EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TRENT REZNOR

[spunion]

hey thanks for the work, I enjoyed reading it.

[blackrose]

On Wed, 10 Sep 1997 16:51:59 +0100, David Johnson
<daj...@zetnet.co.uk> wrote:

>This article is taken from this weeks issue of KERRANG! magazine

A bastion of reporting integrity... ;)

>'Spiral', only guitarist Danny Lohner is still a NIN member. The
>'band' is now completed by keyboardist/programmer Charlie Clouser and
>programmer Keith Hillebrandt. Both glam-freak guitarist Robin Finck
>and drummer Chris Vrenna have been jettisoned. Reznor stresses that
>Vrenna "Will never be in the band ever again".

Wow.

>"I don't know how much I wanna talk about this," he considers. "I've
>written every note of every song that Nine Inch Nails has done at
>this point. Every idea, every stage design, every outfit. Sometimes
>people that are close to you discover they hate you, because you can
>buy a car and they can't. But they don't see the effort that goes
>into all the other aspects of it.
>
>"They ride on the fucking bus for three years, which I paid for,
>playing the songs I wrote," he sighs. "It's like, 'Sorry I can't pay
>the electric bill!'.

Double wow.

>Last December, a news piece appeared on the Internet 'revealing' that
>the new Nine Inch Nails album was to be titled 'Impossible Pain' -
>and that Trent Reznor had enlisted a tramp to help mix it! Reznor was
>quoted in the news piece as saying: "I can't wait to see what this
>fuck-nut comes up with!" Kerrang! and a number of other UK magazines
>reported this story. We all later learned that it was, in fact, a
>hoax. And how we laughed.

Oh yeah. I'm sure. And how.

>"I heard something about that - where a
>homeless guy came into the studio?" guffaws Reznor now. "Where did
>that come from? Yeah, of course it was real," he adds, tongue wedged
>in cheek. "Actually," he hoots, "a corpse came in and started mixing
>the album!... Nah, it's flattering that people are going to the
>trouble to come up with that shit!"

Triple wow. Now I'm actually hoping that this piece *is* for real! ;)

Assuming it is, it's awfully nice to see that Trent is so genial
about it, and that having been said, I wonder if he knows how much it
pissed his manager off? "Flattering" he says. Groovy.

And to answer the question "where did [the homeless guy] come from?"
for anyone that may wonder, it happened one day while I was listening
to "Fixed" at work (while working on the Reznor pages). "Broken" and
"Fixed," if you hadn't figured it out, were the inspiration behind the
ideas and covers for "Impossible Pain" and "Improbable Pain." I'd
never bought "Fixed" until like, 1995, because I've *never* been into
remix albums - I think they're a waste of money on rehashed, recycled
music. My attitude changed (briefly) when a friend of mine forced me
to listen to Coil's take on "Gave Up" that he had recorded on a
cassette. Now, when I heard this song, I immediately went out and
bought "Fixed," thinking "hey, this is fuckin' cool - maybe there will
be some more good songs on it." I played it at work right after buying
it and I immediately reverted back to my original thinking, which was
that remix albums are mostly crap that any monkey with a mixing board
can do. If everybody on a remix album could be as creative as Coil was
with "Gave Up" - things might be different, but they aren't, at least
in my mind.

So I'm thinking, "OK, this Coil song is pretty cool, but the rest of
this shit.. man *I* could do this shit! My *mom* could do this shit!
The fuckin' drunks that hang out at 'The Warehouse' (a Cinci dance
club) could do this" - and so was born the satirical notion that remix
albums, you know, don't take a rocket scientist to create. I figured
Trent's mom remixing the album would have been funny, but I don't
really know anything about his mom. I could, however, imagine him
going out back at Nothing (I'd say for a smoke or something but he
doesn't smoke - maybe just to think and be alone) and seeing this
fucked up bum laying in the street and be like, thinking to himself
"hey, wouldn't it be a trip to get this guy to remix some shit? Pump
him full of coffee and straighten him up a bit - maybe even do him
some good!"

