Down on the Upside
As if there was ever a chance it wouldn't live up to its name. Spanning
two years between 1994 and '96, the
Downward Spiral Tour was a monstrous thing. It criss-crossed America
three times, hitting Europe, Japan
and all points between. Every night was a party backstage with all the
trappings, and every night a moshpit
circled a scene as close as you could imagine to the house band at the
Gates of Hades. Even the Gothic
iconography of The Crow had nothing on frontman Trent Reznor, an
imperious apparition who moved
through the mist like a wraith, solidifying with a whiplash to scream a
line or smash at a keyboard. And the
backing band played his fascist/masochist foil, dressed in a similar
combination of black leather, vinyl,
metal and fishnet.
Those who attended the Alternative Nation shows in Sydney and Melbourne
saw what a Nine Inch Nails
performance entailed: two hours of full-tilt physical abuse as
headliner Reznor attacked his band members,
his instruments (and his band members with his instruments), his
audience and, most harrowingly, himself.
In Sydney, Faith No More's Mike Patton impressed with a backflip which
intentionally saw him smash
himself into the stage. Then he spat sour grapes in the direction of
the headliner he called The Cloud of
Trent. But even Patton's physicality was nothing next to the onslaught
of NIN's early metal machine noise.
It was a thoroughly committed performance.
The Downward Spiral tour, in combination with MTV's high-rotation of
the video for "Closer" (which simulated
clunking, mechanical sex via vocal distortion, a grinding backbeat and
its "I wanna fuck you like an animal"
chorus) elevated Reznor from young acolyte under Al Jorgensen's
Ministry to the new High Priest of
Gothdoom. By the end of the tour NIN was a household name and "Closer"
was being inappropriately
hollered at every keg party in the States. But there was a price to pay
for the leap to fame which Reznor
had always dreamed of.
In the USA, the damage was exacerbated by NIN's Downward Spiral
tourmates. The shock/schlock of the
Jim Rose Circus, sandwiched between Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson
, who at that stage, before he
turned Judas with the release of his tell-all autobiography, The Long
Hard Road Out of Hell, was still
counted as Reznor's protege'brought a hellish vision to the highways
and byways of middle America. A
cocktail of sleep deprivation, alcohol, drugs and star-shock took
Reznor to the brink of something
dangerous, with Manson's backstage craziness the icing on the cake. An
extract run in JUICE detailed
Manson's habits. He created his own video confessional, going to the
trouble of constructing a de
Sade-inspired apparatus of abasement to help with the task. They'd find
a vulnerable hanger-on from that
night's backstage area and lead them to a room set up with apparatus
designed to immobilise and
disempower the victim using a choker attached to a series of
restraints. Manson would proceed to
interrogate the hapless and often naked fan in an attempt to find out
what was really eating them. With
tourmates like these, who needs enemies?
"Last time around we were out for a long time," says Reznor, speaking
from a hotel in the midst of the first
tour around the new NIN album, The Fragile. "Every night was a party
and if there was something going on
anywhere we were at it" By the end of the Downward Spiral tour, Reznor
was either fighting or fleeing from
his own demons.
The end of that tour was followed by the death of his grandmother (who
raised him from age five) and his
last beloved connection to normal life, his pet Labrador. During a
visit to the tour, the dog jumped from a
stage presuming there would be somewhere to land on the other side;
instead she found a 20 foot drop
which broke her back. Both losses have featured heavily in Reznor's
interviews since. Even as The
Downward Spiral album went on to sell over four million copies
worldwide, Reznor became more and more
anxious.
When Reznor finally settled from the tour, he found
himself in a deep funk. He
was diagnosed with clinical depression, sent to
shrinks and pharmacologists. He
found anti-depressants like Effexor and Paxil didn't
agree with his mentality, let
alone his muse. And while talking about it helped a
little, it wasn't a treatment
he could buy into wholesale. It doesn't take a
psychologist to work out that
depression is something Reznor's suffered from since
well before he started
recording his music. But after the Downward Spiral
tour, he hit a new low. "The
tour definitely contributed to that depression,"he
says. "I don't know if its the
cause or the effect or what, but it ended up at a
place with all of the above
mentioned [sleep deprivation, alcohol, drugs] in
excess.
