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meeting trent reznor

Alcofribas

By Alcofribas
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Alcofribas Grand Master

Alcofribas

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the film "the crow" came out when i was 12. at the time that was like THE fucking movie for me. my dad was really into bruce lee as a young man, he had a collection of books, magazine, posters, etc. and he knew all the films inside and out. he even taught me nunchucks and shit. so naturally when i got into the crow he and i bonded over the brandon lee thing. anyway, the crow. shit was legit. the soundtrack? got that shit from the mall, one of my first cds. lots of cool tracks on there but for me the nine inch nails one was just on a whole other level entirely. this was the same year "the downward spiral" came out and the "closer" video was on mtv all the time. i became a total nin fanboy right at this moment. the woodstock '94 performance with the nin boys covered in mud, breaking shit left and right and popping pimples during the after-interview? attending via mtv was like a religious experience me for me. my room rapidly became covered in nin posters and magazine clippings. in some ratty old punk store in chicago i found the "broken" video on a bootleg vhs tape. my dad and i thought it was real when we watched it. awkward but awesome. like a lot of you, nin was my gateway into electronic music particularly via the remixes which were quite excellent. but that's not the point right now.

 

cut to a few years later, i'm like 14-15. i'm still into nin but definitely have expanded my horizons to include shit like mbm, coil, orbital, the orb, etc. the 'chre was just around the corner for me. i could still get down with nin but i was less under the spell and the lyrics felt kinda cringe-inducing by this point. my mom was now a travel agent. at one point she said that through her job she could get really cheap hotels and accommodations and she asked me if there was anywhere i'd want to go. i'm an idiot teenager so i can't think of anything. at this point my monthly copy of spin came in the mail (i bought a subscription from some little neighbor girl selling magazine subscriptions for girl scouts or whatever) and there's a nin story inside. trent talked about moving to new orleans and having a studio on magazine street. so naturally i was like, mom, how bout new orleans? she was into it.

 

even though she was a travel agent we didn't fly. instead, she and i drove there. more specifically, she drove and i sat in back listening to pop will eat itself on my discman. so yeah, new orleans was lush. i got an incense burner that was a devil's head -- you put cone incense in this little tray on his tongue and smoke would come out of his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. pretty wicked but the incense would always burn out too quickly for the effect to be quite convincingly evil. we had a dope time. at one point my mom asked me if i wanted to go check out trent reznor's house on magazine street. i was like "mom, don't be a cunt. i don't have the address." but we drove down the street anyway and sure enough, we found his studio. pretty hard to miss with its pitch black windows, cameras everywhere and the old sharon tate door our front. i completely refused to leave the car despite my mother's protestations. eventually daisy berkowitz (guitarist for marilyn manson) exited the building and stood outside smoking a cigarette, looking cool. my mother suggested i go and introduce myself which was a preposterous notion that i completely rejected. a woman then came out with like four dogs. at this point my mother, an enthusiastic lover of dogs simply got out of the car and went to talk to her. turned out she was trent's personal assistant, just out walking the nin/manson pups. i went and said hi, she was extremely friendly and we chatted for quite some time but sadly she would not let us go inside since trent was recording with marilyn manson. she took our info though and said she'd send me some nin shit. lush.

 

so we went home and returned to our normal lives. nothing ever arrived from chez nin. then, that christmas, my mother revealed that she had been in touch with trent's assistant the whole time and i got a fuckload of sweet gifts from her which included all kinds of signed stuff, tshirts, cds, and even some candid photos (like, actual printed photos) of her and trent hanging with kiss. flol. it was dope. my mom then made me call her to thank her and we kept in touch from time to time. keep in mind i'm like 14-15 and i'm calling trent reznor's studio (which came up as "hot snakes" on the caller id lol) having really awkward conversations with a grown woman. so yeah, bitching christmas right there. don't even remember what i got from anyone else.

 

so, months go by and it's spring or summer break. trent's assistant says that if i want to go back to new orleans we can meet trent this time. i was like, yeah let's do that. so we go. trent keeps blowing us off when we get there. first it's one day, then it's "oh, trent's busy how bout tomorrow." apparently he bought a new computer and it's not working right. i start to doubt this will ever happen. finally, she says come on over today. we arrive but trent isn't there. he's out on a drive with one of his employees having a talk. so my mom and i sit in the cafe down the street. after a while we see trent drive up in a convertible jaguar with some 16 year old black kid, both of them looking extremely awkward. his assistant comes to get us. we enter the studio. the whole place is colored this weird green and wall to wall regal purple carpet adorns each room. i notice orbital's brown album just chilling on the desk so i pick it up. my mom scolds me. great. we walk through a living room with these plush leather couches and a huge tv with like every video game console set up. we go through this little kitchen where funny little notes were hanging on the refrigerator and something about a creepy michael jackson doll or something?? we enter the studio. there's trent. with him is charlie clouser and an engineer (brian? sorry i forgot your name if you're reading this, you were the chillest dude!). both charlie and "brian" are super friendly. trent does not look amused. he introduces himself. we shake hands. he says "this is what nine inch nails does all day: we sit in the studio doing nothing b/c our computers don't work." i'm thinking maybe this wasn't the best time to swing by. i say absolutely nothing whatsoever. about 25 guitars are lined up next to us. my midwestern mother asks "are these your guitars?" trent says "yeah." i continue my fierce commitment to total silence, especially after my mother's foolish question. how dare she? trent suggests the boys take us around, i'm assuming he's having a less than great time with me. with charlie and brian as my guides we go through the whole place which was actually pretty great. we hung in charlie's mini studio for a while. the whole place used to be a funeral home so there's a distinct vibe there, one might say a rather "funeral" vibe. there was even an upstairs room devoted to vintage arcade games. lush. my mom scored some pictures of me and the dudes by some gold records. she also photographed this little black kitten. we even checked out the garage which had a curious amount of jet skiis. that's it. we went home. i wrote about it in my journal and it was the very last page therein which seemed quite profound at the time. an ending. i never really listened to nin after that. my mom framed the kitten photo and sent it to "hot snakes." trent's assistant said they hung it up on the wall.

