TRENT REZNOR DESCENDS — 25 YEARS OF NINE INCH NAILS THE FRAGILE

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After achieving escape velocity with The Downward Spiral i 1994, Trent Reznor would struggle to realise his most ambitions project yet — Nine Inch Nails The Fragile — entering into years of false starts, creative experimentation and personal anguish

The Downward Spiral was released 8 March, 1994 debuting at No. 2 on The Billboard 200,  by March 20, it had already sold 188,000 copies. It would soon go platinum and continue to sell millions of copies around the world. In July of 1994, Reznor was somewhat disingenuous in stating to Spin magazine: “We‘ve made a concept album with no real singles. We‘re not from Seattle, and we don‘t play ‘70s rock.“ riding a wave, that was all of his own making. Though the album’s continued success would become something of a curse, as Trent would later comment: “This album literally sucked the life out of me.” 

Reznor soon embarked on the world-spanning Self Destruct tour which would extend across several legs between into 1996. The peak of this was NIN’s triumphant headline slot at the 25th anniversary Woodstock festival in August, 1994, where the band enjoyed the largest crowd of the 550,000 people who attended the festival. Trent entered into the musical industry well aware of the necessary workload needed  to achieve escape velocity from the underground scene and become known in the popular consciousness.

Read more about The Downward Spiral in my book – Into The Never

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The band’s live guitarist, Robin Finck said: “Nothing could have prepared us for Woodstock. I don’t know that any of us knew how that would catapult the trajectory, the name of the band, and how many more people would be listening. It was powerful. I look back on it now and I see that it was the right time for us.” Speaking to Kerrang in late 1994, Reznor ruminated on the fallout of the album’s success: “Finishing the album got replaced with finishing the 12-inch, the video, rehearsing the band, shows, doing interviews all day, sitting on a tour bus.”

Reznor would continue to express both concern and surprise about the album’s commercial appeal, but on an artistic level, he knew he had produced something unique and enduring, he told USA Today: “It’s the most uncommercial record that’s ever been in the top 50. If you’re not ready for it, it’s terrible, it’s noise. On a couple listenings, if you get that far, you hear through the distractions and find a beauty under the surface ugliness.”

Already, Reznor was struggling with the idea of being straitjacketed into any musical genre, speaking to Spin in July of 1994 about the rise of grunge: “It was needed for a while to kill off the Poisons and the Bon Jovis. But whatever was sincere about the whole back-to basics college-rock thing that eventually turned into grunge—the whole we‘re not pretentious rock icons, we‘re normal people playing earnestly‘—is over. Now that’s the fashion.“ Noting the continued sales of The Downward Spiral, Brian Perera, manager of a small indie industrial label, Cleopatra, said: “Every other major label is going to be looking for their Nine Inch Nails.”

By July of 1995, Reznor estimated The Downward Spiral had sold two million copies, as the album continued to exceed expectations, the complications of the music industry machine seemed to grow around Reznor. He told Huh magazine in February 1995: “This band is so big now. This tour has gotten bigger than anyone expected it to be and it’s not… I’m not so comfortable. I had a lot more fun with the band playing clubs than I do with a 40 person crew, where I don’t know the names of half the guys on it.”

Trent was disappointed at how fans sometimes perceived the music industry as a ‘game’ in which financial and artistic success were equated with an easy life and guaranteed happiness.  He echoed the dissatisfaction of many musicians who worked hard and struggled for years only to attain success and to find many aspects of it hollow. Reznor told the LA Times in 1994: “When I heard that he [Kurt Cobain] killed himself, it was a sad feeling. Even at the level we are at, which is much lower than where Nirvana was, there are pressures that I have to deal with.” 

Increasingly, Reznor talked about his desire to disappear, to become invisible and no longer be seen through his persona as a public figure, preferring the uniform anonymity of the baseball cap. Having given so much of himself away; in his lyrics, live performance and promotional duties fulfilling the image of Trent Reznor, his need for retreat grew as touring continued. Reznor gave less interviews after 1995, edging towards The Fragile’s prolonged period of studio isolation.

Reznor returned to New Orleans, in many ways the anti-LA, where he had originally wanted to establish himself, Reznor told Keyboard in 1995: “A big lesson I learned from the Tate house experience is not to live where your studio is, because it just became an entrapment. There’s a million distractions that will keep you from working – kind of the opposite of what I originally thought. So when I decided to go live in New Orleans again, I casually looked around for a temporary space to set up shop, and we found this place. It was perfect. It was real big, cheap, and that idea mutated into a more permanent installation.” A former funeral home, Reznor added the Le Pig studio front door he had removed from the house at Cielo Drive to crown his new studio.

