Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

TRENT REZNOR: I finally realized I had to come to terms about becoming an addict—for a long time, I lied to myself about [it] until I couldn’t lie anymore—’cause I was either going to die or get better.

  Before Trent Reznor went on his downward spiral of depression and heroin abuse, he was an anonymous musician with a background in classical piano. Raised in rural Mercer, Pennsylvania, he moved to Cleveland after a year at Allegheny College, and began playing in local bands. He also wrote music at home on his computer. And when he wasn’t writing or jamming, he worked as a janitor and assistant engineer at Right Track Studios, where he recorded the demos that got him signed to TVT Records.

  RICHARD PATRICK: Trent and I were both in weak New Wave alterna-bands in Cleveland; his was the Exotic Birds and mine was the Act. We kept tabs on each other and went to see shows like Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Then we ran into each other again at the Fantasy at a concert by [Al Jourgensen’s side band] Revolting Cocks. Trent goes, “See that guy up there? That’s Al Jourgensen; he’s my fucking idol!” It was really Al Jourgensen’s [1986] album Twitch and sound design from Skinny Puppy that were the building blocks for Nine Inch Nails. Trent liked Twitch because it was a little more pop-oriented and it used traditional songwriting, but it was still weird and had rough edges and was jagged and scary.

  TRENT REZNOR: If anyone ever asks me about influences, I always say Ministry. I’m not embarrassed by that, but I also don’t want NIN to be the Ministry wannabe band. Al’s been a hero of mine. But I have to admit, before I met him, I thought, “Is he going to fucking throw a bottle at me?”

  AL JOURGENSEN: I love Trent, man. Before he got all famous he was a roadie for Ministry. He was this kid and he rode with us in our bus and we used to fuck with him all the time. We’d throw firecrackers into his bunk and scare the shit out of him. At my studio, we had a rule that you couldn’t fall asleep or you’d get fucked with. So one time when he was passed out I took out a razor and shaved his head. I thought he looked pretty good that way.

  RICHARD PATRICK: Trent came up to me one day and was like, “Hey listen, I finished up this new record. I actually have a record deal.” Now, for kids of our generation, being in an alternative band from Cleveland and getting signed was unheard of. It was probably the most one-sided, most horrible record contract in existence. He signed away his entire publishing, everything. But still, he had a record contract. He goes, “I’m going to go on the road. Wanna be in the touring band?” I had just disbanded the Act, so I was like, “Sure, let’s go for it.”

  TRENT REZNOR: What I was trying to say with [my 1989 debut] Pretty Hate Machine was that the world sucks and everything around me is a piece of shit, and everything’s depressing me, but I’ve still got myself. Through that whole Lollapalooza tour [for Pretty Hate Machine] I felt overwhelmed. When an underground band starts to get big, some of those initial supporters start to turn on you because now you’re too big to be cool anymore. I thought Nine Inch Nails was getting out of control in terms of how big we were getting. I felt like everything I’ve worked on my whole life I’m starting to get, yet it was all falling apart because the record label we were on did everything they could to fuck it up. I didn’t really like myself or what I had become at that point. In my personal life, I didn’t know who I was. I looked back at what I’d done, and I realized that’s not the me I thought I was. That really fucked me up. I’ve done some shitty things and abused some people, and taken people for granted. I’ve done nice things as well, but when you finally have a moment to sit back and think, “Well, what am I now?” I mean, the normal me is the person who’s not on tour, that’s at home, but is that really me?

  RICHARD PATRICK: The highlight of being in Nine Inch Nails was when I sat down by myself and wrote [the breakthrough Filter single] “Hey Man, Nice Shot” because I knew I would soon be out of the insanity and the pure emotional hardship of being in that band. I was paid next to nothing. Trent would smash $40,000 worth of equipment, and I came home from his huge Lollapalooza tour with maybe a thousand bucks. I lived at home with my parents, and that’s when I was like, “Something’s not right.”

  By the end of Lollapalooza, Reznor was emotionally shattered. He responded by writing the 1992 EP Broken, which featured his fastest, heaviest, and most metallic songs to that point. It was both an attack on TVT Records, which was taking the lion’s share of his earnings, and a cathartic release of the stress and insecurity that had consumed him since “Head Like a Hole” became a hit single.

