When 23 years old Trent Reznor began work on his first original music project, which he would eventually call Nine Inch Nails, back in 1988, there was nothing to indicate that it would be anything special, anything more than the first derivative fumblings of a musician struggling to break his bar band chains. But the whole history of Nine Inch Nails has been fraught with implausibilities, with modest expectations wildly exceeded.
Reznor, a classically trained keyboard player, had moved to Cleveland, Ohio from his native Mercer, Pennsylvania a year out of high school. In Cleveland, he played with a series of commercial rock and new wave bands. The worst of these were bar band hacks; the best were the products of someone else's creative vision with Reznor merely a sideman. He may have realized that he had reached a dead end, but no one-probably including Reznor himself-knew yet that he had the creative firepower to explode right through it. After all, he had yet to do any song writing.
He began tinkering with song ideas and with teaching himself to record them at Cleveland's Midtown Recording (then called Right Track) where owner Bart Kostner traded him idle studio time in return for odd jobs (both have mentioned cleaning toilets). It was there than Reznor created the prototype for his debut album PRETTY HATE MACHINE.
Reznor and his manager John Malm had modest expectations; they shopped the tape to only indie labels, eventually signing with TVT Records. Reznor revamped the material with producer Flood, Adrian Sherwood, John Fryer and Keith Leblanc, and the completed album was released in the fall of 1989.
PRETTY HATE MACHINE was hardly an immediate success. But, though some dismissed NIN early on as a Ministry/Skinny Puppy wannabe, this disc moved modern industrial music to a whole new place with it forceful melodic hooks, its astonishing feel for textural and dynamic contrasts, and most of all for the intimate and confessional quality of the lyrics and vocals. Instead of the usual harsh blast of impersonal anger, PRETTY HATE MACHINE was a quivering mass of ambivalence--probing, questioning, demanding, pleading, raging. Machines may have created the music, but the voice of this album was clearly human. Some of the lyrics were clumsy; some of the song writing tentative but the personal nakedness contrasted with the sampled, synthesizer music made the album both unique and provocative.
NIN was never a cohesive band that honed its act playing local bars. Reznor assembled the music; now he assembled a band to play it . The band toured steadily and not always successfully following the albums release, doing tours with Peter Murphy and Jesus & Mary Chain. As it came together, Reznor's show proved to be as revelatory as his recorded music. The once-restrained sideman unleashed his demons in uninhibited performances often marked by destruction and bodily injury. The album's singles, "Down In It," "Head Like a Hole," and "Sin," took hold at college radio and in dance clubs, as the band's record sales and reputation slowly grew.
In summer of 1991, NIN was part of Lollapalooza I, where its t-shirt sales exceeded those of all the other bands, including headliner Jane's Addiction. Clearly, the band's music was starting to capture peoples interest, and the record's sales, which had topped 100,000 at that point, were impressive for an indie release, though the mainstream audience was still unaware of the band. It's easy to forget that all the time, Guns 'N Roses was the last word in Rock & Roll, and the Nirvana watershed was months away. That PRETTY HATE MACHINE would eventually go platinum seemed farfetched.
It seemed more so because Reznor was having problems with TVT, refusing to record anything to be released on the label. Instead he began to record secretly the material that would later become the EP BROKEN. BROKEN reflected Reznor's feelings about the conflict with his label and the limbo into which it put his career. The claustrophobic material had denser, grungier textures and less carefully-wrought melodies, and projected the sense on an individual trapped in a poisonous atmosphere that becomes destructive to him. Apparently misled by the new prominence of aggressive guitars in this music, the track "Wish" was nominated for- and went on to win- the Grammy for heavy metal in 1993. Considering that NIN was still fairly obscure, it was quite a coup.
With the TVT situation resolved, BROKEN came on in the fall of 1992 on Nothing Records, a label co-owner by Reznor and Malm, and distributed by Interscope Records. It was followed quickly by an EP of remixes of the material titled FIXED (NIN's singles have featured many alternative versions of album tracks, both by Reznor and others such as Coil, Jim Thirlwell and Rick Rubin,) Reznor then went to work on his second full-length album THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL.
Released in March of 1994, THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL is a tougher, more confident work than PRETTY HATE MACHINE. It features more extreme contrasts, between painful tidal waves of noise, and sections so quiet and ambient, they virtually vanish. This time, rather than grappling with his inner contradictions of flailing at invisible prison walls, Reznor set disassembling the world into its basest, ugliest components, creating a void and sounding album, it debuted at #2 in the BILLBOARD album chart, quickly surpassing the sales level it had taken PRETTY HATE MACHINE 4 1/2 years to achieve.
That level of acceptance for a band like NIN was unreal enough, but it was only the beginning. The band went on the road, its shows reached a whole new level, with Reznor's commanding presence presiding over a thick, chaotic panorama. When NIN hit the stage at Woodstock II in August of 1994 robed in mud, it captured the attention of people way beyond the core heavy rock audience, including mainstream rock fans, non-rock media (David Letterman talked about how scary he thought Reznor was) and even public figures looking to attack rock music (Former education secretary William Bennett mentioned NIN as one of several musical acts "not fit for human consumption.")
With a fall, 1995 tour as opening act for David Bowie, NIN continues to make surprising inroads for a band whose musical so uncompromisingly explores the less pleasant aspects of being human.