An artistic exercise that played close to limits of self-ruin, The Downward Spiral left its mark on Reznor, the post-Spiral years working towards The Fragile [1999] would come to be seen by many as a 5-year absence, casting doubt as to whether the album would ever be completed. During that period Reznor’s struggle with addiction seemed to have emerged suddenly, but was a long time coming. He had already lost his drummer Jeff Ward to suicide in 1993 following a long struggle with heroin addiction [he is remembered in the liner notes of The Downward Spiral], and in interview Reznor was disparaging of hard drug use, only alluding to the use of psychedelics and cocaine in occasional interviews. 

Heroin had become the dominant drug of the 1990s and its impact on fellow alternative acts, such as Alice In Chains and Smashing Pumpkins, cast ripples far beyond the music industry. Reznor alluded to the evils of heroin in Hurt, referring to the needle sting as a sour-sweet pain the constant reminder of its physical and spiritual cost. Though there is nothing to suggest that he used heroin himself, it simply worked as a potent image for addiction and personal decline, in the early days of 1994, Reznor did not feel he had a problem with substance abuse. 

In 1997 when Reznor was only just beginning to enter the serious years of recording The Fragile, he was named as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people of the year. The article referred to Reznor as “the anti-Bon Jovi”; an artist lived the aggression and angst of his music like the blues of Robert Johnson; with real pain reflected in performative rage: “not with frat-boy swagger, but with a brooding self-deprecating intelligence.” It is interesting that Reznor would continue to hold such a high critical esteem, as both agitator and inspiration, at a time when he had all but withdrawn from touring. Time praised NIN’s sound that “harks back to the dissonance of John Cage and sounds like capitalism collapsing,” while also praising Nine Inch Nails million-selling albums. In the mainstream Reznor and his music remained representative of middle America’s idea of a creative disruptor who voiced teenage angst, though this would later see him become a convenient scapegoat for suburban American violence. 

In a 1999 interview following the release of The Fragile, Reznor seems relieved at having completed the album, but still struggling to put into words the inchoate state of overcoming a creative block that for so long prevented him from starting, let alone finishing, the record. The mental barriers Reznor had thrown up, re-enforced by ongoing personal issues, had their basis in the struggle fallout of The Downward Spiral. Standing at the edge about to throw himself into another demanding and deeply immersice recording process. The longer he waited the greater the tension and pressure inside of him grew; reaching a point of inertia, where he could neither quit or fully collate the sprawl ambition and ideas into a balanced double album.

In the end, The Fragile, was a broader and in some ways more conventional rock sound than Reznor had attempted before, avoiding the easy path of making The Downward Spiral – Mark Two, writing more piano-led songs and guitar-driven singles, while still pursuing more experimental open-ended instrumental tracks, in-step with the dominant alt-rock sounds that would emerge in the early 2000s.

Reznor would directly address his ongoing grief following the death of his beloved dog Maisie in an accident and his grandmother who raised him in the song “I’m Looking Forward To Joining You Finally”, also looking back at the claustrophobic alienation of The Downward Spiral on “The Great Below”. The lyric “Nothing can stop me now” that featured so heavily across The Downward Spiral returns on the song, “La Mer”, but its meaning had evolved. On the expansive instrumental Reznor allows the blending of sea into sky to create a more hopeful vanishing point, at which a better future was still possible. Landing somewhere between the piano style of Debussy and echoing the isolation of an abortive recording session in Big Sur, Reznor said this track became a renewed declaration of intent from which the rest of The Fragile could then be realised. 

Speaking to Hammer magazine in 2002, Reznor compared his album’s divergent attitudes—shifting from nihilistic expressionism to a confrontation with painful experiences: “In the days of The Downward Spiral, I was in a very dark phase, thinking that I need nothing and no one: ‘Fuck the world and fuck everybody! I need only myself and no one else’ This basic feeling has changed, even if there are still some traces of it inside me. Pretty Hate Machine meant: ‘I hate this world, which does me wrong, but I can defend myself’. Broken and The Downward Spiral symbolized: ‘The world does me wrong, but I, too, do wrong and I hate myself for it.’ The Fragile, on the other hand, was a healing process, the process of picking up the pieces again.”

However, Reznor’s creative breakthrough was not enough to sustain him. With his health failing from sustained alcohol and drug abuse during the Fragility tour in 2000, it wasn’t until Reznor  accidentally overdosed on heroin in London, mistaking it for cocaine, and was rushed to hospital that he was able to fully confront himself. In July 2001 he checked into a New Orleans rehabilitation center and got clean and stayed that way from then on. In a 2005 interview with Kerrang, he reflected on his self-destructive past: “There was a persona that had run its course. I had become a terrible addict; I needed to get my shit together, to figure out what had happened.” 

Reznor would not fully emerge from this period of recovery until 2005, following the release of With Teeth, delivered after another five-year gap. By then just over a decade had passed since The Downward Spiral, and it was only having undergone the extreme challenges of producing his first two studio albums, along with his struggles of depression and addiction, that Reznor would find himself ready to embrace a new musical future.

Read more about The Downward Spiral in my book – Into The Never

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