  TRENT REZNOR: I wanted Broken to be really angry through and through, like a punch in the face. I didn’t want to convolute that message with slow parts or dance tracks. Basically, Broken was me saying “fuck you” to everybody. There’s a lot I don’t enjoy about the competitive and backstabbing nature of the music business. Fame—being put on a pedestal just to be immediately taken off—is a drag, and I don’t think my skin is tough enough to deal with it most of the time.

  RICHARD PATRICK: When Trent saw the Jane’s Addiction electronic press kit [video] that came out, in which Dave Navarro and Perry Farrell were making out, he was into the shock value of that. So he just found a little part of subculture that hadn’t necessarily been exploited yet—the whole S&M thing—and he grabbed it and attached it to his own aesthetic. He put out a video for “Happiness in Slavery,” which had a meat grinder tearing this guy apart.

  TRENT REZNOR: A lot of times sadomasochistic imagery works as a good metaphor. Sometimes I know what I’m writing about, sometimes the truer meaning becomes apparent to me later. But dominance and submission, and power in relationships, whether physical or mental, is interesting to me.

  RICHARD PATRICK: He was never, like, this wild S&M guy or anything. Trent was very conservative sexually. He would always have a regular girlfriend. There were no groupies or anything. Al [Jourgensen] was the one who was completely, totally, and utterly into everything. At one point, Trent hired Al to help him and Al was like, “Sure, I’ll take your money.” Al had no respect for him, but Al sure had a good time. He was banging dope right in front of us. And he’d fuck any girl right in Trent’s house. Al came down from Mardi Gras and had all these crazy goth girls with him that were part of the subculture he created. Trent would hear things going on in the next room as he was sitting there with his then-girlfriend and he would say, “What the fuck is happening?” In the morning, Al would wake up and go, “Okay everybody, we’re having margaritas.” He’d put in a little bit of a margarita mix and a whole ton of tequila. And he’d go, “What else you got, Trent?” Trent would go, “Well, I think that’s pretty much it, margarita mix and tequila.” Al goes, “No, no, no. Where’s the washing machine? There you go, a little Clorox.” And he would pour a little Clorox into the blender. Then he’d say, “You got any motor oil?” Then he would mix it up and fuckin’ drink it and serve it to everybody. It was not enough to hurt anybody, but you still knew there was Clorox in your margarita.

  With both metal and alternative camps firmly supporting him, Reznor holed up in the home of the late Sharon Tate, who, in 1969, had been murdered by the Charles Manson clan in that same house, and wrote The Downward Spiral, a bleak, haunting album that balanced pop hooks and warped keyboards with progressive arrangements and just enough guitar angst to remain heavy. Angular and angry, it’s probably the only album ever released with a mega-hit single that features a sing-along chorus with lyrics as extreme as “I want to fuck you like an animal.”

  TRENT REZNOR: I was living in New Orleans and couldn’t find a house and studio that was the right size and distance away from other houses. So we came to LA and saw the Tate house. It was the coolest house—very centrally located but still fairly isolated, and it was on a beautiful piece of property with an amazing view. When we later found out it was that house, that just made it more appealing. It’s a cool piece of history. I wasn’t consciously thinking of what great media stories I was going to get, it was just an interesting place to be—a cool house in a very uncool city.

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bsp; RICHARD PATRICK: When Trent started working on that album he was freaked. There was a lot of money flying around, and he was in that house way too long. I went to play “Hey Man, Nice Shot” for him and say, “Hey, what do you think of this?” He said, “Yeah, fits really good,” and that’s huge for him to even say because he’s so competitive. I offer it to him and he says, “Maybe I’ll take the riff and we’ll do something cool.” An hour later, [Reznor’s ex-manager] John Malm calls me and says, “You can never own it, you can’t have any publishing, but we’ll give you credit.” I said, “No, I think I’ll keep it for myself.” Now, being out of that camp and owning 100 percent of that song has literally paid my mortgage, paid for my life for the past fifteen years.