"On top of that, and this is not a justification,
more an explanation, it is a
strange world to be dropped into. Every night's like
your birthday party, you
know, or New Years Eve. The party's always for you
and everyone treats you
funny and everyone's trying to kiss your arse. It
does tend to cater to numbing
yourself as a way out of it. It's easier to deal
with if you're to some degree
fucked up.
"You have night after night after night after night of that altered
reality that you exist in. And when the bus
stops and you return to where your home is, there is an adjustment
period of trying to find some degree of
normality. What I don't suggest doing is starting a Marilyn Manson
album which is what I did [he produced
the groundbreaking Anti-Christ Superstar]. Because those guys are like
that all the time, even when
they're not on tour. It just continues."
It continued to the point where Reznor, a painstaking, obsessive
worker in the studio, was mentally and
physically exhausted. He was also overdue for some soul searching. He'd
already achieved most of his rock
dreams, and was now dealing with the disappointment of learning that
fulfilling these ambitions would not
heal him. Instead the contradictions inherent in the star system, and
the strain placed on his personality by
the tug of ego and empowerment, threatened to destroy him. Holed up in
his recording studio, a converted
mortuary in New Orleans, he took a good hard look at himself in the
mirror. He'd moved to New Orleans to
escape the vacuousness of LA but now, sickened by the 'celebrity as
royalty' ethic, he didn't like what he
saw.
"You realise that things distort your personality," he says of this
period of reflection. "Success, money and
being treated differently by people makes you change, even if you try
to watch it. I realised that I had
treated some people poorly, and I had bought into some of the hype that
I read about myself. You start to
forget who you thought you were when you went into it. You start to see
yourself as others see you. And I
started looking more like the person in the picture than the guy in the
mirror, if that makes any sense."
Indeed the Reznor presented by interviewers circa 1995 was a far
crazier man than the one I'm
interviewing. In conversation he was prone to offering ambiguities
about his sexuality, and to sledging his
peers wholesale: his battles with ex-tourmate Courtney Love, which
included her infamous "three inch
nail" jibe, are the stuff of mid-'90s legend. He became known as
erratic, moody, aggressive, in short, an
archetypal rock enigma. This behaviour is expected of rock stars, and
while Marilyn Manson may have
taken this approach too far, initially it did seem to sit well with
Reznor. Before long, however, critics started
to accused him of being disingenuous, a claim which still rattles him.
The sheer emotional weight of The Downward Spiral and NIN's 1989 debut,
Pretty Hate Machine, were
enough to beg the question: How can the Cloud of Trent really be this
angry? With the benchmark for rock
angst already set impossibly high by Kurt Cobain's suicide and no real
horror stories of previous abuse to
parade like a skeleton from his closet, Reznor was judged as a fake.
It's understandable that he would
wish to prove these critics wrong. And perhaps admirable that he
realises he crossed a line in doing so.
"It's just another example of the way that any form of power tends to
corrupt you," he says. "I've seen it
happen to different band mates, different friends in the business.
Anytime you start to get a degree of
success, it does change you a bit. I've had people ask, 'Are you the
same person you were ten years ago?'
No I'm not. Ten years ago I was scrubbing floors and hoping that some
day I could get someone to listen
to the music I'm trying to write."
Perhaps the greatest of Reznor's disappointments was the knowledge that
even at the end of that journey,
he was still little happier than he had been as a janitor. If anything
his life was more confused and painful
than it had been back then. These personality shifts, and an escalating
level of expectation, put so much
pressure on Reznor he suffered writer's block. He worked on the
soundtrack for David Lynch's film Lost
Highway, later explaining that the work, however good, was an exercise
in procrastination. He hid out in a
holiday home on California's beautiful Big Sur coast, tinkering on a
piano and feeling uninspired.
He was amused and then distressed to see the follow-up
to The Downward Spiral
cited as Spin magazine's Most Anticipated album two
years running, especially as it
was nowhere near complete to his satisfaction at the
time. Therapy helped him see
his writer's block as a simple fear of failure, but one
which would end up seeing him
fail without even trying unless he managed to pull
himself out of his depression. He
also felt under assault from so-called friends and
associates, not to mention a huge
pressure to create a meisterwork in his follow-up to
The Downward Spiral. People
were already calling on him to Save Rock & Roll. He
didn't know where to start, but
taking the songs back to his roots, Reznor started in
music as a classically trained
pianist eventually offered him a pathway back.
