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Holed up in an old funeral home, the man
behind Nine Inch Nails has spent the last four years coping with loss
constructing a delicate & brutal masterpiece 1994
was the year Trent Reznor released The Downward Spiral, an unsettling opus that
details one man's descent to near self-destruction. It was also the year Toad
the Wet Sprocket had a Top Ten hit, O.J. Simpson was chased on TV and Kurt
Cobain committed suicide. It was only five years ago, but pop music has the
life span of a Sea Monkey -- maybe even shorter. Consider who shared the bill
with Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock '94: Deee-Lite, the Spin Doctors, Porno for Pyros, Arrested Development
and Jackyl. "At the Woodstock I did," Reznor recalls, "all you heard about was the Pepsi
logo on the fucking bird thing and how it was all about money. Bands were
getting shit-canned for doing it for money. Did anybody mention money this
year?"
In the last five years, rock music, according to Trent Reznor, "has taken
a big shit." It is a period he's glad to have missed. All the while he's
been lying in wait, hidden away like a Brazilian wood tick on the underside of
a branch. Sure, he put his hand to a few things: producing the soundtracks to
David Lynch's Lost
Highway and Oliver
Stone's Natural Born Killers, co-producing Marilyn Manson's Antichrist
Superstar and compiling Closure, a Nine Inch Nails video collection and tour
diary. While these projects only made his fans rabid for a Nine Inch Nails
album, he remained the Invisible Man. "All I really want to know,"
lamented a fan recently on a NIN Web site, "is, When will they tour? I've
never seen Trent in real life." Don't worry, Reznor is ready now. It just took some
time. First he needed to disappear. And then he found that reappearing wasn't
so easy. Reznor, adept at most things he puts his mind to, had disappeared
very, very well.
If you have a few hours, Trent Reznor can tell you what he's done in the second
half of the Nineties - a period he jokingly calls his "summer
vacation." He has brooded on the cliffs of California,
suffering his writer's block at a grand piano. He has lost his grandmother, the
woman who raised him after his parents separated, when he was five. He has lost
a close friend in Marilyn Manson, one of the two or three people he had allowed
into his life. He has spent two years of sixteen-hour days making a double
album called The Fragile that far outshines anything he has ever done. He has
traded drugs and alcohol for protein shakes and jet-skiing on the Louisiana
bayou. He has wondered whether he is capable of sustaining a relationship and
raising a family. And he has learned that he wants one.
Many of these changes and revelations have unfolded at Nothing Studios, in New Orleans,
the former funeral parlor that Reznor bought in 1995, in the midst of the
Downward Spiral tour. It is easy to tell when you are approaching Reznor's
recording compound: Goth girls start cropping up like speed bumps. Even on a
ninety-four-degree day, two vinyl-clad specimens are positioned at the gamy bar
across the street, eagle-eyed for signs of life. Nothing Studios has a
sand-colored stone facade and darkly tinted windows. It exudes a guarded
stillness, like a bank vault. The front door is not original. It is the door
that Charles Manson's minions passed through at Sharon Tate's house the night
they killed her and four others in 1969. Reznor rented the infamous Hollywood
Hills house at 10050
Cielo Drive
to record The Downward Spiral in 1993; he took the door with him before the
owners razed the place. There are security cameras at every entrance to
Nothing. Now that Reznor has finished The Fragile, he may need more of them.
One of Reznor's engineers, a stocky Colombian fellow, answers the door. A wide
staircase leads up to a large second-floor room where, presumably, bodies once
lay for wakes. Today it is filled with vintage arcade games: Robotron, Tempest,
Space Invaders. The first-floor living room boasts a worn-in black leather
couch, a large TV, a larger video collection (Twilight Zone episodes, John
Waters' entire oeuvre) and the six-foot canvases by artist Russell Miller that
were photographed for The Downward Spiral's artwork. Original animation cells
from the movie of Pink Floyd's The Wall line the halls. In the bathroom, a
print of the film's famous screaming face is Number 666 of a limited-edition
run. A homey kitchen is at the back of the building. Above the stove hangs what
could be a picture from Woodstock '99: a frat-looking guy projectile-vomiting
while his pleasantly surprised buds look on. No one is sure who took that
picture. It just showed up at the studio one day.
