The band Trent Reznor said set the bar for Nine Inch Nails
During the holiday season of 1988, 23-year-old Trent Reznor wasn’t in the Christmas spirit, which should come as a surprise to no one.
Having recently departed the Cleveland, Ohio, synth-pop band Exotic Birds, for whom he’d been merely a background singer and keyboardist, Reznor was wrapping up work on the first set of demos by his own newly formed, make-or-break project, Nine Inch Nails. Recording these new songs, which would later be reworked into the group’s debut Pretty Hate Machine, Trent had put little concern into the logistics of how they might eventually be re-created live; some tracks had 15 different keyboards on them, others had eight guitars and a drum machine.
With NIN inked to a record deal and ready to start touring, however, Reznor was suddenly at a creative crossroads in terms of how to present what he’d created. This included not just the arrangement of instruments, but the look and feel of the live show.
“[Pretty Hate Machine] was workshopped with the instrument being the studio,” he told Rick Rubin during a chat on Rubin’s ‘Tetragrammaton’ podcast in 2023, “Trying to figure out what it is I have to say, if anything, and how to emotionally convey it with the tools I had at my disposal, which wasn’t a great live drummer; it was machines.”
Reznor was a fan of electronic music and had seen how other bands had translated “machine music” to the stage, but he hated the idea of Nine Inch Nails putting a guy on stage just hitting an electronic pad.
“I wanted it to feel visceral,” he said. “I wanted it to feel like it can fuck up if it needs to; that it has some volatility to it.”
Although Reznor acknowledges that his memory might have distorted the timeline of events a bit, he did vividly recall being heavily influenced in that pivotal moment by hearing the new Jane’s Addiction album, Nothing’s Shocking, and particularly by seeing them live – for a measly five bucks – at a small Cleveland rock club called Peabody’s Down Under.
Checking the old concert archives, Jane’s Addiction did indeed play a pair of shows at Peabody’s on December 6th and 7th, 1988, and while Nine Inch Nails had actually already played about a dozen gigs of their own by then, Reznor remembers standing in the middle of the floor at the club that night and being blown away.
“They sounded great. They looked like freaks. Perry was hypnotic and in a weird trance. Just, goddamn!”
Feeling jealous and defeated “in a good way”, as he explained to Rubin, Reznor left the Jane’s gig inspired to create a live experience that could somehow compete with what he’d just seen.
“That’s where the bar is,” he said, “In terms of, we have to be able to make an audience do that. Not with the same pulleys and levers, but it has to feel as vibrant, and as dangerous, and as volatile, and beautiful as that. It can’t be a fuckin’ tape playing back. It has to have that thing.”
From that point forward, Reznor and drummer Chris Vrenna regularly used their experience seeing Jane’s Addiction as a point of discussion when crafting Nine Inch Nails’ evolving stage show, particularly heading into the first promotional tour for Pretty Hate Machine a year later. This would include the use of a live drummer and guitarist, interweaved with the pre-recorded and mechanised “non-human bit of it,” as Reznor described it, which would remain critical to the NIN sound.
“That recipe, I thought, worked really well,” he said.
Just a couple of years later, Nine Inch Nails would be touring the US with Jane’s Addiction as part of the first Lollapalooza line-up.
