As their noisy arrangements and visceral lyrics might suggest, Nine Inch Nails has
a dark history. But did you know even the FBI has kept an eye on them? Or, what about a key
member’s drug addiction and on-stage violence? This is the tragic lineage of Nine Inch Nails.
Almost every breakout musician you'll hear about has one thing in common:
they're all young. Your typical musician starts performing around age 20,
and many are even younger. Compared to many of his contemporaries, Trent Reznor got a late start.
Reznor's home of Cleveland, Ohio is not renowned for its music scene. Despite its
lacking reputation, the city had a respectable number of bands, in several of which Reznor spent
his mid-twenties playing keyboard. By the late '80s, Reznor wasn't happy with his prospects
in the Cleveland scene. In a risky attempt to start producing his own music, he took a job
as a maintenance man at Cleveland's Right Track Studio. The work wasn't glamorous and the pay
wasn't fantastic, but, according to AllMusic, Reznor and the studio's owner had a deal:
Reznor could use the studio to record whenever other artists weren't booked in it.
"I decided to just give up everything else and go in a room and
try to realize what I had to say. I knew I had something to say."
Waxing floors by day and recording by night, Reznor soon had a set of demos for his new
project: Nine Inch Nails. It surely wasn't the most exciting way to break into the industry,
but it paid off when the demos started attracting attention from record labels.
While Reznor had worked with many Cleveland musicians, he had trouble finding people he
felt were a good fit for his new sound and weird schedule. It was due to this
complication that Reznor started out by recording virtually every instrument himself.
Even after signing to entrepreneur Steve Gottlieb's label, TVT Records,
Reznor still chose to play almost every instrument on the first Nine Inch Nails album,
Pretty Hate Machine. However, he did invite his friend Richard Patrick to play guitar on
the record, and he recruited his former bandmate, Chris Vrenna, to play drums.
Reznor's independence became a trademark for Nine Inch Nails records,
as he only occasionally asked for input from other musicians.
This approach had the side effect of alienating Reznor from others around him,
which in turn contributed to Reznor's persistent struggles with depression and substance abuse.
"I've always had a sadness and a sense of abandonment, I think,
haunting me. And never feeling like I fit in anywhere."
It wasn't until Reznor met Atticus Ross working on 2005's With Teeth
that he found someone he could work with all the time. Ross
would eventually become the only other permanent member of Nine Inch Nails.
By 1989, Pretty Hate Machine was nearly ready and it was time to release a single.
They selected the track "Down In It," the first song Reznor had ever written.
A dark-yet-danceable rock song with lyrics about depression, negative self-image, and some hints of
drug abuse, it fit perfectly with the gloomy introspection of '90s alternative music..
The song didn't make it anywhere near the charts, but it did catch the attention of some
industrial music fans. Some attentive listeners pointed out the song was incredibly similar
to the Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy's track, "Dig It", which came out 3 years prior.
Rumors even flew around that Nine Inch Nails used some of the same samples in their song.
Several years later, Reznor admitted "Down In It" was absolutely a rip-off of "Dig It," according to
The NIN Hotline. While tons of famous musicians and songwriters have ripped each other off,
both intentionally and accidentally, it's probably for the best that the mainstream of
music consumers never really came down on Reznor with these accusations. Starting a career off
with a reputation for plagiarism would certainly have complicated Nine Inch Nails' early career.
Though "Down In It"'s similarity to "Dig It" went unnoticed by the general public,
it's music video raised many more eyebrows.
According to Mental Floss, even the FBI was intrigued by the gritty, low-budget production.The
video features Trent Reznor and members of his touring band wreaking havoc in a parking garage.
For the video's final shot, Reznor was supposed to look like he fell off the roof,
so he laid on the ground with fake blood around him and cornstarch smeared on his
face. The idea was to attach the camera to a weather balloon, let it float upward,
and then run the footage backward to make it look like the camera was moving toward Reznor instead.
This went fine until the balloon got away, taking the camera with it. It landed over 100 miles away
in a Michigan field, where a farmer discovered it and turned the footage over to authorities.
What the FBI saw was a corpse, two men standing over it, and a third man running away at full
speed, which was actually a crew member trying to catch the balloon. They thought they had
found a recording of an actual murder. After opening up an FBI investigation,
they finally tracked down the source of the video and, satisfied Reznor was alive, closed the case.
"Down In It" would not be the last controversial Nine Inch Nails video.
The video for "Sin", another song off Pretty Hate Machine, was widely banned due to sexual content,
and the video for "Closer" needed heavy editing before any network would air it.
In 1992, Reznor began work on a new EP, and he envisioned a short film to accompany it.
The Broken EP had a much angrier sound, owing to the personal struggles of Reznor
and his bandmates. To capture these elements on film, Reznor teamed up with director and
industrial musician Peter Christopherson. The pair made a short film, which featured
a music video for nearly every song on the EP, all woven together in a frame narrative.
In the film, a man is kidnapped by a serial killer and forced to watch the videos as he's tortured
and, eventually, murdered. It was shot in the style of an amateur snuff film
and featured extremely graphic violence. The film wound up being so intense, the project
was scrapped even though it was 100% completed. Reznor did make a few VHS copies for friends,
and some poor quality footage of the film leaked online. In 2006, a much higher quality
copy of the film appeared on the internet, long rumored to have been leaked by Reznor himself.