Next to the kitchen is a large metal door with a sizable lock. This is the door
to the control room, the room in which Reznor recorded ninety percent of The
Fragile. Inside, tons of gear - sound processors, guitars, effects pedals,
keyboards, computers - is meticulously arranged. Despite the massive
seventy-two-track mixing board and the security monitor above it, the room is
warm: rust-colored walls with a wooden floor, candles burning on every surface
and beige drapes hiding imaginary windows.
Reznor sits alone in a front office. The carpet and walls are deep blue. He is
busy at a buzzing blue Mac. So busy, in fact, that he doesn't notice the odd
little lady who has stopped outside his window. She's using its dark reflective
surface to comb down her hair.
Reznor's hair is short now; gone are the long black locks he once favored. It
is one of many things he has changed. "I was putting off doing this record
for a number of reasons," he says, "some conscious, some
subconscious. It's not like I've had this big, long career where I could become
tired of this, but I was disillusioned." Reznor is dressed in black jeans
and old black combat boots held together with electrical tape. He wears, as
always, one of an endless succession of black T-shirts that advertise his
fondness for Atari Teenage Riot, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow or Nothing
Records.
Reznor speaks deliberately and softly, in clear tones. He waits before
answering, seemingly composing entire sentences before letting them out into
the air. "When we started the Downward Spiral tour," he says, sitting
back on a nearby couch, "we were still kind of a small band. At the end of
two and a half years of touring, we got off the bus and everything was
different. I had money, and I had everyone kissing my ass, and I had friends I
didn't know I had -- or I thought I did. I saw myself change on tour, because I
could. It was like, 'You mean, I can treat you like shit and get everything I'm
supposed to? Great!'"
Reznor had everything he'd wanted for so long: the means to build an ideal
studio, the respect of his peers and free rein from his record label. "What
I didn't have," he says, "was spiritual satisfaction." As Reznor
does when something bothers or "chews at him," as he calls it, he
dived into another project, namely, producing the album that gave Marilyn
Manson a career, Antichrist Superstar. "That was just like staying on
tour, without going anywhere," Reznor says. "The Manson camp party
every night; there's something going on all the time. At the time I was in that
mind-set already, so that was appealing."
When the circus split town, the inevitable fallout occurred. "The party
left except for me," he says with a laugh, "and then I was supposed
to do my real work." But Reznor had lost his musical passion. Depressed,
he briefly saw a psychiatrist. "Then I decided I didn't want to go
anymore," he says. "I turned a corner and I didn't need someone
chewing at me to do things I didn't feel were right for me, like medication. I
don't want to fuck with that. But that whole procedure made me realize I didn't
like myself anymore and that I had to come to terms with certain things."
Reznor headed to a house in Big
Sur, California,
for a change of scene. He brought a few musical ideas - and a lot more
emotional baggage. “It just took me time to sit down and change my head and my
life around. I had to slap myself in the face: ‘If you want to kill yourself,
do it, save everybody the fucking hassle. Or get your shit together.’
“I thought Big Sur would be a nice break,” he says and smiles. “It was sheer terror.
Isolation on the side of a mountain, an hour from the nearest grocery store. I
really didn’t want to be by myself. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
Reznor’s loneliness was deepened by the loss of his grandmother and his split
with Marilyn Manson. The two went from trusted friends to bitter rivals;
reportedly the final straw came when Reznor heard that Manson wanted David
Bowie to produce the Antichrist follow-up, Mechanical Animals. “I don’t want to
get into a ‘he said, he said,’” Reznor says about Manson, “but to sum that
scene up, I think fame and power distort people’s personalities. He and I were
two strong personalities that could exist for a while, but things changed. I’m
not pointing fingers at him 100 percent, but some lines were crossed that
really hurt me when I was down - real down. He was a best friend, and it was a
shitty way to lose him.” Reznor gets up and looks at the door. “It’s hard. It
makes you rethink a lot of the things you thought were special: Were you blind
to them the whole time? How stupid was I? Listen, I don’t really want to talk
about this - that’s all I want to say. I’ve got to take a piss.”