"This record became pretty much about repair, about
trying to sort out the mess," he
says. "I also learned a bit about myself, and learned
that, 'Hey, you are depressed,
it's real. Okay, what does that mean?' I didn't want to
accept that. I didn't want to
think that there was something wrong with me. But the
act of realising that made it
seem a bit better. There's an explanation for my
actions."
"Songwriting usually involves a degree of pain before the enjoyment
comes out," he says later. "Sometimes
I don't want to pick at those scabs and readdress those things. My head
really wasn't on straight, and I
didn't want to look too closely because I was afraid that I might not
like what I saw. So when it finally came
down to doing it, I realised that there's a nice guy in there, there's
a person I remember and like."
As for his depression, details are sketchy. An anecdote about noted
manic depressive Spike Milligan's
thoughts on his illness (Milligan said he would have given away all the
creative flipside so essential to his
fame for just a day's respite in the midst of a black period) leads
Reznor to explain he's not bi-polar.
Instead he has "a degree of chemical imbalance."
"Therapy got me along the path of getting the record going and getting
my head straight and I've been in a much better
place since when it all
went down," he concludes. "When I had that
revelation I thought, 'Why
would I forget that? What was I thinking?' I
had to twist myself around to
what I had forgotten and this was what it was
all about. It wasn't about
selling lots of records or buying things or
being around assholes. It was
about playing music."
This reassessment became the lyrics and tone of
his huge, 70's-style
opus, The Fragile, a double album of 23 songs
and instrumental works
which blew the format of the old NIN away. An
early quote from Reznor
misleadingly suggested The Fragile was going to
sound like Tom Waits.
Maybe on that particular day it did. But the
sheer timespan involved
allowed Reznor to work his way through many
styles and shades of one
oppressive mood. He ended up working on the
album in his New Orleans
studios, surrounded by computers, vintage
strings and keyboards and
sundry musical gear, for two years. The process
was excruciatingly slow. At
one point he decided that one particular track,
"The Big Comedown,"
could use beefing up with a triumphal big band
brass section. He decided
to create the lines in his head using a sample and keyboard, telling
engineer and musical confidante Alan
Moulder: "Just give me two hours." Two weeks later the track was
finished, complete with crowd noise, a
gladiatorial throng over a truly evil marching band. The irony that he
was working in a city overflowing with
quality brass musicians was not lost on Reznor. This image of the
workaholic with an obsessive eye for
detail and a huge sense of ambition doesn't fit that of a man paralysed
by his own fear.
"I read about myself now and it's like I'm a poster boy for being
depressed," he says. "That's not really
the desired intent, nor is it that accurate. I don't want to paint the
picture that I'm sitting in a corner with a
blanket over my head, bummed out, because that really isn't an accurate
description of me."
Perhaps the album's lyrics are a better indicator. The songs seem to
deal with these issues directly. "I'm
Looking Forward To Joining You Finally" could be a direct reference to
the brutalities of showbiz with its
chorus, "Thought he had it all before they called his bluff/Found out
that his skin wasn't thick
enough/Wanted to go back to the way it was before," while its verse,
"A fool's devotion/Swallowed up in
empty space/ The tears of regret/Frozen to the side of his face",
speaks of pure remorse. Elsewhere
snippets hint at similar emotions: "God damn, I am so tired of
pretending/I wish I was ending' ("Where Is
Everybody").
'"The Big Come Down" details the urge to self-destruct; "No, You Don't"
alludes to vampires and a "filthy
little worn-out see-through soul" and "The Wretched" (part of a series
of songs named in such downer style
Ð "The Frail," "The Fragile" and "The Great Below" , it's hard not to
laugh) contains abasement of biblical
proportions as Reznor sings, "God himself will reach his fucking arm
through just to hold you down/Stuck in
this hole with the shit and the piss."
There are, however, more positive moments. "We're in This Together"
turns
co-dependent dysfunction into an us-against-the-world anthem, while on
"Even
Deeper" a resolved Reznor concludes, "I'm straight/I won't crack."
By the time we finally speak, six attempts have been made to connect me
with
the elusive Reznor (he apologises for the inconvenience and makes
amends
by talking twice as long as expected). After one failed attempt the
tour
manager who is arranging the interview explains that Reznor, whom he
suggests is more than a little moody, has accompanied NIN guitarist
Robin
Finck to the hospital after an onstage accident. That Finck needed six
stitches
in his forehead suggests that the NIN show for The Fragile has at least
some
of the aggro of the Downward Spiral shows.
