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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 celebrity is like because I’ve worked with them. My usual answer is I haven’t a clue. The beauty of the business I’ve been in all these years is all the wonderful people I’ve met and become friends with all over the world, but those people have mostly been camera folk, casting directors, producers and editors, grips and gaffers, art directors and location scouts. Going to lunch with the lead singer of a band was quite unusual.

The Axl I saw at lunch that day was a happy, funny young man. He had some ideas for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” which were quite dark. I also feared the ideas were expensive, but I nonetheless promised to write them up into a treatment. The video would open on a newspaper headline which said TOUR CANCELLED and pan down to a frame of Axl from the “Welcome to the Jungle” video — this picture would be captioned BRAIN DEAD? We’d see an ambulance racing past and then depositing Axl in a mental home wearing another white straitjacket similar to the one in “Jungle.” In a room full of male mental patients Axl would look through a window at an adjacent room full of female mental patients. Eventually, he would be transfixed by the image of Erin Everly, who would be equally transfixed on the other side of the glass.

As the lunch progressed, we mostly talked about Queen and the Electric Light Orchestra. In the end, that lunch with Axl produced an agreement between us that “Mr. Blue Sky” was a perfect pop moment and an open verdict on whether Out of the Blue would have been better as a single album.

Over the five videos I did for Guns n’ Roses, this was the only social interaction I had with anyone in the band. I’m not resentful or upset by this — this is the way my business has been. I’m part of a service industry, and my service is to provide great film. When I ask the plumber to come over to my house to fix a leaking tap I don’t expect to hang out and share my life story with him — I want him to fix my tap and then leave.

The treatment I’d written up was rejected. Alan rang me back — they simply wanted a performance video, and he had a location in mind: an old ballroom above a bank in Huntington Park. We could have the band rock out and shoot ourselves shooting the band, invite Erin and friends down and cut the whole thing together. The only problem we’d have to solve was clearing out the prodigious piles of pigeon crap we found in the building when we went to check it out.

The first attempt to shoot the video was cancelled at the last moment. When the plug is pulled just hours before work commences, the crew gets paid. I got half my fee and smiled all the way to the bank. A few weeks later, the shoot was postponed a second time: drummer Steven Adler was “ill,” and you can translate that any way you like. Once again, the crew got their cancellation fees, though I think, as I’d already pocketed a couple of thousand bucks from the first cancellation, I nobly (but foolishly) volunteered to put this delay down to experience and not submit another invoice.

Consequently, when, at the third attempt, we actually got our gear in the building I was not really optimistic that we’d roll any film — especially as Alan warned me that the band would appear on time but that Axl would arrive late and have to check out the building and see if the “vibe was right” before he’d agree to join in and take part. This was not good news. A rock band without a lead singer is no fucking use to anyone.

But I had noticed that a promising change was in the air. Firstly, someone from MTV was going to be on set with us. The young lady had specially flown in from New York and Alan had concocted a piece of simple blackmail. He wanted to put her on the dolly and have our “behind-the-scenes” film crew shoot her operating one of the cameras. If we used that footage in the video, then surely MTV would play the video, if only to show one of their own hard at work. Director of Photography Vance Burberry and his crew rolled their eyeballs, but we all understood that, though we saw ourselves as “creatives,” we were in the business of selling small round silver things, and if that’s what we had to do, we’d do it. When we’d shot “Welcome to the Jungle” I couldn’t recall seeing anyone from the label on the set, but there were lots of people from Geffen here, many of them wearing high heels and short skirts.

Suddenly a whisper went round the set. Axl had been spotted outside and was said to be climbing the stairs into the building. Everyone pretended not to notice but watched nervously as he prowled around, checking that everything was to his liking. An emissary was sent my way. Axl approved, and we were ready to shoot. Sighs of relief were audible around the building. The Assistant Directors scurried to and fro, getting everyone ready for camera.

Axl had suggested that it would be a cool idea if, just before the solo, he ripped off his leather jacket so he could really rock out in his T-shirt in the second half of the song. I concurred but asked if he could please remember to do it in every take at exactly the same point in the song. Axl said that would be no problem.

So, why now, halfway through the first take of the shoot, was Axl flailing his arm like a windmill with his jacket hurling around through space like a lasso? I yelled “Cut” at the top of my voice and everything stopped.

Axl — just like any self-respecting rock star would — had festooned his wrists with myriad bracelets, and the bracelets had got caught in the lining of the sleeve of the jacket. We figured out a solution and started over.