And off he goes. It won’t be the last time. When our talk turns too personal,
Reznor is quick to end them by politely and firmly leaving the room.
Trent Reznor is a network of balanced contradictions - and all the richer for
it. His music can be as abrasive as chain saws or as melodious as birds - often
in the same four minutes. Until The Fragile, he worked almost exclusively with
machines but expertly wrung earthy warmth from their chips and bits. As much as
his music screams “Fuck you,” it whispers “Love me.” It can sound simple, but
it is meticulously crafted and complexly programmed. Reznor uncorks chaos but
has the intelligence to harness it. As industrial, distorted and thrashing as
Nine Inch Nails are, there is an inherent groove to the music that can’t be
learned - like Prince, like Sly Stone.
Reznor’s lyrics, he says, come from his gut. They are culled form journal
entries and are intensely personal yet tell us little of him. He engages in
microscopic self-editing and self-analysis, but he will be the first to tell
you that he runs from his problems. Above all, Reznor is driven, a man
possessed of a vision only he can fully see. He is the type who is most
inspired when his back is against the wall.
“I came to realize,” says Alan Moulder, producer of Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon
Collie and the Infinite Sadness, engineer for My Bloody Valentine and
engineer/co-producer of The Fragile, “that the best thing to tell Trent is that you
don’t think a song is working. If he thinks something’s beating him, he won’t
stop until he’s beaten it.” Moulder should know. He spent two years with Reznor
on this album, watching it grow from unfocused instrumental snippets into a
two-hour sonic journey - serving as a collaborator as much as a producer.
The two began with the bits Reznor had compiled, some ideas from Big Sur, most from afterward. “I
wanted to let what felt right come out without allowing myself to think about
where it was going,” Reznor says. “That’s also what made the record difficult.”
The experiments were unlimited: No clock was running. Reznor, who is
classically trained on piano and well versed in synth, found himself drawn to
guitars. “It’s typical of him,” Moulder says. “You know people saying ‘Rock is
dead.’ Everybody else is hanging guitars up, and he decided to do a guitar
record with solos and everything. He’s as good as anybody I’ve ever worked with
at conveying emotion with his playing. He’s always looking for an angle you’d
never think of taking.”
“I’m pretty studied in keyboard instruments,” Reznor says, “but I don’t
understand the guitar very well. There’s an imperfection to it that helped me
get a more emotional connection to the music: You can strum it with your hand
or bang it; it can go out of tune; certain notes buzz. Not to get super
literal, but it gives the album a more fragile feel.”
As the volume of material grew, the pair divided a grid of influences to keep
track of things. There were category headings like Tom Waits, Bone Machine;
Organic Funk; and Atari Teenage Riot. It was a way to set sonic goals. “Nothing
was ever suggested and not done,” Moulder says. “The unwritten rule was, ‘We’ll
try everything. We’d spend a day getting a load of cardboard boxes and a metal
barrel. We’d mike them up and he’d play on them. The marching sound on
‘Pilgrimage’ is actually bits of stuff that was shaken.”
At the end of a year’s time, Reznor had nothing but “an abstract blob” of a
record. He hadn’t started this album with a story line, as he had The Downward
Spiral. Now he needed someone to find one. Reznor and Moulder sent for Bob
Ezrin, producer of The Wall, a constant Reznor touchstone. Ezrin, who has
worked with everyone from Alice Cooper to Berlin, flew to New Orleans for one
week and powered through three of four different sequences until he nailed it. “The
most important thing about a continues listening experience,” Ezrin says,
living up to his Seventies rock legacy, “is defining the four corners of the
album first - the beginnings and endings of the first and second acts - while
staying true to the journey. It was important to fail two or three times. The
last failure opened so many doors that it fell into place in a matter of
hours.”
There is a journey at the center of The Fragile, one laden with dreamlike (and
nightmarish) imagery and unexpected twists. It begins ominously and ends
uncertainly, with a sense that space has been traveled but no destination
reached. The ocean is a recurring theme - sinking beneath it, rising from it,
looking to it for something or someone. Overall, it is an album to keep a
psychiatrist (or an armchair one) pretty busy: Is this a quest for
self-discovery? A map of the subconscious? A diary of a co-dependent
relationship? It could be all of them, and it could be none of them.
