Thursday, May 17, 2012

Happy Birthday, Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor is celebrating his birthday today!  Take a look back at some old NIN/Reznor footage

In 1994 Nine Inch Nails headlined Woodstock.  Watch the full performance below.



"Ringfinger" live, 1991



Short interview with Nine Inch Nails from 1992




FYI, in the video above, Reznor referred to some comments he made about Front Line Assembly/Bill Leeb* in a 1992 interview in Spin.  The comments are posted below:

"Front Line Assembly is a textbook case of a band that - I can't listen to a fucking song, let alone an album. Just monotonous, boring, uninspired bullshit. And they're far more traditional and far more exemplary of 'industrial' than NIN is."


In the video above, Reznor also talked about the crazy experience of opening for Guns & Roses. In the same Spin 1992 article with the FLA comments, Reznor also went into detail regarding the G & R drama:

"So we open up. First song, people are, like, 'Yeah, there's a band onstage,' and they're slowly realizing that we're not Skid Row. Second song, 'Okay, these guys are not Skid Row and I _think_ i hear a synthesizer.' Third song, 'We definitely hear a synthesizer - this is bullshit. These guys suck, they're fa**ots, let's kick their ass.' There is something about the feeling of standing in front of 65,000 people giving you the finger ... An intense terror took over. In a word, it sucks...from there, things went rapidly downhill ...I decided just to make it the worst half hour of this crowd's life."



Read the full 1992 Spin interview with Nine Inch Nails here.

*By the way, Bill Leeb's previous band Skinny Puppy weren't big NIN fans either. To illustrate, Ogre made these comments to a music fanzine back in the day:

NIN are totally cock rock...I think the biggest thing about industrial music was it trying to break all those stereotypes and it succeeded but has ultimately failed again in a way. It’s just a name attached to cock rock and f***ing hate cock rock.

Finally here's a television interview from 1985 that focused on Reznor's band Exotic Birds