For fans of Nine Inch Nails, the Self Destruct Tour has gained notoriety as the band’s most infamous tour. Running from 1994 through 1996 in support of the band’s second album, The Downward Spiral, the tour saw the band making the jump from cult status to the song “Closer” being a breakthrough hit and earning them regular airtime on MTV and making the jump to amphitheaters, culminating in a co-headlining tour with David Bowie. On hand to document it all was Jonathan Rach, whose documentary of the tour, Closure, gave fans a peek behind the curtains to see the band behind closed doors and has gained a reverential status among fans of the band. Now thirty years later, Jonathan Rach, the director of Closure, will be showing his photography of the tour in Los Angeles as part of his touring photography exhibit Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral. I had the privilege of talking to Jonathan about the exhibit, working with Nine Inch Nails, and finding inspiration from David Lynch.
Tyler King: How has the reception been? The exhibit just had a run at the Morrison Hotel in New York, how was that?
Jonathan Rach: It’s been amazing. Something like this just doesn’t happen for a photographer. I think part of it is that there’s just such a great story behind these images, and it’s the most iconic tour of Nine Inch Nails. It’s the one that still stands out. It’s the one where Trent Reznor went from playing clubs to playing Woodstock. I was just fortunate enough to be there. Everyone who’s been coming out to the exhibit seems to be getting a lot of it, in the same way that you would get a lot out of going to a museum by sitting with the images and pieces there for however long you want. Nine Inch Nails fans are coming out and meeting each other in-person for the first time instead of just talking through social media, which has been great to see, and the shows have been packed. It’s been in Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, New York, and now Los Angeles.
TK: Have you been at all of the openings, and how were the ones you’ve been to different from each other?
JR: I’ve been at every event except for the Sydney one, so if anyone wants to come down and meet me and talk to me, I’ll be there! It’s been very rewarding. A question I ask everyone who comes is, “What does Nine Inch Nails mean to you?” And I’ve gotten so many amazing answers. The Melbourne one was very exciting because Nine Inch Nails doesn’t go out that way very often, so it felt like the people who came out were treating it more like a concert. Some people were showing up multiple days that the exhibit was open and they would just stay for hours. London has a bit more of a music industry there, so I saw some old friends there, which was great. The Tokyo one was interesting to see all of the hardcore Nine Inch Nails fans come out. They’re the happiest angst-filled people in the world, I’m telling you. They’re just happy but they appreciate the angst and they were so kind. New York was kind of similar to New York, and a lot of industry people who had worked on the tour came out to that one and I was seeing them for the first time in thirty years. It’s really been very rewarding.
TK: Going back to even before you photographed Nine Inch Nails, how familiar were you with them and their music before photographing them?
JR: My girlfriend at the time and I saw them on the Pretty Hate Machine tour, which must have been around 1990. I had just moved to Los Angeles and I remember hearing “Head Like A Hole” on the radio and thinking to myself, Whoever that is, it’s impressive. I loved that it had kind of a punk sound as well as dance, and it was a great mix of those genres and it stood out. I was going out to lots of live shows, and they came through Hollywood, so my girlfriend at I went out to see them and stood at the back of the venue. Watching them play, there was all of this crazy stuff onstage and at the end of “Head Like A Hole” some of the crowd rushed the stage and it felt like everyone was up there. So my girlfriend and I were on the stage! I don’t even think Trent knows this story.
TK: You were already filming the live documentary Closure by the time that Anton Corbijn pushed you towards photographing Nine Inch Nails. How did you approach photographing the band versus filming the band?
JR: I learned quickly that you can’t do both at the same time. I forget what venue we were at, but I had my camera around my shoulder and my camera bag around one shoulder, and I thought that I could do both. The first time I tried to do both at the same time I just fumbled with both bags as the band walked right by me, and I decided I wouldn’t try to do that again. My priority was filming, so maybe I would just do photography in the dressing room and then film the entire show. If it felt like the show wasn’t a giant monumental moment for the tour documentary, that would be a night where I would focus on photographing it.
