Nine Inch Nails: Many Happy Returns To...'The Downward Spiral'
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Written by Huw Baines
When Trent Reznor returned with a new Nine Inch Nails record last year, he wasn’t the only one looking back. Fans began compiling their lists of wants and needs, while writers immediately fired up Google to get a little mileage from his statements prior to the band’s hiatus in 2009. Reznor, though, was evaluating the man he is next to the spectre of the man he was.
"I was thinking a lot about ‘The Downward Spiral’ album era, and the person I was at that time," he told the Guardian last summer. "’Downward Spiral’ felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode.
“I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts...but after a while it didn't sustain itself, and other things took over – drugs and alcohol."
‘Hesitation Marks’ shared common ground with what many consider to be the defining Nine Inch Nails album - not to mention one of the leading alternative releases of the ‘90s - from Russell Mills’ artwork to its blurring of the line between sensuality and the machine.
Since ‘The Downward Spiral’, which was released in March 1994, Reznor has produced at least two more bona-fide classic records, mellowed somewhat and become an Oscar-winning composer. Why, then, is this often brutal, thoroughly bleak album such an enduring piece of work? Well, simply put, it’s pretty much a perfect example of circumstance, time and place being channelled into something far greater.
Head Like A Hole, the opening song from Nine Inch Nails’ debut, ‘Pretty Hate Machine’, had made Reznor a counter-culture poster boy. His band were being co-opted into a mainstream world that he struggled to accept - just as it would struggle to accept him - while a bitter legal battle with Steve Gottlieb and TVT Records bound him in a creative strait-jacket. The result, after some loophole finding and a deal with Interscope, was ‘Broken’, an EP so feral in its anger that it remains a benchmark for the band’s abrasive side.
"My whole life became my career, essentially," Reznor told Rolling Stone in 1993. "And then I was faced with the fact that my career could easily have been over because the people that controlled it are fucking assholes. It's a horrible feeling.
“On one hand, Nine Inch Nails had a platinum album. And on the other hand, I thought it was over because I was not doing another album for Gottlieb. And I was told litigation would have taken two years. That's where a lot of the rage on ‘Broken’ came from."
Post-’Broken’, there was no suggestion that Reznor would lighten the tone. Nine Inch Nails had, through ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ and their part in the inaugural Lollapalooza - an experience that at times flitted from chaotic to destructive and back again - become a big deal, but Reznor also finally had creative control of their next step. As the video for ‘Broken’ cut Happiness In Slavery displayed, he wasn’t interested in playing by anyone else’s rules.
‘The Downward Spiral’ confronted self-loathing, suicide, hopelessness and the descent to absolute rock bottom. Its movements were meticulously planned by Reznor on both a thematic and musical level, but the process was a difficult one. After attempting to write the record as a whole, he eventually pieced together its narrative in a more organic fashion, experimenting with samples and snatches of guitar re-routed through layers of effects.
“Two thirds of the way through it, i looked and realised that I’d just done exactly what I set out to do without thinking about it,” he said in a 1994 interview. “The songs all fit in the right spot, somehow.”
Like ‘Broken’, and Marilyn Manson’s debut, ‘Portrait Of An American Family’, the record was recorded in part at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, the site of the Manson Family’s murder of Sharon Tate. Reznor’s studio was dubbed, in bad taste, Le Pig in reference to a message left in Tate’s blood on the front door.
What began as a marriage of convenience eventually led to a deeper understanding of the place. Reznor was unaware of the house’s history when he viewed it and, following difficulties in finding a unit in New Orleans, his preferred city to base the band in, it offered a chance for him to set up a studio and fine tune his engineering skills.
“The reality was we had to build a studio from scratch, because there wasn't any in New Orleans with technology past 1975,” he told FHM in 2000. “The place we used just happened to be available.”
Of course, the house’s history would remain an emotive issue. “While I was working on ‘Downward Spiral’, I was living in the house where Sharon Tate was killed,” he told Rolling Stone in 1997. “Then one day I met her sister. It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: ‘Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?’ For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face.
