Could "November Rain" have been bigger?

[Smoking Guns]

On the Classic Rock Station here in Birmingham, AL, they play the full version of Sweet Child and November Rain.  I love that!

[Dust N Rose]

Anyway, people that aren't rock fans find it too hard to listen to a song bigger than 5 minutes.  that's the reason why the radio stations prefer edited versions of the long-length songs.

[a fan]

I don't think whether or not a song is cut short will make a difference in how successful it is.  For mainstream success, all it needs is to be catchy.  And the video was certainly catchy. 

[Acquiesce]

I heard an edited version once on a NJ station. I forget the name of the station but the number is 93.7 if anyone knows what it is. I believe it plays more pop songs so that is probably why it was edited on that station. The edit was absolutely horrible. They cut off the entire ending with Slash's solo. So I think an edit would hurt the song more than help it.

[Lord Kayoss]

I remember it was the #1 music video on MTV for weeks.  It may have surpassed a month at the top spot.

[Johnnyblood]

So when "November Rain" was released there was no way they were going to make it more radio-friendly. I'm wondering, if they had, would they have had another top 10 hit as was the case with "Sweet Child"? Of course that wasn't Axl's purpose, he wanted his epic intact, but do you think the single could have been more successful?

Re-editing the same recording (the Illusion I recording) wouldn't have made a difference, in my opinion, but I think recording it differently, arranging it differently and making it shorter probably would have done some good as far as mass appeal.

From the first time I heard it, I've been hugely disappointed with November Rain. I actually like it more now than I did at first, but that's only because the high expectations have worn off and I can just listen to it as a GNR song. I'd been hearing about NR for about two years before the Illusions came out. I expected something breathtaking, something extremely intense. When I finally heard it, it sounded like a long, boring ballad with a pretty cool guitar outro, and that the outro got ruined by a blase chant about people needing people (didn't Barbra Streisand cover that territory in the 70s?).

I think most people who got excited about GNR in the beginning heard November Rain and thought, "Who are these pussies?" I know a lot of people here love the Illusions and NR, but the subject of this thread is how NR could have been bigger, and I think the length and arrangement (orchestral, even though it doesn't add much), amounted to a 'miss' with most radio listeners. These are the people you have to win over to be huge, not the disciples who love just about anything you do.

A few years after the Illusions came out, with the internet, I was able to dowload the NR demos. This gave me a new perspective on the song. I know it's Axl's song, one of his 'babies,' and he wrote it on piano. But for me, by far, the best version of NR is the short acoustic guitar version. It's much simpler, but I think that impact of that arrangement is more intense than the album version and the vocals are a lot more effective.

[ShotgunBlues1978]

I don't know how a song could be much bigger than November Rain.  Everyone knows it, everyone's heard it, and everyone knows at least the chorus to the song.