 

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lumpenprol Grand Master

lumpenprol

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yep, great story, AAA. Surprised you didn't tell it until now, I'm guessing the repressed memory of Trent asking you to rub barbecue sauce into the folds of his neck had something to do with it.

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Guest yikes

Guest yikes

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charlie clouser comes across like a champ......and has a running thread on gear slutz where he answers each and every question from the peanut gallery in explicit detail regarding ALL of his work with NIN and his solo productions.

it's a massive thread and extremely informative,loaded with very useable info for basically anyone interested in elctronica/sound design.

a friend of mine met trent out in LA in the 90's in a studio and said he was reserved and quiet.

edit-great story-thanks for writing all that up!

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awepittance Grand Master

awepittance

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that's an awesome story. I met reznor once at the E3 where Doom 3 was first previewed and he seemed very irritable. I thought he would 'warm up' once i name dropped all the obscure musical associations he was familiar with like Coil and Aphex twin but he wasn't changing his demeanor at all, so after a brief photo he went on his way. The thing i was most struck by was how he was wearing a very disgusting looking low cut 70s esque shirt with a ploom of his chest hair sticking out and how short he was. He's gotta be around 5 foot 7. I'm sure this happens a lot but when I've met celebs in real life they are always a very different size than what i would expect. Meeting Cindy Sheehan was the opposite though, she looked like a petite lady on TV and in real life she was extremely tall and had the build of a gym teacher.

edit: add on to the story that happened later, my friend got into E3 by pretending to work for Fox News 11 (the local LA station). Somehow with no verification whatsoever they gave him the press passes, and as soon as they did he started getting tons of e-mails from CEOs and officials from Microsoft, ID, activision, nintendo, sony trying to set up interviews. The only one we agreed to do was one with Mr T and we needled our way into Activision for an interview with Trent (which was scheduled and ready to go). We had all these basically prank questions set up for Reznor which comprised of 'hidden' NIN lyrics in the form of really straight forward broad questions. I have no idea what would have happened had we actually interviewed him, it probably would have been a disaster and I'm sure he wouldn't have been amused by it. Unfortunately the Mr T interview didn't happen either, but he had a question which actually used the word 'antidisestablishmentarianism' in it among other questions that were just designed to confuse him and make him angry (but our plan was that the questions would seem innocuous and harmless but actually be designed to make him look like an idiot)

to sum up the story, Trent ended up being fired from Doom 3 for 'creative differences'. There was a ton of NIN paraphernalia associated with the Doom 3 booth at the time, and apparently he did all the sound fx and wrote an unreleased soundtrack for an early iteration of the game.

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Eggs Mentor

Eggs

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Great story Alco and great parents to boot. It appears at the exact same time separated only by distance, we were scowling in backseats to "Mr. Self-Destruct" and shoving down sweatpant boners to "Closer" via antique playback devices. My Mom-NIN intersection wasn't quite so idyllic; I left the liner notes on the living room coffee table by accident--being 14 and not quite that sharp yet. At dinner, she nervously said "I read the lyrics to that album and I want you to know that I don't approve". That was it.

lol

lol

lol

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Guest A/D

Guest A/D

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Hahaa, great thread.

 

It appears at the exact same time separated only by distance, we were scowling in backseats to "Mr. Self-Destruct" and shoving down sweatpant boners to "Closer" via antique playback devices.

Mothafuckin internet high-five, people.

 

I actually rollerbladed home during middle school so I could get my Discman so I could listen to Mr. Self Destruct right before the only fight I have ever been in in my life, which was at a park, at a scheduled time. It pumped me up. Further adding to the suburban nature of this story, after dancing around and clumsily striking each other for 20 minutes, the fight was ruled a tie, mainly because the other guy sucked. Ahh, the lols we had.

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Alcofribas Grand Master

Alcofribas

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my mom has some stuff in the attic but eventually i gave most of it away to people in high school who were really into nin.

 

i still have a sweet meat beat manifesto shirt though!

 

p.s. trent was wearing shorts and a black tshirt fyi

 

p.p.s. one of the things i got was a manson poster signed by the band accept for daisy and some one wrote "YOU'RE FIRED!" over his head with an arrow pointing to him lol

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dr lopez Grand Master

dr lopez

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p.p.s. one of the things i got was a manson poster signed by the band accept for daisy and some one wrote "YOU'RE FIRED!" over his head with an arrow pointing to him lol

 

spit my morning coffee über alles

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  • 2 years later...
Rubin Farr Grand Master

Rubin Farr

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I had a girlfriend in New Orleans circa '94-95 who knew the contractor who remodeled the funeral home, I heard 2nd hand it was quite morbid looking, and that he had Anne Rice over several times to out-goth each other, LOL. I believe this was before his dog Maise accidentally jumped over a fence to her death. She also got invited to Rice's infamous Halloween parties at the convent, which was a setting in Tale of the Body Thief I believe, mostly unfinished with a small living area for her and her husband. small world.

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