I was trying to make a sort of sarcastic point about remix albums with
the whole "bum" thing - and I think it maybe gets lost in the story.

br
@-}-

All things blackrose: www.malkavian.org/~blackrose
blac...@suckmespammers.org
[to email me, replace "suckmespammers" with "malkavian"]
R A D I O F R E E A M E R I C A
http://www.malkavian.org/rfa
R U P P T E C H N O L O G I E S, I N C
http://www.mobilescape.com

[Sally Gus]

Hey, guy! Thank you very much for posting that article!! It was a
treat, David. :)

Sally

[David Johnson]

This article is taken from this weeks issue of KERRANG! magazine

which was released today. It is a 5 page articles with various
pictures of Trent etc, and Trent is also featured on the front cover
of the magazine. I hope you lot appreciate it cos it took me fookin'
ages to type it all in - Some interesting stuff! And I'm pretty sure
it's not bollocks!

-----------------------------------------

Trent Reznor invented Marilyn Manson, revolutionised movie
soundtracks and single-handedly made industrial rock cool. And now,
in his first interview with the UK press in three years, the NINE
INCH NAILS mainman explains exactly how he did it...

"Tour guide parties walk past my house and (horror novelist) Anne
Rice's house every day. It's like, 'That's where the woman who wrote
'Interview With The Vampire' lives, and that's where the
Satan-worshipping rock star lives'!"

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor is at home in New Orleans,
recovering from a mild bout of Pringles-induced sickness. His dog
Daisy occasionally provides a background chorus. "I've got this seat
here in my living room where I'm pretty sure they can't see me,"
Reznor reveals. "I'm in my underpants right now, so I hope that this
correct."

Nine Inch Nails, one of the most important bands of our time, have
just broken an extended silence with the release of a new EP, 'The
Perfect Drug'. it was originally written for the soundtrack to David
Lynch's latest movie, 'Lost Highway'. And yes, a new NIN album is in
the works. Right now, Reznor is working on mixes for a David Bowie
EP, but once he has "flushed that out of my system" he will press on
with the third full-length NIN record. When it emerges in ''the very
first half of next year - hopefully", it will have been four years
since the magnificent 'The Downward Spiral' was released.

"That's because touring turns you into a retard," says Reznor.
''You're bombarded with input - whether it be drugs or women,
stimulus or ego gratification, playing or exhaustion or bad food. You
get little time to think. Every record I've done, I've got on the
cerebral professor hat and asked, "Is this an important thing to
say?". He pauses. As he does a lot. "I know that sounds pretentious and dumb."

Even while touring Europe for "Spiral", Reznor worked in hotel rooms,
creating perhaps the best film soundtrack of the '90s, "Natural Born
Killers".

''The cool thing about the film was the collage of pop imagery," he
says. "So I said, "let's make a collage with a hundred songs in it -
some for 10 seconds, some with dialogue over them. can you play the
CD, you'll think of the movie." With "Natural Born Killers", the
movie, remains unavailable on video in the UK, having been
predictably smeared with copycat incidents in America and Paris.
"This can relate to Judas Priest, Marilyn Manson and other issues,"
says Reznor. "Ultimately, the individual has to assume complete
responsibility. Art has always been a reflection of culture and
society. If you listen to a fucking rap record and go and shoot a
cop, maybe the record was the final catalyst that made you do it, but
you had problems to start with."

He notes that his work on "Lost Highway" was less intensive. "The
sheer volume of 'NBK' involved sorting through thousands of
megabytes of songs," he recalls. "For Lost Highway that wasn't so
appropriate, because the movie has a different feel to it. Within the
limits of what David Lynch would allow, I tried to make it a
representative of the film. That whole mortal combat idea of let's
just throw every bullshit thing you can in there doesn't appeal to me."

Lost Highway is hypnotically surreal and disturbing. Does Reznor have
any clue what it's about? "Does anybody?" He darkly chuckles. "I
don't know. But David Lynch and David Cronenberg are my favourite
film-makers, along with Ken Russell. Lynch is charming and puts you
at ease. But the level I worked with him was the highest pressure
period I've ever worked in."

Anecdotes incoming...

"He talked really loudly, like the guy in Twin Peaks who's had of
hearing," laughs Reznor. ''He'd say, 'I've got a chase scene, and I'm
picturing insects swimming around'. Then he'd scribble on pieces of
paper and say, 'This is what I want it to sound like'. "I went up to
his house in LA a couple of times. One of the houses he owns is in
'Lost Highway'. He said, 'Let me show you this', and walked up the
side of a hill. He showed me a trail of ants crawling over a piece of
rotting meat on a canvas, and told me that it was his latest project.

