The tour that almost killed Trent Reznor: “It led me down a very dark and terrible path”
The ten years that preceded Nine Inch Nails‘ infamous 1999 to 2000 Fragility tour was a story of repeated commercial success that defied all odds.
Emerging from Cleveland, Ohio’s new wave scene and becoming enamoured with the darker end of synthpop conjured by industrial acts Skinny Puppy and Ministry, Nine Inch Nails’ aggro-synth debut Pretty Hate Machine became a surprise underground hit, its signature single ‘Head Like a Hole’ enjoying heavy rotation on MTV.
Confounding expectations, singer and principal creative force Trent Reznor swapped combative pop for volatile guitar attacks for the blistering Broken EP, reaching even higher in the Billboard albums chart and garnering a Grammy award for ‘Best Metal Performance’ in 1993. Despite an accompanying bootlegged video depicting a snuff execution (directed by Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christophersen), it just seemed Reznor couldn’t not court the mainstream’s attention even if he tried.
And try, he certainly did. For the much anticipated ’94 sophomore LP The Downward Spiral, Reznor pursued an even bleaker pursuit of sonic abrasion and conceptual desolation, a narrative arc exploring a man’s descent into suicidal ideation scored with distorted metal, pummelling electronics and abrasive sonic impact courtesy of legendary British producer Flood. Quite literally dumped onto label Interscope’s desk, Reznor recalled in a past Spin interview, “Here it is. I’ll tour on it, but I’m not gonna change it”.
Label head Jimmy Iovine needn’t have been concerned with such an uncompromising stance, The Downward Spiral topping album charts worldwide and receiving near-universal critical acclaim. Unwittingly, perhaps, Reznor became the poster boy for the 1990s American counterculture after Kurt Cobain, who was aided by the legendary Woodstock ’94 slot and produced Marilyn Manson’s first two records.
Despite numerous soundtrack productions and a handful of stand-alone singles, The Downward Spiral‘s eagerly awaited follow-up took five years, hampered by writer’s block and a growing heroin habit. The resulting LP was double opus The Fragile, a sprawling industrial traverse imbued with brittle ambient washes exploring grief and funereal sorrow fuelled by the loss of his grandmother who raised him and spiked with the private anguish that comes with the throes of drug addiction.
Retrospectively acclaimed but met with a cool reception at the time, Reznor stuck to his creative guns and reached for ‘greatness’ amid a climate of nu-metal absurdity, recruiting Pink Floyd’s The Wall co-producer Bob Ezrin to help shape the album’s coherency. Five years was a long time, The Fragile selling half as much as The Downward Spiral despite debuting at number one on Billboard 200, unleashed to a markedly different music climate than the one that so readily ate up its more desolate predecessor.
By the time of The Fragile‘s accompanying Fragility Tour, Reznor was a mess. He divulged further to Spin: “That whole tour I was in a constant state of withdrawal and sickness. The success of that record was the first week. Then the label had had enough, and the public seemed to have had enough, and I’d had enough… It led me down a very dark and terrible path. At the end of it, which was close to four years ago, it was very clear to me that I was trying to kill myself.”
The extensive tour taking its toll on the Nine Inch Nails frontman came to a near-fatal nadir when mistaking the notoriously potent China white smack for cocaine, resulting in an overdose and the cancellation of the tour’s remaining dates. The severity of the experience was lost amid a destructive, drug-induced swirl that bookended the hellish Fragility Tour, Reznor confessing to The Guardian: “You tend to accumulate dramatic bad things when you’re in that place. My house got broke into, how did that happen to me? Oh my car got stolen, oh I woke up in hospital … it doesn’t sound that out of the ordinary when everything is shitty. For me, it was another brick in the wall of realising at some point, enough.”
After cleaning up in 2001, a noticeably beefier Reznor released With Teeth, swapping heroin hedonism for workout regimes and protein shakes. Ushering a prolific string of work including numerous Nine Inch Nails releases with now core collaborator Atticus Ross, How to Destroy Angels side-project, and a slew of Academy Award-winning film scores, self-loathing and self-medication seem a distant memory, but clearly an episode burned into Reznor’s psyche, lamenting: “I was going to just drink myself or drug myself out of it. I got back to New Orleans after the Fragile tour, and I’d pretty much lost my soul. I just felt like nothing: ‘Being famous doesn’t matter. I don’t like myself. I think I’m a piece of shit.’ It was unquestionably the worst thing ever. Just lying all the time about everything. I was in terrible physical shape, too.”