Lots of bands change record labels. It's a standard business move, and artists make
this decision for many different reasons. Even if a band has a falling out with their label,
it's rare for the conflict to ever go public. Trent Reznor, however,
has had public disputes with his labels not once, but twice.
Nine Inch Nails' first label, TVT Records, mostly released compilations of TV theme
songs and novelty albums. Since Pretty Hate Machine was the label's first major success,
TVT wanted Reznor to go for a similar sound when it came time to record its follow-up.
Reznor refused to comply with TVT's request, but the label remained insistent.
He eventually recorded Broken in secret, and worked out a deal with producer Jimmy
Iovine's label, Interscope, to release the record in partnership with TVT.
The band's relationship with Interscope lasted much longer than it did with TVT.
Nine Inch Nails continued to release albums through Interscope for another 15 years.
After the record Year Zero came out in 2007, Reznor grew angry about the international pricing
of his records and publicly trashed his label on the Nine Inch Nails website. He left Interscope
shortly after. Thankfully, it's unlikely that another conflict like this will arise for Reznor,
as he now releases Nine Inch Nails records through his own label, the Null Corporation.
Creepy videos and record label drama weren't the only dark aspects of the Broken EP. Broken
and it's follow-up record, The Downward Spiral, were also recorded in a pretty ominous location:
10500 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. Better known as the former home to actress Sharon Tate
and director Roman Polanski, Cielo Drive was the scene of the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders. It was
there that a group of Charles Manson's followers murdered Tate and several of her guests in 1969.
When Reznor found out the home was available to rent for cheap, he signed the lease immediately.
However, he claims that he did not realize the house was a murder scene at the time.
One of the more infamous details of the murder scene was the word "Pig" written in Tate's blood
on the home's front door. This fact inspired Reznor to start calling his home studio "Le Pig."
Whether Reznor intended to use Cielo Drive as a publicity stunt or not,
his residence in the LA home backfired when Sharon Tate's sister, Patti,
paid him a visit. She accused Reznor of trying to exploit her sister's murder
by living in the house. Shortly after their conversation, Reznor moved out.
A few months later, the house was demolished and a new one was built on the same lot.
By far Nine Inch Nails' most popular album, The Downward Spiral spawned numerous singles and
sold almost 4 million copies, bringing the band worldwide attention. To this day, The Downward
Spiral is one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the '90s, and continues to stand out
from Trent Reznor's immense discography. What many more casual listeners might have missed is
that The Downward Spiral is a concept album, much like Pink Floyd's The Wall or The Who's Tommy.
"When I started working on Downward Spiral, I kind of approached it
as a big body of work, rather than 10 songs that just happened to be written at the same time.”
Unlike its more operatic predecessors, the concept behind The Downward Spiral is particularly dark.
The songs and lyrics are all meant to tell the story of a man's slow descent into depression
and self-destruction. The protagonist grows angrier at himself, religion,
and his personal relationships as he falls deeper into self-loathing.
There's no happy ending, either. The album's final songs, the title track
and "Hurt," strongly imply the main character succumbs to his depression and suicidal urges,
ending his own life. On its own, the song "Hurt" also has another famous connection to mortality:
country legend Johnny Cash released a cover of it just a few months before his death in 2003.
Throughout the 1990s, Trent Reznor dealt with a heavy addiction to alcohol and cocaine.
This wasn't exactly a secret, as a number of the band's songs directly reference substance abuse.
This led to a lot of destructive behavior on his own part, such as frequently ending the band's
live shows by destroying equipment on stage. This habit often led to Reznor and touring members of
Nine Inch Nails suffering moderate injuries — occasionally even a broken bone. Basically,
it looked like Reznor was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.
"Ya know, my last, the last times I played. The last year of touring in 2000 was
being sick every single day and lying to myself,
and living in this terrifying world of being physically addicted to something.”
Reznor's struggle with addiction culminated in 2000. While on tour in London,
Reznor mistook china white heroin for cocaine and overdosed. The mixup nearly killed him.
He woke up in a hospital, unaware of what had happened to him — his aides had found
him in his hotel room and managed to sneak him out a back entrance to maintain his privacy.
After Reznor recovered, he went into rehab and has since quit hard drugs.
On April 20, 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked their own high school,
killing 12 students, one teacher, and injuring more than 20 others. In the aftermath,
while searching for answers as to why these two seemingly normal boys had done something so
terrible, the media seized upon the pair's love of two things — violent video games and dark music.
While accusations about music influencing violent actions mainly fell upon rock star Marilyn Manson,
a former collaborator of Trent Reznor's,
Nine Inch Nails and several other industrial bands were also targeted.
It turns out both boys were fans of the band, quoted their lyrics,
and even referenced the unreleased Broken movie in journals and other writings before the shooting.
This led to renewed criticism of violent lyrics in music, a conversation which eventually led
to the Parental Advisory label appearing on many albums. The critique of Nine Inch
Nails and their contemporaries faded as time passed after the killings. However,
Reznor and several other bands did end up being the subject of congressional hearings in 1999.
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