"That might make him sound like a pretentious cock, but he's not at
all. He's like your uncle. I found myself looking at him, going,
'Jesus Christ, David Lynch!'. I've probably seen 'Blue Velvet' about
50 times, y'know?! It was like, 'He's talking to me! He created Frank Booth!'."

The 'Lost Highway' soundtrack song 'Driver Down' is credited to Trent
Reznor. Given that the man always writes NIN songs, why make that
distinction? "It was a transition, because members of my band had
left," he replies, before taking a deep breath and broadening the
subject. "Here's the problem I've had with my band. I started by
myself, living in Cleveland, engineering in a studio, recording bad
Rhythm 'n' Blues acts by day. If there was a few minutes at the end
of the night, I could do my own stuff - which pretty much ended up
being 'Pretty Hate Machine'."

"I couldn't find anybody that would join me. Everybody was like, 'how
much are you paying?'. But I was getting $200 a month and eating
peanut butter sandwiches every day! I didn't find anybody so I did it
myself, adopting the attitude of, 'Well, fuck, Prince did it - I can
do it!'." Only after Reznor signed a record deal did he assemble a
group of hired hands. ''They played the part I wrote and I was the
guy lying on my back under the computer, basically doing everything.
That established a premise where the band never was a band. I thought
it was a good live band, but not a band that went into the studio and
recorded together."

Nine Inch Nails musicians have been numerous, including Filter's
Richard Patrick, ex-Filter man Brian Liesegang, and guitarist Jeff
Ward, who died a heroin addict ("I never knew how bad he was - he
kept hiding," laments Reznor). Of the line-up that toured with

'Spiral', only guitarist Danny Lohner is still a NIN member. The
'band' is now completed by keyboardist/programmer Charlie Clouser and
programmer Keith Hillebrandt. Both glam-freak guitarist Robin Finck
and drummer Chris Vrenna have been jettisoned. Reznor stresses that
Vrenna "Will never be in the band ever again".

"I don't know how much I wanna talk about this," he considers. "I've

written every note of every song that Nine Inch Nails has done at
this point. Every idea, every stage design, every outfit. Sometimes
people that are close to you discover they hate you, because you can
buy a car and they can't. But they don't see the effort that goes
into all the other aspects of it.

"They ride on the fucking bus for three years, which I paid for,
playing the songs I wrote," he sighs. "It's like, 'Sorry I can't pay

the electric bill!'. There's been a few elements like that. "Manson
and I aren't as close as we were," he casually adds. Really? Tell us more...

"Well, you have to deal with the reality. Being around a few more
years than he has, I seen my own personality distort. Now, I've
watched his personality distort. A bit of fame, and you change."

Marilyn Manson are signed to Reznor's label, Nothing Records. Reznor
admits that they've made the label "a legitimate entity", and that
Manson himself required will always be a intend". Yet it appears that
Reznor's involvement on the 'Antichridst Superstar' album may have
set the two friends adrift. Reznor claims that the production work of
'Antichrist' "stopped my life for quite some time, and took five
times as long as I wanted it to". Three of the albums songs are
credited to him.

"I tried to help their songwriting," he explains. "Like, 'let's get a
chorus where it kicks in and you can pump it in your fucking car!'.
That radically changed the record. "I wanted to elevate Manson from
being something that could be dismissed as a statement. They needed a
really good record - and not for my personal benefit."

Reznor and Manson met years ago, when the latter's band opened for
NIN in a small club. ''It was a joke," recalls Reznor. "He said, 'I
only have a band so I can sell T-shirts!'. That was pretty cool,
because it was a counterpart to me. Not to sound high and mighty, but
if no one ever recognises me and no supermodel ever dates me - which
they haven't! - I wouldn't care. That's not why I'm doing it. Manson
had a different approach to celebrity. His attitude was, 'I wanna be
a star and I'm gonna be a fucking star'."