  TRENT REZNOR: Going into The Downward Spiral, the safest thing I could have done was make another Broken that was tough and mean and would show everybody how many great metal riffs I can write. It would have been the least artistically challenging thing, so I wasn’t going to do that. I started The Downward Spiral on guitar but ended up using a lot of computer instead of guitar to write because it was a lot more inspiring to me. I was also trying to make a record that was fairly broad in its scope musically, rather than everything being really hard and fast.

  RICHARD PATRICK: While he was working, Trent was nice enough to let me record demos. But there was always this belittling vibe with him and John [Malm]. I was getting paid $400 a month. After a while, I called John and said, “I don’t think $400 a month is gonna be able to cut it.” I will never forget this. I was in my brother’s guest room talking to John on the phone and he goes, “Well listen Rich, we know you want some extra money. We found a great little pizzeria down the street and saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign, and we think it’d be in your best interest if you got a real job to see how hard it is out there in the real world.” I said, “For $400 bucks a month you want me to go deliver pizzas so I can learn the meaning of the word respect?” That was the final straw for me. Fortunately, the next phone call I got was [from my own manager], going, “Warner Bros. and Atlantic are interested in you. Are you available?” I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding? I’m so available.”

  TRENT REZNOR: I’m on a quest to figure out what the fuck is in my own head. I think a lot of the stuff that’s addressed on my records is from a fairly confused standpoint, and one that I know is incorrect, or maybe looking for solutions in the wrong things. With The Downward Spiral I wanted to really examine the debris of that negativity and see what I could make out of it. And maybe that involved being a bit more musically diverse with a lot more moodiness and atmosphere in the music, and maybe a bit more lyrically vulnerable. When you peel back the skin, sometimes you find that what you see is not always the person you thought you were.

  CHUCK PALAHNIUK (author): I listened to The Downward Spiral and Pretty Hate Machine constantly while I was writing Fight Club. There were cuts on it that I would put on repeat to the point that my housemates were just insane. “Hurt” was one of the big ones. The lyric “I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel” might as well be one of the novel’s mantras.

  TRENT REZNOR: Before it came out, I thought there was a danger that there weren’t any real singles on the record, and people that really liked Pretty Hate Machine wouldn’t like The Downward Spiral, and people that were more into the metal sound of Broken wouldn’t like it. That’s when I caught myself saying, “Am I a marketing product or am I trying to make a piece of art? This is the record I wanted to make.” 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.

  CHRISTOPHER HALL (Stabbing Westward): When Nine Inch Nails got really popular, people compared us to them. We’re not really influenced by them, but more by people who influenced them, like Ministry and Skinny Puppy. But I always thought melody was missing from industrial music. That’s why we did songs like “What Do I Have to Do” and “Shame.”

  At the height of his commercial and critical success, Reznor formed the vanity label Nothing, which released future NIN records as well as albums by Prick, Meat Beat Manifesto, and 2wo, a collaboration between Reznor and Rob Halford. None was particularly successful, but one superstar—or rather Antichrist Superstar—bankrolled every failure. Before being courted by Reznor, Marilyn Manson (aka Brian Warner) was the leader of the Florida-based performance art/shock metal band Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids. Impressed by his nihilism and perversity, Reznor signed Marilyn Manson and produced his 1994 debut Portrait of an American Family, the 1995 EP Smells Like Children, and the 1996 breakthrough Antichrist Superstar, on which Reznor is credited with playing Mellotron, Fender Rhodes piano, and guitar, as well as programming and mixing. But Manson didn’t want to be someone else’s protégé, and by the time Antichrist Superstar was a hit, he had burned bridges with Reznor and lashed out on his own. In no time, Manson was the new antihero for a generation of post-millennial misanthropes, the bogeyman for terrified parents, and a whipping boy for conservative America. The more heat he took, the more outrageous he became in his show, cutting himself, dressing in outfits reminiscent of Nazi soldiers, and tearing up the Bible. For Manson, spitting in the face of the mainstream was as enjoyable as having a hit single.

