Guns N’ Roses is an undeniable pillar of 80s hair metal, like them or not. But that kind of fame doesn’t happen overnight. Or maybe it does, but only in specific circumstances. Like being relegated to the late-night slot on MTV.
The band’s 1987 debut album, Appetite For Destruction, spawned several hit music videos thanks to record-exec-turned-director Nigel Dick. He directed “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Paradise City”, and “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, arguably Guns N’ Roses’ biggest hits. In his September 2026 memoir Music Video Mischief, Dick details how working with GNR made his career. Even though he didn’t really understand them at first.
However, GNR’s manager Alan Niven pushed Dick to work with the up-and-coming rock band. He listened to “Welcome to the Jungle” over and over again, and it didn’t click. But Niven wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wanted this music video director for Guns N’ Roses. As Dick wrote in his memoir, Niven told him, “You’re the only person I know who could handle them.”
The “Welcome to the Jungle” music video has somewhat of a loose narrative, which Axl Rose pitched to Nigel Dick. Axl arrives in Hollywood and sees a shop window full of TV screens, with a video on each one of him screaming while strapped to a chair. This is interspersed with performance footage of the band. It’s wild, nasty, and exactly what Guns N’ Roses were about.
Guns N’ Roses Get Rejected By MTV At First, But Things Quickly Heat Up for the Band
“Welcome to the Jungle” looked to be a hit. But when it was sent off to MTV for circulation, the channel rejected it. According to Dick, they’d missed an offending frame of stock footage in the edits. The frame briefly panned over a Coca-Cola machine, with the logo visible for a split second.
“MTV didn’t condone advertising unless it was connected with large amounts of cash paid directly into their coffers,” Dick wrote in his memoir. Editors worked the frame over to make the Coke machine look like a vague red blob, and Dick submitted the video to MTV again. They rejected it again. This back-and-forth submission and rejection occurred several more times, until MTV had enough.
“And then the really bad news arrived,” Dick recalled. “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.”
“Welcome to the Jungle” Music Video Was a Literal Overnight Hit
Back then, MTV could make or break a band by airing, or not airing, their music videos. So how did Guns N’ Roses manage to get on MTV when MTV didn’t even want them?
“The label pulled out the heavy guns,” Dick wrote. This involved going straight to David Geffen. The memoir quoted Geffen from the PBS show Inventing David Geffen, where he recalled, “‘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.’”
The “Welcome to the Jungle” music video got an MTV slot, but only after 9 p.m. However, things changed when the band brought Nigel Dick in again to shoot the video for “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. Things were heating up at MTV, and there was interest in Guns N’ Roses. The channel sent a representative to the set, and she also ended up in the video.
By the time everything was said and done, MTV was hot for Guns N’ Roses, and they put “Sweet Child O’ Mine” into heavy rotation. Safe to say, Nigel Dick may have started to “get” Guns N’ Roses after that.
Photo by Larry Busacca/WireImage
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