Reznor describes the tensions between Manson and the bands now
ex-guitarist Daisy Berkowitz as "So
un-fucking-productive" during initial 'Antichrist' sessions. "When
Daisy went, Twiggy (Ramirez, bassist) came forward with a bunch of
songs. At their best, they could be what they are and at their worst
they could be Lunachicks-style, one-riff crap rock that you've heard
a million times before. "I'm pleased with 80 per cent of that record.
If I completely had my way, I would have taken it 10 notches more
extreme. But it worked."

Nine Inch Nails set the stage for Marilyn Manson by touring with a
bombastic, spectacular show, and promoting a somewhat androgynous
image. "I remember seeing Kiss as a kid," enthuses Reznor. "I want
rock stars to be larger than life. I don't want to see a fucking gas
station attendant. I want fucking blood and fire and explosions,
naked tits and all that stuff! In a small way, we did that. Manson
took that to extremes. And good for them. Sadly, now you'll see a
million bands like them. Imagine the old fart musicians who are now
coming out of their stupor going, 'Fuck, we can do this!'. King
Diamond's gonna try again..."

But while Manson is seen as a great cartoon character, Trent Reznor
is genuinely respected. One of America's most highly esteemed
journals, 'Time', has just hailed him the 'Most Influential Musician
Of The Nineties'. "It's extremely flattering," he says, "but what the
fuck does it mean? You don't wanna think about that too much, or
you'd fuck yourself up. I have!"

Unsurprisingly, given NIN's traditional position a step ahead of the
pack, Reznor is well aware of his musical influence on orders. "When
I finished the Manson record, I found myself personally not wanting
to hear bands like Gravity Kills and Stabbin Westward," he admits.
"Danzig's made a fucking industrial' record now! Not that there
aren't good elements in those things - but it dead, it's tired, it's
done." Instead, Reznor found himself being swept away by the drum 'n'
bass scene.

"I'd never heard music like that before," he marvels. "It's nice to
see stuff like Goldie and Aphex Twin taking on a truly experimental
vibe that doesn't give a fuck about radio or MTV." He describes The
Prodigy as "A decent pop-band". "The amount of hype they have over
here overshadows what might be good about them," he continues.
"They're definitely important and I liked the record, but I don't
think, ultimately, what's being said is anything shockingly new or
stimulating. "Someone obviously decided to say, 'Hey! If we brought a
frontman in there and give him a silly fucking haircut, or someone
sings...'," he laughs.

The Chemical Brothers? "Again, I like them, but 'Block Rockin' Beats'
has the stiffest groove I've ever heard in my life!" He exclaims. "It
screams to me, 'We're English, we're white and we're playing a funk song!'."

The new Nine Inch Nails record will not be titled 'Dissonance', as
has recently been reported elsewhere. "That was just the name of the
tour we did with Bowie," scoffs Reznor. "The beauty of the Internet
converted that into our album title. The working title right now is
'The Fragile', although I'll probably hate that in a couple of weeks."

What will it sound like? "I really don't listen to rock music any
more," he states, up-front. "The new record is focused on taking an
element of rhythm 'n' blues and funk - in the Prince sense, not the
Red Hot Chili Peppers sense - and juxtaposing it radically with an
Aphex Twin-ish approach. It has the feel of something you might
understand, but the sound of a stereo exploding. With a nice melodic
pop song on top."

No guitars? "Pretty much all I've been playing lately is guitar and
I'm finally getting to the point where I think I'm okay at bit, but
it's not gonna be a guitar - sounding record. It'll be very
electronic and the constructed."

Lyrically, Reznor wants to say something new. "I mean, I don't
fucking know how to write songs," he mutters with ludicrous modesty.
"I opened my journal up, wrote things I could never let anybody hear,
and it turned out people liked them. I was embarrassed, because it
was like telling your most naked thoughts. Each new song probably
won't start with the word 'I'," he laughs. "If you add up the number
of 'I's I've used in my life, it comes to... quite a lot! There's
also a real element of boxing yourself into a corner. How much more
dead can you be? How much closer to suicide can you get?!"

