Nine Inch Nails emerged in the late 80s by offering something completely different from
the shiny radio pop of the day.
Millions of fans found a kindred spirit in frontman Trent Reznor and his emotionally
intimate songs.
Keep watching to discover what you may not have known about him.
As the chief creative mind behind Nine Inch Nails, Reznor became one of the coolest and
edgiest musicians of the 90s, an era positively lousy with cool and edgy rock stars.
But everybody's got to start somewhere, and Reznor's first forays into music were decidedly
not as unassailably hip as stuff like "March of the Pigs" or "The Perfect Drug."
After his parents divorced when he was six, he was raised by his maternal grandparents
just outside of Pittsburgh.
In 1995, his grandfather Bill Clark told People Magazine that Reznor was a good kid who spent
his time fishing, skateboarding, constructing model planes, and playing the piano.
His childhood piano teacher likened his jaunty playing to that of Harry Connick Jr.
That musical foundation paid off in school, as Reznor played tenor saxophone and keyboards
for the jazz and marching bands.
He was also a good enough musical theater performer for his classmates to name him "best
in drama."
His roles included Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
As a teenager, Reznor already had a gift for music, including an aptitude for the keyboard.
Luckily for him, when he graduated from high school in 1983, synth-driven new wave was
all the rage.
That gave him the chance to really go places with his band at the time, Option 30.
Far from the dark industrial sounds of Nine Inch Nails, Option 30 was primarily a bright
and sunny pop group.
Reznor played synths and occasionally sang.
Around that same time, he also played keyboard for a midwestern synth pop band called Exotic
Birds, although he departed after recording just one EP.
A few years later he jumped into a band with a higher profile, although it was a fictional
one, as he landed a bit part in the movie Light of Day, a 1987 drama starring Michael
J. Fox and Joan Jett as bar musicians.
Just two years after playing in this fake band, he would release his first Nine Inch
Nails album.
After studying computer engineering at Allegheny College for a year, Reznor moved to Cleveland
and paid the bills with a job adjacent to the music industry.
He worked as a handyman for Right Track, a recording studio later renamed Midtown Recording.
He applied the precision and attention to detail that he's famous for to his work as
he kept the place in order.
In 1995, Midtown owner Bart Koster told People Magazine,
"When that guy waxed the floor, it looked great."
Reznor was really there for a fringe benefit, as Koster let him have free range of the studio
during unbooked hours.
A lot of those sessions were spent just figuring out how to use all the production gear.
As Reznor told Kerrang! in 2005,
"I'd spent time at night learning how to record and engineer things, and I tried to work out
how my voice sounded.
I was playing everything myself."
It was during those studio downtimes that Reznor recorded Pretty Hate Machine, the first
Nine Inch Nails album, which reached stores in 1989 and boasted the hit single "Head Like
a Hole," a song that Reznor says took him just 15 minutes to write.
As he recalled,
"The fact that it produced this huge reaction really pissed me off because I hadn't agonized
over it."
The first single off Pretty Hate Machine was "Down In It," and Reznor hired visual artists
Benjamin Stokes and Eric Zimmerman to make a music video for it.
The concept for the video was that Reznor would be pursued through Chicago, then fall
off a building and play dead on the ground, splattered in blood.
Since the directors didn't have the money for a crane shot of a dead Reznor, they tied
a camera to some weather balloons, but then the wind carried the makeshift apparatus to
parts unknown.
So the video was completed and released without that final shot.
Meanwhile, around the time of the shoot, a Super 8 camera attached to weather balloons
landed on Robert Reed's farm outside Burr Oak, Michigan, more than 100 miles away from
Chicago.
Reed turned it over to authorities, who found grisly footage of what looked like someone
being killed.
The FBI eventually took over the case.
After about a year of investigating with little progress, the bureau sent out flyers to Chicago-area
schools to solicit tips.
Eventually, an art student saw the "Down In It" video on MTV and recognized the imagery
from a flyer he'd seen at school.
Soon afterwards Reznor finally got the opportunity to explain the whole situation to the authorities.
In 1992, Nine Inch Nails released Broken, an EP of brutal industrial metal.
Reznor commissioned a promotional mini-movie that was also called Broken.
The uncut version of that film has only ever been seen by very few individuals.
Reznor hired visual artist Peter Christopherson to make a horror movie that felt real, like
a snuff film.
He delivered, producing a 20-minute movie that included an individual being drowned,
a shot of a man preparing for his hanging, and another man being kidnapped and held hostage
in a basement.
Topping it all was a clip set to the song "Happiness in Slavery" featuring self-harm-inflicting
performance artist Bob Flanagan getting tortured by a machine and ground into meat.
Even Reznor found the whole project to be too extreme and over-the-top, and he thus
never commercially released it.
He did however make some VHS copies for a few friends, some of which were bootlegged
and discreetly traded.
"Happiness in Slavery" showed up on a 1997 Nine Inch Nails music video compilation, but
Broken in full remained a mysterious artifact.
However, in 2006 it showed up on illegal download sites, and in 2013 it appeared on Nine Inch
Nails' Tumblr page after it was posted on Vimeo.
The release was brief, though.