After he completes an album, long before it is on sale, Trent Reznor gives a
copy to each of his parents. Considering the subject matter - suicide, sex,
bondage - it must be squirmy. “It’s always a little awkward,” he says. “You
know, like, ‘I’m OK, I’m OK. Don’t worry about it.’” The album is different.
“It’s more about a sense of purity or morality and a preservation of that. It’s
about the search. And you don’t arrive at a nice tidy conclusion.”
The wind is pinning Trent Reznor's hair down and lifting his black T-shirt
almost over his head. He is sitting in the front of a forty-foot powerboat,
skipping over the waves off Nassau, in the Bahamas. After five days of nonstop rehearsals here, he and his band are
heading for a day off on a private island where the boat's captain will cook up
grouper stew and spiced rice for the band, crew and road managers. Reznor is
gnarled into the same posture he assumes onstage: shoulders rolled forward, arm
gripping a bar in front of him. But he is smiling, laughing and gleefully
looking around as the boat repeatedly jumps out of the water. Behind him,
keyboard player- programmer Charlie Clouser and guitarist Robin Finck clown
around, letting the wind catch their lips and distort their faces.
They aren't the same crazed crypt keepers who left a trail of smashed keyboards
across the country four years ago. They will be quick to tell you they've
changed - and that they needed to. It wasn't just Reznor who tried to live up
to the tour's name: The Self-Destruct Tour. Finck also had to find his way back
to earth. After speaking a lost year in New Orleans,
he joined Cirque de Soleil for a year as its guitarist. "It was exactly
what I needed - a 180-degree, polar-opposite change," he says. Finck then
spent time working with Guns n' Roses, a project he may return to after the
upcoming Nine Inch Nails tour. "I was with Axl for a little over two
years," he says, "and we recorded dozens of songs together. I'm
really proud of what we did as a band. I'm anxious to see how it's
completed." Well, will it be? "Oh, yes," Finch says, grinning.
"You may depend on it."
Nine Inch Nails are in the Bahamas
for three reasons: to prepare for the MTV Video Music Awards - their first
public appearance in almost four years - to make The Fragile road-ready for a
tour that will take up much of next year and to vacation while doing it. Before
settling down to work, they frolicked for a few days: swimming with Bahamian
Reef sharks, jet-skiing and snorkeling. "The music sounds better than it
did at the height of when we had our shit together before," Reznor says. "Our
drummer, Jerome Dillon, is really changing the sound." Dillon was one of
many who tried to land former drummer Chris Vrenna's spot. Vrenna - who left on
bad terms two years ago - was the only person aside from Reznor's manager who
had been around since Day One. "When Chris left the band," Reznor
says, "part of me was relieved. I miss him as a friend a lot. But it was
freeing on the musical level."
Nine Inch Nails have taken over Compass Point Studios, the facility that Chris
Blackwell built in the late Seventies to record Bob Marley, for whom he
couldn't t an American visa. In the woody main room where Marley recorded
Survival, Exodus and Kaya, the band has set up its gear. A second control room
serves as Trent's office, while the attached studio has been converted into a
gym. Reznor's Nautilus and stationary bike have been shipped from New Orleans. Nearby
is a table full of vitamins, protein powders and - aha, Reznor's real secret; a
bottle of Mega Creative Fuel.
When the band members settle in for rehearsal the night before our boat trip,
their chemistry is tangible. In conversation, Reznor is shy and thoughtful. Put
him in front of a mike and all of that changes. His body tenses, his arms flex
as he holds the mike above and in front of him, rocking it back and forth. The
band fiercely attacks older songs like "Suck," "Terrible
Lie," "March of the Pigs" and "Down in It" like it's
been at it for months. When it falls in on "Reptile," hot air streams
rhythmically from the stacks of speakers in the small room. There are only
three of us in this audience, but the band members are kinetic, playing with
closed eyes, bouncing up and down, as lost in it as they would be for 3,000. ("Rocking
in bare feet is not cool," Reznor says afterward. "Toe Stubbing is a
problem.")