In the middle of take two it happened again. And take three and take four and take five. We were an hour into filming, and I hadn’t gotten a single run-through in the can. Alan wandered over and shooed away the women in their high heels. He leaned over me and whispered, “For god’s sake, get a full take now whatever happens. Axl is going to walk any minute.”

On take six we got lucky; from that moment onwards things proceeded according to plan. We’d started shooting at 4:00 p.m. and wrapped somewhere around 2:00 in the morning.

But we weren’t wrapped at all. Axl had other ideas. He was having so much fun he wanted to keep going. And so we went back to work. By 4:00 a.m. we’d completely run out of film. I pulled the plug and we all went home.

I had started regularly working with a wonderful editor named Michael Heldman, who was to become a lifelong friend. The two of us set about cutting the hours of footage into the “Sweet Child o’ Mine” video you know today. There was one problem — like most music video sets, no one was recording any audio, so when we cut in the shot of the panting dog before the music starts, we had no panting dog sound. We found a microphone, we rolled tape … and Michael started panting like a dog. We also didn’t have the sound of Slash plugging in his guitar, so I went home, cranked up my tiny practice amp and recorded the plugging-in guitar sound on my cassette four-track. Not exactly high fidelity, but no one has ever complained.

The next big issue for me was that Axl shimmied from side to side with an unusual snakelike move that struck me as effeminate and lame. It wasn’t rock and roll or tough. When Michael showed me the first cut, I instructed him to take that move out, every single shot of it. And then a woman in our office wandered into the edit bay and saw 30 seconds of the cut.

“What do you think?”

“I love those shots of Axl doing that sexy side-to-side dance of his. He’s gorgeous!”

I realized she fancied him. But, more importantly, I realized that what I hated was something that others seemed to really, really like. When she left, I turned to Michael. “All those shots of Axl shimmying from side to side — you know the ones I told you to take out? Put them back in — all of them. And see if you can find some more!”

Whether it was the shimmying, the gratuitous shot of the MTV employee pretending to operate the camera or the fact that people, a lot of people, were now buying copies of Appetite for Destruction, MTV was very enthusiastic about the video and there was no 9:00 p.m. restriction on this clip. It went into heavy rotation and was suddenly the hottest thing on the channel.

The next G n’ R video was “Paradise City.” Alan’s plan this time was a clever one. The Gunners were touring the States opening for Aerosmith, who were also on Geffen. They had a date at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, so why don’t we go and shoot them there and “borrow” the huge Aerosmith crowd to create the impression that G n’ R were already massive enough to draw tens of thousands? Within a few months, the band would be able to draw a crowd of that size on their own, but for now it was a bit of a white lie. If we pulled it off, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The icing on the cake was that, immediately after the Giants Stadium show, the band were going to fly by Concorde to England to appear at the Donington Park heavy metal festival. I would get to go back to England with the band, on the Concorde no less, and shoot more footage there in front of another massive crowd.

Giants Stadium was sunny and bright. We were rolling film during soundcheck, and Slash was perched on the edge of the stage with his guitar wailing, wearing only shorts and boots.

Alan Niven sauntered over and told me that Axl would not be available to talk before they went onstage, so was there anything I needed to know before showtime?

Me: When will the band be playing “Paradise City”?

Alan: When do you want them to play it?

Me: Third song in would be perfect.

Alan: Why third?

Me: We only have four cameras. The magazines on the cameras should last through the first two songs, so if we change mags before the start of the third song, we can make sure that all cameras are fully loaded when they do “Paradise City.”

Alan: I’ll go and check with Axl.

Alan returned five minutes later, chuckling.

Alan: Axl said he doesn’t know where “Paradise City” will be in the set. All he knows at this point is that it definitely won’t be third!

Me: Seriously?

Alan: Seriously.

I rolled my eyes and went to the office at the back of the stadium, where my four monitors had been set up, and tested the talk-back system. At a live show you give each camera operator a headset and a transmitter/receiver so you can give them instructions on what you want them to shoot. Everything was working perfectly, and I paced nervously, waiting for showtime.

The cameras started rolling the minute the band appeared behind the massive stage, ready to go on. On my monitors, I saw Axl for the first time that day. He’d gone full Hollywood rock and roll in a white leather jacket and pants. Slash was wearing a Hard Rock T-shirt with a difference — instead of L.A. or New York or London, the location printed on the shirt read “Hell.” I chuckled to myself and wished the crew good luck as the band raced onstage. Down in the guts of the arena I could hear the crowd roar and the first dull thuds as Steven Adler tested his kick drum. I heard the count-off for the first tune, the band launched into their set …

… and all the monitors in front of me promptly turned to snow and static! We’d tested the video transmitters after soundcheck and everything had worked perfectly but, when that massive PA system started belting G n’ R out to a packed stadium, the soundwaves were so powerful that the transmitters couldn’t cope. Occasional images drifted in and out of the static as if the band members were in a hurricane on Mars. I tried my best to direct the cameras to shoot useful angles. I didn’t dare look around, but I sensed Alan over my shoulder boring holes in my back. I still had no idea when “Paradise City” would appear in the set. This $200,000 job was turning into a white-knuckle ride in a snowstorm; I now knew what must have been going through the Big Bopper’s mind as he and Buddy Holly took off on their final fateful flight.

