“Our benefit”: The bands Trent Reznor thought he blew offstage
When a band knows just how good they are but don’t get the praise they deserve heaped upon them, it’s hard to listen to other acts and wonder exactly why they’re the ones receiving all the plaudits. After the release of their debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails were acutely aware of just how much potential they had to create a gigantic impact on the heavier end of the music industry, but due to the abrasive nature of their music, they didn’t always get the attention that they felt they were deserving of.
Pretty Hate Machine was a groundbreaking album in many ways, and nowadays, it is recognised for being ahead of its time with its fusion of industrial rock, noise, and electronic music. While it might have leaned into various avant-garde tendencies, Trent Reznor knew that what he had created had commercial potential, but he needed to find a way to convince the masses that this was the case.
With MTV reluctant to play the band’s videos and radio stations finding them a touch too heavy to warrant any airtime, Reznor realised that extensive touring would be the best method for getting their music in front of a wider audience. While embarking on lengthy tours across the country in support of other bands might seem like an exhausting prospect, it had a noticeably positive impact on the band’s trajectory and brought them attention from places where they might not have expected.
However, at first, this idea worried Reznor, and he believed it didn’t have the desired impact he had hoped for. Speaking to Chaos Control in 1992 about his decision to play so many live shows in support of the debut album, he said, “Initially, I think that touring and solely touring broke the band,” but that once they had started touring, “Suddenly l think the live band was pretty good and it got people interested who were on the fence and never heard of us.”
While this would ultimately benefit the project and get people excited for them to create more music in the future, one thing that aggrieved Reznor was the comparative quality of the acts they were opening for, and once Nine Inch Nails had tightened up as a live act, they were beginning to notice a gulf between themselves and their touring companions. They were very soon upstaging far more established acts than themselves, and yet they were still stuck with having to perform as the opening act.
“We opened for a couple of bands that were easy to blow away,” Reznor stated in the interview before sharing that two of the acts that they had managed to outperform on their Pretty Hate Machine tour were Jesus and Mary Chain, Peter Murphy. While the Jesus and Mary Chain were a seminal act in the shoegaze movement at the time, they still remain to this day an unexciting prospect as a live act, especially when compared to the violent carnage that Nine Inch Nails were known for creating.
However, surpassing goth rock royalty in Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy is another matter, and given their comparative lack of experience on the road compared to the frontman, the fact that they were outperforming him was surely indicative of how much potential there was from the beginning of their career.
Was it a bad thing that Nine Inch Nails were a stronger live act than those they were touring with? Trent Reznor seemed to think that it didn’t matter. “It worked to our benefit,” he claimed, and the fact that their confrontational style was not only turning heads but helping them accrue a new fanbase while only performing as an opening act was surely a sign that there was better things to come.
