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RIP
März, 1992
The Sound and the Fury
Autor: Mike Gitter
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Trent Reznor feels used at 26 years old. Not counting Mr. Rogers, he’s the only person out of the nowheresville of Mercer, Pennsylvania, who actually made a name for himself. A gold record. Opening gigs for Guns N’ Roses in Europe. A crowd favourite on this summer’s Lollapalooza road show. An MTV darling. If only I felt that good. It doesn’t. Trent Reznor’s been bought and sold. He’s spent the past two years battling and burning. And burning. And burning. H single-handedly spearheaded Nine Inch Nails’ exercise in discomfort. The supremely unbalanced, methamphetamine techno-pop crunch of his debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, jammed itself into the guts of millions. The guy’s so honest, it hurts – and the pain is what sets him free. If only it was that easy. “I’m a commodity Reznor says with a sigh of resignation. “I’m a slave to somebody else’s whims. Once I foolishly and naively believed that making music, making records, was an act of art, an act of purity. It’s certainly not about that. It’s about money and product. It’s about ripping people off and breaking them down. It’s killing me.” Now ready to record his follow-up, Trent _Reznor is living out the downward spiral Pretty Hate Machine hints at; the vinyl torture sound-bytes of agony that make up the computer-generated art brut of “Head Like A Hole”; the crash of metal on metal that is “Terrible Lie”; “Something I Can Never Have’s” dirge diary of hurt. This is industrial-rock pain with enough poppy hooks to hang a handful of hits on. As the band’s founding and only actual member (other musicians are recruited for touring purposes), Trent’s made a career out of misery. These days that angst is eating away at him, consuming him, overcharging a hate battery that explodes into a million pieces of razor-tipped shrapnel every time Nine Inch Nails hits the stage. It started innocently enough. Reznor grew up in Mercer, “Rural-ville, USA,” he says. “It was the sort of place where, when you get together with your friends, the only thing you dream about is getting the f?!k out.” His parents split up when he was young, and he was brought up by his grandparents, with whom he admits family life was “normal enough”. He grew up listening to Queen, Kiss and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “That was the perfect record,” he recalls. “If I was confused or bummed out, I could put on a certain side of that, and I felt better. It made me feel almost normal, hearing someone who was more depressed than me!” Then came the Cure and Depeche Mode records, discs that struck a chord in Trent, a troubled kid with enough drive to get out of a place where most of the people he knew in high school “ended up pumping gas.“ From an early age he knew what he wanted: to start a band. “It was the only thing I wanted to do,“ he smiles. “I think I saw American Bandstand when I was very young, and it somehow became my ultimate dream. You can‘t go to college to do that, so I just put myself in situations where I could get the education I needed.“ He played keyboards in several bad new wave bands, including an early, much poppier incarnation of Nine Inch Nails, which he dismisses as “a learning experience.“ Reznor ended up in Cleveland, where he got a job selling computer software for electronic music. “This led to a prestigious job at a local studio as an assistant coffee maker!“ he grins. The dream became an obsession, as Trent spent night after night in the studio, recording demos that would become the early impetus of Nine Inch Nails. “I reached a point a few years ago where I wasn‘t really doing anything,“ he says. ‘I was a f?lking bum. I had never really worked my ass off at anything before. Then I asked myself what would happen if I did. I really threw my life out of balance, gave up my friends, gave up my any personal life, and went into music full-time.“ Judging from Nine Inch Nails‘ holocaust you can dance to, Reznor plays it like a man pushed screaming into an emotional black hole. Ironically, he insists he‘s not quite the tortured, angry soul, the emcee of pain and suffering, he appears to be on Pretty Hate Machine and during Nine Inch Nails‘ harrowing live gigs. “Maybe I’m a little depressed sometimes, certainly a bit unsettled,“ he admits. “Otherwise, I’m boring. I grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college and dropped out. Sorry, I didn‘t grow up living in 20 countries, I didn‘t have a heroin habit, and I‘ve never been a male prostitute. People come up to me all the time and say, God, you must be the most depressed person!