It’s a dangerous, debauched way of life where vices abound: prolific amounts of drugs, epic week-long benders, violence and general social bottom-feeding. And that’s only the tip of the self-destructive behavior that can lead to depression, physical ruin and death – the trifecta of tragic rock clich s.
Ask Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor where he has been in the six years since “The Fragile,” his last record of original material, and his answer is blunt: “I decided to try to stay alive.”
Excess is the chosen path of most newbie rock stars, one glorified in the media and cemented forever in pop-culture lore. But when rockers don’t fully succumb to the madness la Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Michael Hutchence, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin and so many others, they often turn a 180.
That’s what Reznor did. He plays two sold-out shows in Denver next week, turns 40 a few weeks after that and embodies the experienced, wiser rock star trying to avoid becoming the easy punch line or hated hypothetical question.
“I never looked at drugs or alcohol as an inspiration,” Reznor said recently. “It was so I wouldn’t feel bad – so I’d feel OK about myself. When we were on tour with ‘The Downward Spiral,’ it crept up on me that I was drinking a lot. Life had turned into something I didn’t think it was, and suddenly I was famous and rich and everybody wanted to be my friend.
“And after being on tour for 2 1/2 years, drinking, and eventually drugs, became a way of me self-medicating, and that started a process of me having to come to terms with what I’d become, which was a lengthy process.”
Reznor, known for his thoughtful, often angsty pop-modeled industrial music, speaks with calculated authority. You can tell he has been there, wherever there is, from his moderate, somewhat urgent inflection. The tone is similar to former Guns N’ Roses bandmates Slash and Duff McKagen when they launched the first tour of their new project, Velvet Revolver, a year ago.
“All of the stuff I did excessively I don’t do anymore,” Slash told The Post in June 2004.
“We all had traveled down the same path every way you can imagine – drugs, success and all that kind of thing,” added bassist McKagen, who was forced into sobriety in the mid-’90s when his wild lifestyle resulted in his pancreas exploding. “I’m not out there preaching or waving a big sober flag, but I learned the hard way. We’re not out there getting (messed) up at strip clubs every night anymore.”
McKagen is a father of two girls. Slash has two sons. They’re rock stars taking their careers and lives to the next rational level, exchanging their needles and drug kits for bottles and diaper bags. And while Reznor has no children, he’s now a matured and more put-together version of his former self.
“I truly have never felt more myself,” Reznor said. “I feel like I’ve put a terrible chapter behind me.”
After Reznor got sober in 2001, he took time off “to try to get to know myself again and feel better about myself and figure out if I wanted to keep making music and see what it meant to me then and what my role in the world was.”
He started writing music in January 2004. With a goal of writing two songs every 10 days, he finished in May. He whittled the 25 tracks down to 13 and recorded over the summer in New Orleans. He put a band together at the end of the year, and started rehearsing the record – teaching the band the new material, as he does with every self-made record – earlier this year.
“I sat down for some disciplined work, and I found far more clarity than I remember myself ever having,” said Reznor, adding that he never relied upon drugs or alcohol in the studio and that it was more of a tour indulgence. “I felt enthused, and I thought the music was good. I also thought the songs sounded like song-songs rather than bits of an album.”
The result was “With Teeth,” Reznor’s fourth full-length album in a career that started with the explosive “Pretty Hate Machine” in 1989. “With Teeth” arrives Tuesday, the day of Reznor’s first gig of a two-night, sold- out stand at the Fillmore Auditorium. It shows a decidedly different portrait of the artist, harkening back to each of his full-lengths and multiple EPs, jumping from the managed fury of “The Downward Spiral” to the premeditated, rough-on-the-edges “The Fragile” with ease.
The album’s first single, “The Hand That Feeds,” is a time warp, sounding as if it were plucked from the deep recesses of Reznor’s hard drive. While Reznor acknowledges that his new record is different from anything else – he actually returned to making demos for the first time since “Pretty Hate Machine” while recording “With Teeth” – he sees it as his most honest album ever.
“As I started working on this record with a new brain in my head, I wasn’t governed by fear as I must have been working on the previous records,” Reznor said. “There were a few songs where I could hear me censoring myself – ‘The Hand That Feeds’ because it was too catchy, and ‘All the Love in the World’ because is was too open, and then it gets all gospel at the end.
“Then I realized that I can do whatever I want to do,” he said. “Do I like this stuff? At the end of ‘All the Love in the World,’ I had goose bumps and I was smiling. Was it right for Nine Inch Nails? I realized a lot of my thinking was always too worried about what someone would think about it. And that allowed me to get a little less worried about things and what I felt was right.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Nine Inch Nails
INDUSTRIAL|Fillmore Auditorium, 1510 Clarkson St.; 8 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday with The Dresden Dolls opening|sold out|last-minute releases may be available via Ticketmaster, 303-830-8497 or www.ticketmaster.com.