And “Paradise City”? They played it third!

The months passed and Alan Niven called me again to say the band had made an EP, and we were going to make a video for “Patience.” The band had an idea that involved a recording studio setup and a collection of hotel scenes.

We shot the studio scenes at the Record Plant in Hollywood. Axl whistled his way through the tune; Slash slumped in a chair and let his hair fall over his face. I kept asking him to look up and reveal himself, but he ignored me and then was upset when he couldn’t see himself in the final edit. The hotel footage was shot at the Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard. I’d shot the Temptations there when I first moved to L.A. The hotel had still been open then, but now it was a neglected dusty mausoleum, a memory of a bygone glamorous age. In other words, the perfect place for a film crew to go about their business and make as much noise as we wanted.

As each bandmember had his own vignette, it became clear that the vibe between them had changed. When we’d shot “Welcome to the Jungle” there was a clear impression of them as a solid social unit — five lads together against the world. But now, with some success and thousands of road miles under their belt, they were five distinct organs all pulling in different directions, no longer with the same unity of purpose. It happens with all bands eventually, but I felt it was happening particularly quickly with G n’ R.

There was a final hurrah with the band when we shot the video for “It’s So Easy,” which in the end did not show me in the best light. The idea called for Axl and Erin to be seen in various scenes involving bondage. Whips and gags were the order of the day; those moments would be intercut with live footage shot in Hollywood’s Cathouse. When I delivered the treatment to Anne-Marie Mackay, now my rep at Propaganda, she refused to allow us to be associated with it. I’d like to say that I did the right thing but, as always, I wanted to get the gig and pressed onwards despite her objections. Looking back, I believe she was right, but it says a lot about my work ethic (or not, depending on your view) that I put the blinkers on and just pressed onwards to get the job done. The scenes between Erin and Axl were shot with Axl making most of the crucial decisions on set as I was too embarrassed to really get behind the idea. Axl eventually contacted Vance, my DP, directly to shoot the footage of him and two girls making out in the car.

The live footage at the Cathouse was shot during a crazy live show in a packed club with the P.A. cranked to the max. There were no monitors for me to watch, and my directing consisted of pushing through the sweaty bodies and pointing frantically to tell the cameramen what to shoot. My abiding memory of that night is sitting on the hood of my car talking to a crew member on the street after the show and watching David Bowie leave the club alone. He gave us a brief, limp smile as he passed and then disappeared into the night.

As we were completing the edit, Slash stopped by the edit room to check it out. He arrived carrying a beer bottle as if still in the role we’d first seen him play in “Welcome to the Jungle.” After he approved the cut I walked him to the door of our office. He draped his arm around me. “Y’know Nigel, we need to go out and drink sometime.” What could I tell him but the truth? “Slash, I don’t really drink!”

As his arm slipped from around my neck and he stumbled for the door, I heard him say, “Weird!” **

We sent a cut of the video to the label, where it remained in limbo for many years before being released with the 30th anniversary edition of Appetite for Destruction.

For the next few years, a manager or label person would hire me to shoot their hair metal band and say, “Do for my lead singer what you did for Axl Rose.” And I would accept the gig, knowing in my heart that I was involved in a fool’s errand. For all their faults, the original Guns n’ Roses were a magic collection of parts that created a greater whole. And no one was ever going to match Axl, let alone be a better version of him. God knows, I certainly tried to do my best.

I get calls every few years from journalists wanting to talk about the videos I made for the band. I go on YouTube to watch them again to see if there’s anything I’ve forgotten. The final irony is that, when I watch the videos, I finally get Guns n’ Roses. I didn’t understand at the time what they were about; it seems I had to make the videos so that I and the rest of the world could see what it was that made them tick.

Slash was certainly right: Weird.

* These remarks are documented in the PBS American Masters show Inventing David Geffen.

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**I saw Slash again 30 years later when I shot some interviews for his blues project — he was charming, sober and lucid.

This Excerpt from Music Video Mischief, published by Trouser Press Books is © 2026 Dickfilms, Inc.