spelled) had come up with an idea which involved Axl stepping off a bus in Hollywood and hanging out in a motel room with the other guys and some babes. Axl would see himself on a TV screen in a shop window strapped to a chair and screaming, Clockwork Orange style, as he watched violent newsreels. All of this would be intercut with performance footage of the band playing in a large room in the Park Plaza Hotel. When I typed out the treatment for everyone to approve it barely filled one side of a page.

Videos, like most pieces of film, are frequently made without enough money to pay for the ideas that are going to make them work, so we picked an empty store across the street from our offices on La Brea as our prime location and filled the shop window with TV sets. The shop front was soon tricked out to double as Axl’s chair set and the room out back was filled with cheesy furniture to look like a motel room. A loop of lurid TV footage had been obtained from a stock house. We were ready to roll.

Axl sat in his chair and screamed his head off. I was too inexperienced, nice and, well, English to suggest he should get wild, but he didn’t need any prompting from me — he went nuclear, cutting himself badly on the wrist restraints the art department had built for his chair. I wasn’t directing Axl — he was directing himself.

Meanwhile, across the street where our motorhome was parked, nothing was happening. Slash, obviously bored, thought it would be fun to take the moho for a spin. Without warning, it lurched into life, did a screeching U-turn on a busy city street full of Mercs and Jeeps doing weekend shopping and started off up the street towards Sunset before Slash was relieved of his self-elected driving duties and the motorhome came to a halt. I saw Alan dragging Slash by his collar, barefoot, back across the road like a scolded child. It seemed that the master guitar player was getting into character and, like the wino he played in the video, had already been at the sauce.

The morning of day two found us at the Park Plaza Hotel — a location used for dozens of features and hundreds of music videos. We were preparing for the performance section of the video — what I like to call the skeleton — when Slash came bounding up, all contrite and full of smiles. He apologized profusely for taking the motorhome miles away from set the night before, up into the Hollywood Hills, before completely wrecking it in a canyon. I accepted his apology, appalled at the damage he must have caused on this second car-jacking spree. I hunted down my producer, Lisa Hollingshead, to find out what the damage had been and learned that there had been no second spree at all — apparently, the original U-turn and 100-yard dash up La Brea had seemed longer and more colourful and disastrous to Slash than it actually was. The motorhome was currently in the parking lot — shiny, new and undamaged.

I’d reminded Lisa that having alcohol on set was a no-no in California and made her promise that the band would not be able to get at the hooch while we were filming on the second day. Slash’s apology, it turned out, was not so much a plea for forgiveness as a prelude to asking that I lift the embargo and let him get at the sauce before lunchtime.

Before the crowd of extras arrived later in the afternoon, we were going to shoot close-ups of the band, which we would later intercut with the crowd shots. First in front of the camera was Axl. I’d heard him telling someone earlier that he was going to tease his hair into an enormous fright wig — something he’d obviously done before — and that after the video was shot he’d never do it again. Sure enough, he came out with the massive ’do that would later define a musical genre: hair metal. After one take — which is usually not worth the celluloid it’s printed on, as the crew and the artists find their feet — Axl mumbled something about being freaked out and disappeared back into the depths of the building. He was not seen again for another two hours. As plans go, my plan for the evening was now burning in flames. While I prayed for Axl’s return, we pressed on with close-ups of Slash, Izzy, et al.

I went home when the night was done, exhausted and confident that my time with the band would not be repeated, as we clearly had nothing in common. Climbing into my VW Golf, I saw the band disappearing into the night, followed by a horde of willing and nubile young things.

The edit was subsequently completed to everyone’s satisfaction and sent off to MTV, who promptly rejected it. Unnoticed by me (and everyone else), we’d included a piece of stock footage which very briefly, like a frame or two, panned past a Coca-Cola machine whose logo was just about recognizable. MTV didn’t condone advertising unless it was connected with large amounts of cash paid directly into their coffers. Video effects back then were in their infancy and costly, but Geffen authorized an overrun and the errant Coke machine was transformed into an anonymous red blob. The video was resubmitted and rejected again. And fixed again. And then the really bad news arrived — MTV simply didn’t want to play the video at all. Too edgy, too heavy, too real, too violent, too loud, too sexy? Who knew? They simply didn’t want anything to do with it.

With the important Christmas sales season coming up, the label pulled out the heavy guns. David Geffen: “I called my friend Tom Freston [at MTV] and said to him, ‘Just play it in the middle of the night. Don’t report it, just play it and let’s see if there’s a reaction to it.’” *

Tom Zutaut, the A&R man who signed G n’ R: “Sometimes there’s that one thing that pushes someone’s exposure … and in this case, that one thing that David did made all the difference in the world … from a band that was dead at 200,000 to a band that sold almost a hundred million.” *

And so it was agreed the video would be played once a day but only after 9:00 p.m. The hair metal craze was off to a very jumpy and problematic start.

I forgot about Guns n’ Roses and concentrated on that Was (Not Was) video I was planning. Then Alan Niven called again. Christmas had passed, “Welcome to the Jungle” was still being played and it seemed something might be happening out there in MTV land. There was going to be a second video called “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Axl was dating Phil Everly’s daughter Erin and was rumoured to have written the song about her. This was the second G n’ R track I’d heard, and I didn’t like this one much either, though I thought the guitar solo rocked. Instead of presenting me with an idea for the video, Alan suggested I meet him for lunch at a swanky L.A. watering hole. He would bring Axl.

I’ve occasionally been asked what this musician or that c

_Originally reported by [Rolling Stone](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/guns-n-roses-music-video-book-excerpt-1235616883/)._