The MTV Video Music Awards will mark Reznor's second television performance -
his first was Dance Party U.S.A.
Yes, back in the early days, before his debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, was
even released (attention, VH1 producers), Trent Reznor lip-synced on the raised
platform of that low-rent-Solid Gold show. "I told this publicist we
wanted to do it, completely out of my ass," he says. "Next thing I
know, we're booked. It was like mall people doing these crazy Hairspray dances.
Terrible. And, at the time, we had this keyboard player who was a fucking
idiot. When we were talking about what to where on the shot, he said, 'I'm
thinking about a sword.' I'm thinking, 'Is that some sort of cummerbund?' He
meant a real sword. He's probably dead by now. There's no way someone hasn't
taken him out."
Reznor guards the NIN mystique zealously. He has never played Saturday Night
Live, never sat in on Politically Incorrect. It hasn't been for lack of offers.
"I've worked hard at keeping Nine Inch Nails precious," Reznor says. "Everything
I do is secondary to the music. It's pretty easy, once you let your guard down,
for someone to say, 'Hey, want this Prada jacket?' Next thing you know, you're
some hive dude; Carmen Electra is on your lap and you're a rock guy that's full
of shit." That said, Reznor is looking forward to joining us, live and
worldwide, on MTV. "I like the challenges of flirting with the mainstream
with Nine Inch Nails. I think we can do it honestly," he says. "You
know, let Fred Durst surf a piece of plywood right up my ass."
Reznor is frank about today's clownish rock climate. "If you turn on MTV
right now," he says, grimacing as if a foul smell has found him, "I
bet Kid Rock is on there, judging something, giving something away with sumo
wrestlers and his pants on backward. But that doesn't seem inappropriate for
what he's trying to do." Reznor was recording during Woodstock '99 but had
it tuned in on TV. "It struck me as some of the worst shit I'd ever
seen," he says. "It was a dismal synopsis of everything that's bad in
music right now. The incredible lack of importance seemed to jump off the
screen at me. But it did make certain bands really stand out. I thought Rage
Against the Machine looked like the Second Coming of Christ."
After the night's rehearsal, Dillon, Finck and Lohner have a beer while
lounging around the hotel pool. They recall the injuries sustained during the
last Nine Inch Nails tour (broken fingers, bruised ribs, a severely lacerated
head). Reznor returns from the studio. "Is this the all-mall pool
party?" he asks, his chocolate-milk Weimaraner, Daisy, in tow. He says
good night and is gone.
The next day, on the private island, Reznor is the first off the boat, and he's
soon exploring every inch of what is basically a large sandbar with palm trees,
bordered by sharp rocks. It has been colonized by hermit crabs that caravan
over the sand and up the trees. "This one's in charge," he says,
pointing out a fist-size shell. "Pick it up; they don't bite," he
goads one of his sound engineers. He does and it does. "Did that
hurt?" Reznor asks with a sly grin.
Reznor moves to a stone stairway that descends into the water. Below it the ocean
is deep blue and tranquil. It is very different from Big Sur.
"You'd walk down this rickety ladder to this not-very-pretty beach scene:
crashing waves, moss-covered rocks, weird ocean life. It was scary," he
recalls. "It summed up a lot of things. Like, 'I should be enjoying this,
but I'm not.' It's a very spiritual, very cleansing place. But all that my
antennae were picking up were the bad parts." As hard as that time was, it
served Reznor well. "Daydreaming, just sitting out there became a
catalyst," he says. "It's a force that crops up in some of the
album's lyrics." And it's a force that seems to have washed away some of
The Downward Spiral's suicidal tendencies. "I had a little flirtation with
the bottom," he says, "and I don't want to be there. After Downward
Spiral ran it's course, I wound up at a pretty desolate place. It's one thing
to flirt with suicide when you're writing, it's another when you arrive there. It's
not as funny or romantic a notion."