‘ Yeah, I was de pressed when I wrote the album, but, you know, if I wrote a novel about going around and killing people, that doesn‘t mean I‘m going to do it. I like to project things beyond what they normally are. In this case I think I projected myself to the ultimate degree of being bummed out! “When I did Pretty Hate Machine, I had nothing,” coffee achiever Reznor continues. “Plus, a lot of things were f?!king with me on a personal level—relationships, lack of religion, lack of a belief system, lack of morals or morality. The whole process of writing the album was incredibly isolating; working in the studio during the day, and recording at night. I figured the more emphasis I put on having a normal life, the less id put into music. It was pretty interesting to abandon one side of things just to see what I could accomplish. Who says there has to be some balance between music and sanity?“ Trent Reznor, the man who is Nine Inch Nails, has been testing that sanity ever since. Two years ago he sold his soul to TVT Records and its president, Steve Gottlieb, “a new type of psychopath. The young I-think- I ‘m-an-artist-entrepreneur-f?!khead-record guy,“ Trent seethes. “He was a third-rate Wall Street lawyer with Mom‘s money financing his endeavors. All of a sudden he decided it would be a lot more fun, and his chances of getting laid would be much increased, if he was a record-company president.“ From there, it‘s been a battle every step of the way. ‘I got the whole line about TVT being an artist-based label, creative control, blah, blah, blah.“ Trent laughs sardonically. ‘I now tell aspiring young bands, if you hear those words, run out the door immediately!“ When Reznor delivered Pretty Hate Machine, recorded with a bevy of heavyweight producers—including Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc (Tackhead), Flood (Depeche Mode) and John Fryer (Love And Rockets) —Gottlieb dismissed it as an “abortion,“ and demanded that it be remixed and retitled. “Believe it or not, he said, ‘Pretty Hate Machine? That‘s not the title of a million-selling album,‘ “ Trent snarls, incredulously. “And, ‘Why are you, well, so.. .upset?‘ My God! Every step since then has been so defeating and so unnecessary. I‘ve been wasting energy battling about the dumbest things. ‘You can‘t use this artist you like [ do the cover] because he‘s gay.‘ It‘s been dressed up as every other possible reason, but it comes down to just one thing—a certain artist that we wanted to use is a homosexual, and Steve Gottlieb has a problem with that. It‘s ludicrous.“ Nine Inch Nails and TVT Records have barely spoken since. For the past year there‘s been dead silence and a growing mountain of contempt between the two. “What I was hoping was, now that the record has started taking off and we‘re doing really well, Steve would say, ‘What the f?lk, I was wrong, okay?‘ All we want is for him to leave us alone and just let us do what we want to do,“ Trent sighs. “Now it‘s, ‘Oh, you sold 500,000. Y‘know, you probably could have sold five million!‘ What does the guy want me to be? Vanilla Ice?“ Whatever gains Trent Reznor‘s made, he‘s made for himself. The tours with Jesus & Mary Chain and Peter Murphy, and the Lollapalooza dates, were obtained on NIN‘s own Initiative. Imagine if they had a record label that was actually behind them! The mind boggles. “Y‘know, we didn‘t even give TVT an itinerary for Lollapalooza!“ Reznor declares. “There‘s an incredibly funny scene I remember backstage at the L.A. show,“ he says, beaming. “There were several record-company heads, including Rick Rubin, who is a friend of mine, hanging out. I look across the catering area, to the rope the civilians are kept on the other side of. There‘s Steve Gottlieb standing at the rope with no pass, watching the Billboard all-star record-label-president lineup talking to US. I looked at him and felt good for a minute about how humiliating that must have been. For one moment it felt like a small victory - especially when he did eventually get back there, and I had him escorted out in a fuIl-nelson!