“I said, ‘No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.’ I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, ‘What if it was my sister?’ I thought, ‘Fuck Charlie Manson.’ I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit.”
Once he’d overcome the significant, time-consuming hurdles that attend building your own studio, Reznor and producer Flood set about assembling the record from the ground up, experimenting each step of the way in a method that would quickly overpower most.
Reznor sampled everything he could get his hands on - Chris Vrenna, he told Keyboard Magazine, watched “3,000 movies” in search of sounds - and introduced musicians like Adrian Belew, guitarist of King Crimson, into the mix just to see what would happen.
“He showed up and said, ‘Hi, what do you want me to do?’ And Flood and I were like, ‘Well we don't know’,” Reznor told Keyboard. “So he looks at us, scratches his head, ‘All right, what key is it in?’ We look at each other, ‘Hmm, not sure. Probably E. Here's the tape, do whatever you want to do. Go!’ So he started noodling around and...Adrian is the most awesome musician in the world. I've never seen anybody play guitar like that.”
Reznor was far more interested in the texture and feel of the record than any songwriting convention, though he chalked up his experimentation to a desire to improve and evolve as a songwriter. It’s remarkable, even 20 years on, just how cohesive a whole ‘The Downward Spiral’ is given its disparate beginnings.
“There were a few things I wanted to do with this album,” he told Axcess in 1994. “Get away from the verse/chorus, verse/chorus, middle part, end structure, which came from listening to ‘Low’ by [David] Bowie. Some of the songs don't seem that odd until you listen to a song and there wasn't any singing on it, but you didn't even realize it wasn't there. Odd structures and stuff.
“I doubt the average listener pays attention to it, but when you try to better the craft of songwriting, you listen to those kinds of things. Also, to experiment with mood and put more effort into that than I had in the past. Music that might evoke visual images, not any specific ones. Perceptions.”
Reznor couldn’t lay aside his ear for a tune, though. If any record in history shouldn’t have birthed a hit single, then ‘The Downward Spiral’ is it. And, If any song is further from the safe, reusable model of a hit single, then Closer is it. For his part, Reznor felt the same way.
“Before ‘The Downward Spiral’ came out, I said to the label, ‘Look – sorry, but I don't think there's a fucking single in here. I don't think it's going to sell for shit, but I had to make this record, because it's what I'm about right now; I believe in it 100 percent. I'm sorry, though, there's not something to justify the money you gave me to make it,’” he told Rolling Stone.
“Then Closer takes off, and the fucking record sells two or three million copies. It surprised me because – not to sound lofty, but I didn't think people would get it, you know?”
Closer is a great example of Nine Inch Nails’ peculiar place in popular music. For a band readily associated with Skinny Puppy and Ministry - whether Reznor likes the industrial tag or not - the song has far more in common with Prince than Al Jourgensen.
Its lyrics and Mark Romanek-directed video, though, would help to lead Nine Inch Nails into conflict with the pop establishment, traditionally the preserve of only the most short-sighted and anodyne. The promo clip, in fact, was another extension of Reznor’s refusal to compromise.
Romanek’s treatment was always on the edge, but given the expensive processes utilised to give the video its 1920s grit, there wasn’t really any way to make cuts and alterations without blowing the budget.
“Trent finally just said ‘fuck it’, let’s not make two versions. Let’s make our version, and if MTV won’t show it, then fuck MTV,” Romanek later recalled.
The final video, complete with bleeps and heavy ‘censored’ bars across the screen, eventually earned heavy rotation. But, in a beautiful twist, Reznor has described the ‘tone’ of the video as being the most problematic thing for conservatives to stomach. And, like the rest of ‘The Downward Spiral’, there was no way to change that.
Several months after the album’s release, Reznor and his band tackled Woodstock. Their performance - caked in mud and in front of one of the biggest, most raucous crowds of a troubled event - quickly became iconic, augmenting the huge dent that they’d made in the public consciousness. In 1994, Nine Inch Nails changed music as we know it.
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