The same goes for nihilism. "I'm still anti-organized religion," he
says. "I still think that's a crock of shit. But in my head, that spilled
over into an utter chaos outlook: 'I don't need anything, I don't need anyone,
and I don't need to believe there's any reason to anything.' it was a pretty self-centered
approach. I was lonely and has a bleak outlook on everything. I think people
have an inherent need for belonging, to feel they are a part of
something."
Reznor talks about working with other people in the studio and being closer to
people outside his career. "There's a shitload of things I've given up to
do this," he says. "I look at friends from other eras of my life who
are now married, paying off condos. They have that rock of stability and
normality that maybe they with they didn't have. It's like, 'Fuck, you've got a
lot in that life.'"
He often wants that life, too, but thinks he'll need to end this one first. "
When I do something, it's total immersion. I don't allow anything to get in the
way," he says. "I know what my life now can bring, and it's great
things - but there's a shallowness to it. I've been saying for a long time that
I wanted to raise a kid." He tosses a rock absent-mindedly into the waves.
"I'd want to wait until I wanted to dedicate a lot of time to a family. It's
not right this second."
Trent Reznor has other plans. He wants to start a new band, one that he's not
in. "I want to do everything I do for Nine Inch Nails and produce it, but
not sing," he says. " What I liked about producing Manson was that I
could help make the music better and not have any pressure on me." Calling
all divas: He has people collecting tapes and is looking for a female singer. "It
has to be the right thing - genreless and raceless, but soulful. Not Nine Inch
Nails with a girl singing." He also plans to tackle more scoring. "It
sounds kind of jive, but I like the idea of getting deeper into music and being
an icon." Hopefully, this will leave Reznor more time to make friends, of
which he has few. "I don't really have many friends," he says.
"When Christmas comes every year, I get a little bummed out because if I'm
not in a relationship, I don't have anywhere to go."
Where he usually goes is home: Mercer, Pennsylvania,
a small rural town far out in Amish country. He plays music and talks computers
with his dad, visits with his younger sister, her husband and two kids, and
returns to the house where he was raised to see his granddad. Everyone is
within twenty miles of one another. Though Reznor's parents have been separated
since he was five, they get along well. "I used to just thing it was a
little shitbag town I couldn't wait to get away from," he says. "That
motivated me a lot to succeed and drew me to things like sci-fi and horror
movies and Kiss. Anything that wasn't at all like Mercer, Pennsylvania."
Reznor has begun to accept and even embrace his roots. "Now I realize
there is a quaintness to Mercer that's kinda cool," he says, then smiles
and throws a sidelong glance. "Still, I don't think I'm moving back
there." Reznor has joined Eydie Gorme and Tony Batula, of Sixties pop
group the Lettermen, in the ranks of famous Mercians. For the sake of the town
square, let's hope they don't commemorate him with a statue. "I'd be the
first on to spray-paint it," Reznor says. "I'd put tits on it."
Midway through his thirties, Reznor finds that the majority of his friends are
younger, and he doesn't feel different - for the most part. "Thirty-four,"
he marvels. "Suddenly the balls lower a little bit. I only feel weird when
I look at someone else my age and think, 'Fuck, they're old.'" Reznor will
not be rocking when he's fifty. "I've thought about artists like Tom
Petty," he says, "who seem to have been around forever and still make
passionate music. I never get the sense he's putting on act for a generation he
doesn't belong to." The dark void of the generation gap is already
something Reznor has gazed into. "We did a show in New York," he
recalls, "and we brought in Adam Ant onstage. We're like, 'Fuck, yeah,
Adam Ant,' and the audience is looking up at us like, 'Who the fuck is that
guy?' They're all fifteen. I'm thinking, 'Oh, forgot. I'm older than
you.'"
Reznor pokes a Paleolithic-looking creature clinging to a rock. It doesn't
budge. "Do you mind if we take a break for a while?" he asks, eagerly
looking at the people goofing around on the beach. "I want to go hang out
with everybody for a bit." He walks back toward the group. Wait - where is
he going? He walks past them, to the water. He stares out at the setting sun
for a few minutes, letting the ocean lap at his feet. Then he turns around and
faces everyone. He doesn't look happy, he doesn't look sad. And he doesn't move to
join them.
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