Reznor admits he would eventually like to work on soundtracks and
"give Nine Inch Nails a respectful burial". Could 'The Fragile' be
NIN's swansong? "I don't know. I'd like to say no. At the same time,
I have a level of unhappiness that Nine Inch Nails hasn't really
fixed. I've still got fuck-loads I gotta do... Nah, y'know what?!
Nine Inch Nails is gonna be The Rolling Stones! I'll be 60, with a
fucking colostomy bag. No one might be there at the shows, apart from
the Vietnam vet reunion in Pennsylvania or somewhere. The advert
would be 'Featuring No Original Members!'. Actually, I can't say that
- I already don't have any original members!"

Trent Reznor claims to be "happily inspired" right now, despite
recent events. An unknown musician, Mark Nicholas Onofrio, has filed
a lawsuit against him, claiming that certain songs from 'The Downward
Spiral'are "strikingly similar" to his own, which he alleges he sent
Reznor in 1993. "If I could name the Number One thing on my list that
pisses me off right now," says Reznor, "it would be that pile of
fucking human cunt garbage. I've never met him or heard his fucking
tape. I don't even want to acknowledge his existence. You'll read
about it when it gets thrown out of court."

On a more personal level, Reznor has recently lost his grandmother,
who raised him in Pennsylvania. "No one close around me as ever died
- it's a small family. So that was a weird..." he trails off. "I just
got back from that. It was awful, watching her in the hospital room.
I don't recommend it."

Is there an after-life? "I think I believe in reincarnation," he
considers. "There's some kind of God, but certainly not the kind of
God that the preacher at our funeral was talking about. I almost
walked up and hit him on the way out. It just confirmed to me that
I'm not wrong in my thinking."

When it comes to relationships, Reznor insists his are confined to
"my kick-ass dog". "See, I was so desperate to get out of
Pennsylvania where I grew up that I decided I'd never let anything
hold me back," he admits. "When I started working on my stuff in
Cleveland, it was so time-consuming that I lost all my friends. I'd
sleep for two hours, and start to see bugs on the wall and shit like
that. From the moment I got signed until right now, every second has
been so consumed with shit that it's hard to come across somebody who
understand a lifestlyle where it's like, 'Well, for the next either
months I'm gonna be in the studio for 15 hours a day. Then I'll be on
tour for a year-and-a-half...'. Lot's of people can have
girlfriends," he chuckles. "But I can throw around guitars onstage!
That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've
seen him smash a Les Paul!'."

Last December, a news piece appeared on the Internet 'revealing' that
the new Nine Inch Nails album was to be titled 'Impossible Pain' -
and that Trent Reznor had enlisted a tramp to help mix it! Reznor was
quoted in the news piece as saying: "I can't wait to see what this
fuck-nut comes up with!" Kerrang! and a number of other UK magazines
reported this story. We all later learned that it was, in fact, a

hoax. And how we laughed. "I heard something about that - where a

homeless guy came into the studio?" guffaws Reznor now. "Where did
that come from? Yeah, of course it was real," he adds, tongue wedged
in cheek. "Actually," he hoots, "a corpse came in and started mixing
the album!... Nah, it's flattering that people are going to the
trouble to come up with that shit!"

---------------------------------
--
James.

[LdyNRed]

In article <199709101...@zetnet.co.uk>, daj...@zetnet.co.uk
says...

> This article is taken from this weeks issue of KERRANG! magazine
> which was released today. It is a 5 page articles with various
> pictures of Trent etc, and Trent is also featured on the front cover
> of the magazine. I hope you lot appreciate it cos it took me fookin'
> ages to type it all in - Some interesting stuff! And I'm pretty sure
> it's not bollocks!

I certainly appreciate your "fookin'" efforts d...:) It's above and
beyond the call of duty to type in all that just to share with us poor
deprived "Merkins" who, maybe like me, don't have any hope of access to
KERRANG!

You know...I was thinking about commenting on select parts of that
interview, but I decided against it. <Carolyn listens to collective sigh
of relief from AMNIN denizens> I'm long-winded enough on posts of two
paragraphs, much less something of that length. I'll spare you all this
time.

Except for one thing...:) I *knew* he wouldn't plagarize...no way...no
how... I haven't seen anything tangible to shake me from that up to this
point and now there's a statement from T.R. saying flat out that Onofrio
is full of crap. I believe him 100 percent. Skewer that s.o.b.
baaaaayyyybeeee! Make Onofrio ka-bobs out of him!

Carolyn