“ Playing live has become Reznor‘s electro shock therapy. The months of anger and strain have reached their apex, with Nine Inch Nails now instituting an unwritten scorched-stage policy that ends virtually every gig in mayhem. Guitars smash. Keyboard banks slam hard against the ground. The stage looks like a war zone by the time Trent and his merry band (including guitarist Richard Patrick, whose brother, Robert, played the evil T-1000 in Terminator 2) finish up. It‘s demolition after demolition. Pure audio carnage. In the past six months Nine Inch Nails have been responsible for the untimely demise of 15 keyboards and well over 50 guitars. “Dollar value?“ Trent smirks. “I don‘t even want to know.“ Adversity, snafus and violence have become the man‘s calling card. Fact is, the avid Splatter-film fan genuinely gets off on scaring the shit out of the unwary. “There has to be danger,“ he pronounces. “We have to instill a sense of tear in our audiences and in ourselves. Rock ‘n‘ roll deserves that.“ Precisely the attitude that caught the attention of one Axl Rose. Seems that Axl, duly impressed with Nine Inch Nails‘ appetite for decimation, called Trent in the middle of last summer‘s Lollapalooza dates and asked him to open two of the Gunners‘ European stadium shows: Mannheim, Germany, and at London‘s Wembley Arena. “Axl came backstage L.A.,“ Trent recalls. “I didn‘t know if it was backstage bullshit or what, but he called me back several times. I tried to figure out why Axl Rose is a big fan of ours. Why does he like us? I think there‘s a lot comparisons you can draw between the two bands. I think we‘re both sincere what we‘ve got to say, even though I don‘t necessarily agree with everything he‘s saying. He‘s a pretty convincing live performer. When he sings, it sounds like he means it. I think you could say the same thing about us. To me, both Appetite for Destruction and Pretty Hate Machine are very real records.“ The pairing of Reznor and Axl was, best, an unlikely meeting of metal and electro. “Mannheim was a disaster,“ Trent recalls. “They wouldn‘t even give us a chance. We didn‘t have long hair, we weren‘t Skid Row, we weren‘t for them.“ Wembley went “a little better,“ he says. “It was pretty clear the people there wanted a rock show with all the rock trappings— but they didn‘t get that from us.‘ What they did get was a tense, neurotic, no-pain-no-gain, industrial strength bludgeon from a machine its ringleader jokingly refers to as “some synth faggot band.“ It‘s a tag that just doesn‘t apply here. Sure, Nine Inch Nails has a lot more in common with Skinny Puppy than Skid Row, and sure, they do play with their fair share of prerecorded bass lines and triggered samples. So what? Nine Inch Vanilli, this ain‘t. It‘s more like rollerball. “When we were asked to do the Guns N‘ Roses dates, I didn‘t think we‘d go over that well, but I thought if 10% of the crowd thought, Hey, that was pretty cool, and if they suddenly realized, Hey, that‘s a synthesizer on stage. God, I never listened to electronic music; I’m into real rock. Well, f?!k you, this is just as intense as that, just as honest, just as brutal, just as mean. In my case, it‘s just coming from a more fragile, more disturbed view point.“ A point of view that‘s festering and growing more incendiary. Trent Reznor now lives in New Orleans, a city where he knows no one, so he can slip back into isolation and begin work on the follow-up to Pretty Hate Machine. He‘s exhausted; too burnt to support Guns N‘ Roses in the States despite Axl‘s invitation, physically bruised and battered from two years of touring, and an emotional wreck from countless record company screaming matches. His career, his life, remains out of his control. The record company that once told him his honest outpouring of naked emotion was an “abortion“ has sniffed green and will be damned if they ever let Trent out of what has become a very lucrative contract. “We‘re on this ego-based little label that has not only lied to me, but also ripped me off for gigantic sums of money,“ he sighs. “I’m locked into a contract with someone who‘s a f?lkin‘ asshole, and I’m going to be free of him one way or another.“ Till then, terrible Trent will be in his newly built home studio, burning. The way it‘s going, expect a record sometime next year that‘s going to make Pretty Hate Machine sound like a Whitney Houston album! “I used to think a song like ‘Head Like a Hole‘ was pretty dangerous,“ Reznor admits. “Now I hear it getting played next to Mariah Carey! I’m just starting to write the next record now, and it‘s definitely going to be as musically and lyrically mean and angry as possible. I don‘t expect there to be much MTV or radio support, that‘s for sure. It‘s just something I‘ve got to do right now, something I‘ve got to get out of my system!“ Thus spake Trent Reznor, a man with a head full of hate. |
