Did Nine Inch Nails really destroy their keyboards every night?
It’s been a while since they’ve indulged in some good old-fashioned on-stage destruction, but back in their 1990s heyday, Nine Inch Nails struck a fierce reputation for the number of instruments destined for the scrapheap after their volatile shows.
It doesn’t seem to happen much anymore, less money flowing around the rock business perhaps? But ever since Jimi Hendrix lit his Fender Stratocaster on fire at Monterey, a roll call of rock’s big names have all ensured their guitar connected sharply with an amp or the cold, hard ground; The Who, The Yardbirds, and Nirvana routinely meting out carnage to the spectacle of the crowd, and Paul Simenon’s one case of guitar ruin found its way on 1979’s London’s Calling cover.
But electronic music? For a long time, synthesisers were eyewateringly expensive units requiring far too much logistics and labour to lug on stage with all its hefty modular units to be so gratuitously demolished, even the portable Minimoog cost in the tens of thousands in today’s money. The closest anybody got to abusing their keyboards was prog showboater Keith Emerson, and even then, he only ever threw his Hammond organ around and theatrically staked its keys with a vintage Nazi dagger by one Ian ‘Lemmy Kilmister during his time as a roadie for former band The Nice.
However, across the next 20 years, synths became cheaper, more portable, and ubiquitous, to the point where the 1980s dominating Yamaha DX7 now could be picked up without making too much of a dent in the wallet, as synthpop grew out of favour during grunge’s alternative explosion. It gave Trent Reznor some ideas. While electronic music was potently scoring the free rave and underground dance culture, a wave of industrial artists was deploying an aggressive synth attack around the Chicago ground zero, Nine Inch Nails, one of many bands like Skinny Puppy or Ministry, all orbiting the city’s Wax Trax! Records’ pull of the rock world a little closer to the dancefloor.
Once 1992’s Broken EP had added an abrasive crunch of industrial guitar assault, Nine Inch Nails’ stage shows grew ever more frenzied, featuring numerous stitches between members and legends of cartloads of synths annihilated most nights during the eight legs of the Self Destruct Tour across 1994-1996. They were big, The Downward Spiral peaking at number two on the Billboard 200 level of big, but could Nine Inch Nails really afford to waste so many keyboards during the tour?
So, did they really destroy their keyboards on stage?
Yes, in a word. As well as reportedly obliterating over 130 Gibson Les Paul guitars, as many as four DX7s would be nightly ruined as a result of Reznor’s aggressive whims, as well as keenly orchestrating a theatre of chaos to put on a show fans wouldn’t forget.
DX7s were by the mid-1990s pretty cheap, remember? At the start of the tour, Nine Inch Nails possessed about 20-odd DX7s, but employed a special keyboard tech guy for the tour to attempt a scrap salvage of what was left of the Yamahas to at least wring some further use for the next show. So long as the metal board wasn’t damaged, you could destroy all 52 keys and still affix new ones ready for another night, plus they looked cool and bust-up befitting the industrial aesthetic on stage. Roadies would even be sent off to whatever town the tour was passing through to rifle local recycle spots or pawn shops for any second-hand DX7 they could finish off for good.
Surely such voluminous mountains of keyboards mean a headache of programming all the electronic pads and sounds for the set on each unit? Well, the DX7 was actually little more than a big button for the real gear kept backstage and far away from any risk of damage. The guts of the synthetic sounds needed were all stored on rack-mounted E-mu Emax II samplers and enjoyed their own internal hard drive, later fine-tuned with MIDI control for the tour with David Bowie in 1995.
“They’re just a remote,” then keyboardist Charlie Clouser revealed to Scene Magazine in 1996. “They were both very similar to each other. On [each] Emaxs in between songs, we would all have to load a new bank on our keyboard. You hit one button that tells the Emax to load, and you hit another button that tells what bank on its hard drive to load.”
So, yes, keyboards were thoroughly mistreated during the Self Destruct Tour, but not even Nine Inch Nails during their Woodstock ‘94 peak could afford to trash their Emaxs. Still, it looked fucking cool, and legend has it that so many DX7s were ruined that for a while, Yamaha’s most famous digital synth was pretty hard to come by for the next few years in the aftermath of Reznor’s industrial juggernaut.