Within a few hours, Vimeo banned it for violating its "excessive violence" guidelines.
One of the singles off of Nine Inch Nails' 1994 album The Downward Spiral was "Hurt,"
a slow, emotional ballad about inner pain that sounded very different from "March of
the Pigs" and "Closer," two of the singles that preceded it.
But the original version of "Hurt" has been overshadowed ever since the legendary Johnny
Cash recorded a stark, stripped-down cover of it in 2002, just a year before he died.
Producer Rick Rubin asked for Reznor's blessing in advance of Cash's take, but then the Nine
Inch Nails leader received a demo.
In 2002, he told The Sun,
"I listened to it and it was very strange.
It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song.
Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend.
It felt invasive."
Reznor eventually got over those feelings, though.
As he put it,
"Having Johnny Cash, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, want to cover your song, that's
something that matters to me.
It's not so much what other people think but the honor that this guy felt it was worthy
of interpreting."
In 1997, two of the 20th century's most prominent experimental musicians collaborated, when
Trent Reznor and David Bowie teamed up for a twisty electro-pop song called "I'm Afraid
of Americans."
That came after Reznor remixed "The Hearts Filthy Lesson," which Bowie released in 1995,
the same year that Nine Inch Nails opened for Bowie on his Outside tour.
It was also during that time that Reznor found himself uneasy with sudden, massive success.
In 2016, in the wake of Bowie's passing, Reznor told Rolling Stone,
"My way of dealing with life was to numb myself with drugs and alcohol."
He knew that he was on a self-destructive path, but when he met Bowie, who had also
been through the ups and downs of fame, he saw someone who was at peace with himself.
The older rocker imparted guidance and advice.
One thing in particular that Bowie said that stuck with Reznor was:
"You know, there is a better way here and it doesn't have to end in despair or in death,
in the bottom."
Reznor hit bottom about a year later but then got sober, and some time after, he tried to
thank Bowie for all he did.
As he recalled,
"I started to say, 'Hey listen, I've been clear for...'
I don't even think I finished the sentence; I got a big hug.
And he said, 'I knew.
I knew you'd do that.
I knew you'd come out of that.'"
"There's kind of one pivotal point where we both seem to have the same sensibility."
One of the biggest rock albums of 2005 was Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth.
It was the group's fourth album overall and first in six years.
It debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart and spawned three number one alternative
rock radio hits: "The Hand That Feeds," "Only," and "Every Day is Exactly the Same."
So it was no surprise when the band received an invitation to perform at that year's MTV
Movie Awards.
They accepted the offer but then withdrew in late May about a week before the show.
Reznor planned to perform "The Hand That Feeds" while flanked with a photo of President George
W. Bush, which the network took issue with.
Reznor wrote on Nine Inch Nails' website at the time,
"Apparently the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me."
As for the network, a spokesperson said in a statement,
"While we respect Nine Inch Nails’ point of view, we were uncomfortable with their
performance being built around a partisan political statement."
Nine Inch Nails has never been a media-friendly pop act, what with their many loud and angry
songs about death, mental illness, and social decay.
But the world has nevertheless embraced them.
They've sold millions of records and received some of the music industry's highest accolades.
Some of that is fine with Reznor, but some of it isn't.
In 2011, he mused to The Hollywood Reporter,
"Why don't the Grammys matter?
Because it feels rigged and cheap - like a popularity contest that the insiders club
has decided."
That same year, he won an Academy Award along with Atticus Ross for the original score they
composed for The Social Network But he apparently holds the Oscars in much higher esteem than
the Grammys.
As he told The Hollywood Reporter,
"The movie side is interesting, challenging, different and rewarding in ways that I hadn't
experienced through my music career."
He told DP/30:
"I'd always been interested in the idea of scoring film, but I hadn't made any real inroads
to- It was one of the things on that pile that I was gonna get to."
Reznor was similarly pleased in 2020 when Nine Inch Nails were inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, an organization that the city of Cleveland made a play to host
back when Reznor worked in a drum machine store.
As he told Rolling Stone,
"It's crazy to think all these years later that, wow, against all odds, I wound up as
a part of that."
Shortly after the 2007 release of the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero, Reznor wrote a
blog post aimed at Universal Music Group, the parent company of his label, Interscope
Records.
He took Universal to task for what he considered an "absurd" price for the album in Australia.
While other major releases ran about $21.99 in Australian dollars, Year Zero cost $34.99.
So Reznor wrote,
"When I asked a label rep about this his response was: ‘It’s because we know you have a
real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out – you
know, true fans.
It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy.’
So…
I guess as a reward for being a ‘true fan’ you get ripped off."
At a concert in Australia a few months later, Reznor ranted against Universal a bit more
before offering a unique solution to his overcharged fans, as he declared,
"Has anyone seen the price come down?
Okay, well, you know what that means - steal it.
Steal away.
Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing."
Reznor subsequently parted ways with Interscope and Universal, and in 2008, he self-released
the Nine Inch Nails albums Ghosts I-IV and The Slip.
Deluxe physical versions of both projects were available for a fee, but otherwise, fans
could download them for free.
"For us, it's always about trying to find truth and be as honest with who we are."
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