Why Trent Reznor ended up hating everything about Guns ‘N’ Roses: “I’ve tried to block that out”
It’s not difficult to understand why an artist like Trent Reznor might find himself at odds with a band like Guns N’ Roses. The Nine Inch Nails man is a bastion of artistry, and the rock group was always more concerned with partying than how their music really sounded.
The idea of putting the two names together on a bill now is unthinkable. It’s impossible to imagine the intelligentsia of NIN’s fans mixing too well with the GNR crew. But for a moment in time, the two groups were connected by one tour. That run of shows would produce a lifetime of disdain for Reznor.
For a brief few years, it looked like Guns N’ Roses would take over the music world. Their debut, Appetite for Destruction, primed them for superstardom with tales about the rowdy side of Hollywood. Around the same time they were cocked and loaded, Trent Reznor was also starting to make waves in the industrial scene with Nine Inch Nails.
Once Guns N’ Roses got the money to make their sprawling epic Use Your Illusion, they originally positioned Nine Inch Nails as one of their support acts for their accompanying tour. Although both bands seemed to be operating on different planets, Axl Rose had expressed a love for the band in the past and even tried his hand at industrial music on the song ‘My World’ at the very end of Use Your Illusion II.
When taking to the road, Reznor talked about the tour being a miserable experience and told Q Magazine: “It was only a couple of shows, and it was some of the worst performances we ever had in front of the most hostile, moronic audiences I’ve ever experienced. They were there to rock. What they didn’t want was some homo-looking dudes playing noisy synths, and they made that very clear to us”.
Reznor remembered a particular show played in Germany where Nine Inch Nails got pelted with meat from the stage. He recounted:
“There were thousands of people standing there and raising their middle fingers. There were bits of sausage being thrown onstage. I’ve tried to block that out”.
Trent Reznor
A wall of meat being launched toward you as you play your shows is not the kind of thing any artist should have to endure. But, in many ways, it showed Reznor that he and his band were simply not built for the path that Guns N’ Roses had laid the foundation for. Things, it would seem, were changing.
Though Reznor discussed the cold reception, that wasn’t the band’s worst opening act experience on tour. On a separate leg, Faith No More were the opening act, and Mike Patton wanted no part in Rose’s antics. His inflated rockstar ego got so out of hand that Patton allegedly threatened to defecate on the monitor Rose used to remember his lyrics. Nothing ever came of the story since Faith No More was booted off the tour before Patton could implement his plan.
As Nine Inch Nails regrouped for the next album, Reznor eventually took his inner turmoil and used it as fuel for The Downward Spiral. After the harsh industrial side of Pretty Hate Machine, Spiral put listeners’ heads into a blender, as Reznor mentioned getting more and more uncommercial as he went along, saying (via Louder), “I thought I quite intentionally may have shot myself in the foot commercially. I didn’t do that just to fuck myself up, either. It’s what popped out of my head and was the strongest statement I could make. Fortunately, people identified with it”.
Once both bands reached 1994, Guns N’ Roses’ brand of gutter rat rock and roll was a thing of the past. Nirvana had taken up the mantle of authentic hard rock and had even rejected the opportunity to open for the band at the time because Kurt Cobain believed Rose held misogynistic views towards women.
Although Nine Inch Nails’ brand of industrial rock didn’t work with Guns N’ Roses crowd, they were welcomed by the masses when ‘Closer’ started to climb up the charts with stuttering beats and lyrics that were from the perspective of a damaged human being. While Guns N’ Roses may have been the world’s most successful band for a moment in time, their opening acts were proof of the changing of the seasons.
Reznor would continue to hold a level of disdain for such acts that would not only separate him from a whole crowd of rock lovers, but also put Nine Inch Nails among some of the most beloved alternative acts around. It was one thing to talk the talk, but with Reznor so willing to kill his commercial clear, it became obvious that the band could walk the walk as well.