  MARILYN MANSON: “Marilyn” came to me in about 1990 from watching a lot of talk shows and reading Hollywood Babylon. I realized Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson were some of the most memorable people from the sixties. I thought—in the tradition of philosophers like Hegel—about the juxtaposition of diametrically opposed archetypes: taking two extremes, putting them together, and coming up with something totally different. It’s male/female, good/evil, God/Satan. That kind of defines my personality and represented the lyrics that I was writing. I met Trent Reznor, and over the growth of Marilyn Manson, I always passed along demo tapes [to him]. When he got the opportunity to start his own label, he contacted us.

  TRENT REZNOR: From a business point of view, Marilyn Manson was wildly successful. I think he’s a talented guy, and I’m not taking credit where it’s not due. If there was a valid role I had, it was helping provide a framework to allow him to do what he wanted to do.

  MARILYN MANSON: A lot of people think that Trent was very involved with our songwriting and the direction of the band. [Our second album,] Mechanical Animals, not only proved that we can do things on our own, it proves that what we’ve done in the past was still very much our own creation. The problem with Antichrist Superstar was I was put in a position where I was made very unsure of myself. I was questioning everything I did because at the end it really fell apart, and I had to make a choice whether to accept someone else’s opinion or my own. Trent is a very heavy-handed producer, but I’ve always been my own songwriter. I have no animosity against Trent. I don’t think that we’ll ever work together again—I think that’s obvious. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.

  TWIGGY RAMIREZ (Marilyn Manson): We come from a different place than Trent. I want to make music that people can put on if they feel shitty, and it will make them feel even more shitty. I like to write stuff that makes people want to go out and do drugs and fuck shit up. If I can motivate someone to go out and destroy something, I accomplished my goal.

  JOHN 5 (Rob Zombie, ex–Marilyn Manson, ex–David Lee Roth): When I was in 2wo with [Rob] Halford, we were supposed to do a festival in Germany with Manson that was canceled. I was so bummed because it was the last day of the festival and I never saw Manson. I get home from Germany, put my bags down, and the phone was ringing. It was Tony Ciulla, Manson’s manager, saying, “We’re looking for a guitar player. Would you like to come meet Manson?” I was like, “Absolutely.” We met at Gaucho Grill [in West Hollywood] and he had a Loverboy shirt on and big sunglasses. He asked me to be in the band right there. He gave me the name [John 5] there in the restaurant. He wanted me to rerecord the guitars on Mechanical Animals b
ecause they hated ex-guitarist Zim Zum so much, but the record company was like, “We can’t, we’ve got to put this out.”

  A volatile, confrontational performer, offstage Manson abused himself and others as well. He developed a hearty appetite for cocaine and other drugs, and relished every opportunity to stretch the limits of his libido.

  MARILYN MANSON: I met Alyssa at a showcase we did for Maverick Records. I immediately realized she was deaf because of the way her voice sounded. A year later we were at South Beach Studios in Miami, and I went outside to get something to eat and I ran into Alyssa. I said, “Why don’t you come by the studio?” It was ironic because just that day [ex-keyboardist] Pogo [aka Madonna Wayne Gacy] was saying that one of his fantasies was to have sex with a deaf girl. Pogo shouted, “I’m going to come in your useless ear canal,” and it seemed to echo through the room as maybe one of the darkest things we had ever heard. Alyssa went to take a shower because she was covered in meat [we had thrown at her while she was naked] and assorted body fluids from the act of filth. So since she was going into the shower anyways, I asked, “Can we urinate on you?” She said, “Just not on my boots, and don’t get it in my eyes. It burns.” Twiggy and I put one leg on the stall and one leg on the toilet and hosed her down with urine.

  JOHN 5: Every single night, every single day [there was debauchery]. It was disturbing, to say the least; it was unbelievable. The very first night of [2000’s] Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) tour there were tons of girls, and this girl had to go to the bathroom. Someone said, “Hey, why don’t you just go in the trash can.” I had the video camera, we’re all giggling. She starts to pee in the trash can, but she has a dick. It’s on film if you look on [2002’s] Guns, God and Government DVD in the behind-the-scenes section. And a black girl was smoking a cigarette with her vagina—and this is just the very first night of the tour. This stuff happened every night. I was upset if I didn’t [have sex with] two girls a night.