"It was more an accident," says Reznor. "Of course it happened on the
second
song, so to look over and to see blood pouring out of his head you
think, 'Oh
no' It looked fantastic but that can throw your game off a little when
it
happens right at the beginning of the show."
He asserts this is no return to the bad old days of "95. The show is an
exercise in pacing and dramatics, rather than amphetamine-fuelled
craziness, as it works in the soundbites
and symphonies of The Fragile amongst the industrial anthems of yore.
The antics are under control, both
on and offstage. Instead Reznor is surviving the insomnia he suffers on
overnight drives by rolling around
on the back lounge of his coach watching bad videos while his bandmates
sleep.
"I've got a little more of a sane head on my shoulders than I did at
the end of the last tour," he says.
"It's not like we're 'ld men now, rushing back to the hotel after the
show, but at this stage it hasn't
yet sunk to the level of debauchery it did in the past."
I quiz him about Marilyn Manson's torture machine, using it as a bridge
towards talking to him about
another aspect of music making Ð responsibility. In asking if Manson's
story of emotionally manipulating
the vulnerable for his own amusement could possibly be true, I also
want to know whether Reznor feels
Manson's behaviour proves him to be entirely irresponsible to his fans.
Reznor has seen videotapes the
band made of those sessions but, despite the fact that since the book
was released Reznor's pat line has
been "he and I aren't the best of friends at the moment," he does
defend Manson's actions.
"I'm not by any means justifying them, but I was never aware of a true
desire for complete and utter
humiliation, or taking advantage of somebody. It's hard to put this in
context but it took place on a tour
with Manson, us and the Jim Rose Circus. The kind of people you get
backstage are people that are always
trying to out-do each other. So we got Mr Lifto from the Circus trying
to lift a brick with his dick backstage
while someone else is, well, you can imagine some of the things going
on. So it was always kind of a
light-hearted: 'What can we do tonight to out-do last night? Okay, I
got a stun gun, let's see if I can try to
shock my dick with it.So some of these scenarios that sound like a
torture room, or sound like you should
be in prison for just being around it, were to my knowledge done in the
laughing around, playful kind of
way. That's not an excuse for what went down, but it is important to
understand the context in which some
of that was taking place." Context is something Manson has little
respect for, however. Slighted and
betrayed by the book, Reznor admits that much of it shadows the truth.
It's just that Manson moves
characters within the events. "A lot of it is told from a perspective
that makes him look better than he was,"
Reznor complains. "I don't wanna get into muck-raking, but I skimmed
through it enough to know that a
large portion of it was revisionist history. I just found the whole
point of it unnecessary, spiteful."
The alliance between Manson and Reznor over, Reznor's Nothing Records
label now stands alone in an
environment where business collusion is of growing importance. Witness
the mini-empire of Korn, which
includes a record label, the Family Values touring festival, the Firm
management company and a roster of
artists that includes Limp Bizkit and Orgy. While Reznor was
sequestered in his remote studio dreaming up
The Fragile, his contemporaries were networking and doing the business
with gusto. Reznor expresses his
concern that the time he took to finish The Fragile may have rendered
him obsolete. "I worry that we don't
matter anymore," he says. "I thought it was too long between albums and
the climate has changed quite a
bit since then."
The emotional connection Reznor made with America's
abused and
disconnected has been picked up by the likes of
Korn. Theirs is a more
violent, direct and unabridged version of Reznor's
angst. Where Reznor will
allude poetically to decay, Korn's Jonathan Davis
will repeatedly scream 'rape.'
I ask if he's heard Korn's new album, Issues, which
seems to have raised the
stakes yet again, and done it with more musical
punch than The Fragile
musters over its 23 track length. "I've just picked
it up and I haven't had the
chance to listen to it yet," he says. "But
generally I like Korn a lot. At a pretty
generic time in rock music, they're at least doing
something interesting. But I
haven't checked that album out yet."
When he does, maybe it will inspire another angst
opus. In the meantime,
thanks to all that anxiety, everything is working.
The Fragile has received
glowing reviews and Spin has continued its display
of appreciation by naming it
the album of the year and sticking Reznor's face on
its final cover for this
millennium. "The band is really good, touring's
going well, and I don't have a
whole lot to complain about at this moment," Reznor
laughs. "But I'll come up
with something."
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This article
is provided courtesy Keith Duemling and Tracy Thompson from the collection previously
located at SUS.
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