I wasn’t a photographer by trade. I had no training in photography. This was in the 90s where you would take the picture on film and send it to the lab in Los Angeles and not get it back for a week. So you might mail it out in Kansas City and then get the contact sheet mailed back to you in Chicago. And I remember I would get the contact sheets and look at them through a magnifying glass and look at them. At the same time I was looking back at the video footage, but something about the photographs was just different. There’s something about a photograph that’s so powerful. And I would wonder why it felt more powerful than the video footage, and it comes down to the fact that it’s just one moment. And so much of your imagination is trying to fill in the gaps of the moment before and the moment after. It lets you be present with something that footage doesn’t allow you to do.
TK: I’m part of a generation of Nine Inch Nails fans that was either too young, or just wasn’t alive, when The Downward Spiral came out and The Self Destruct Tour happened. By the time that I got into Nine Inch Nails, which was around 2007, Trent and the band had calmed down, with there now not being the onstage destruction at the level that there seemingly was during the earlier tours. So for fans like myself, or younger than myself, these images and the Closure video have achieved this status as the ultimate statement of that era of the band. Did you have any inkling at the time that these images or Closure wouold have that kind of staying power to the fans? And looking back at the photos and Closure, how definitively do you think you captured that era of Nine Inch Nails?
JR: I was asked the first part of that question recently, I was asked if I was aware that I would be capturing something that would be relevant thirty years later. The logic answer is no. But for some reason I was always impressed with Trent. I’d seen a lot of concerts from stadiums to clubs. From 1987-1990, I worked for a promoter on the East Coast. So when you see the best of the best like David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and The Rolling Stones, you start to identify what makes somebody of that caliber. So I intuitively always gave Trent a lot of respect because I saw his live show and heard his songs before I even met him, and it seemed like nobody had anything negative to say about Nine Inch Nails. Then to all of a sudden find myself in that camp and it being everything I thought it would be, I did feel like I was with something real special.
I remember seeing The Song Remains The Same, the Led Zeppelin documentary, and how I was so intrigued by footage of the band just walking backstage. I wanted to live in that world and wondered what it was like to be one of those artists with all of that energy around them. I wanted to soak up as much of that world as possible. So to be in a situation where I was documentating an artist that to me was on that level… and also where the crowd started getting bigger and the band jumped from playing club shows to amphitheaters over the span of that tour, and next thing you know Lou Reed is knocking on the backstage door to gush over the show, and then David Bowie reaching out to co-headline with him… you start realizing, I have something here, and I’m lucky.
And he’s still relevant thirty years later. There were lots of bands during that time that were relevant for maybe only one or two years. At that time Nine Inch Nails was part of the anti-culture. So many people were into the grunge scene, and Trent was different and not following trends. Because of that I’m sure that a lot of people looked at him and what he was doing and thought that it wouldn’t last, but Nine Inch Nails was the band that outlasted all of that.
That’s a really long way to answer your question! But I really felt at the time, being such a fan of Nine Inch Nails, that it did feel like it was something that future generations of fans would want to see.
TK: On the day of David Lynch’s passing you posted a photo on your Instagram page of him with Trent. It’s an image I’d seen before, but I was wondering if you could talk about the story behind that photo and if you have any memories of David Lynch?
JR: In that particular photo David was in Trent’s recording studio down in New Orleans. I believe they were working on Lost Highway. I was upstairs working on the Closure documentary. The tour was over and I was putting footage together, and I had to come up with the ending of the documentary and I just wasn’t sure how to do it. And then I thought, Wait a minute, I have Trent Reznor and David Lynch in a room downstairs! So I went down to where they were in Studio B and I went and chilled out and listened to them working together, hoping to get inspired. I actually recently told Trent that the ending of Closure was inspired by him and David Lynch working in the studio. I was trying to be inspired by them, and I’m sure you know that David Lynch’s energy just comes from somewhere just…
TK: Beyond.
JR: Yeah, beyond! I just remember relaxing and thinking that I had a bunch of super 8 footage and I decided to make a compilation of it all and score it with “A Warm Place,” which is a sparse and somber song, and I decided to end it that way. So as soon as I put that song under the compilation it just worked. And that was totally inspired by David Lynch and Trent, and that photo was from around that time. I remember David said he wanted a photo with Trent, and I grabbed the camera and turned around and took the picture! But he was so inspiring to be around, he just thought so differently from everyone else. It was so sad that he passed away.
TK: You said that a question that you ask everybody who you talk to at your exhibits is what Nine Inch Nails means to them. What does Nine Inch Nails mean to you?
JR: Before, during, or after?
TK: Let’s say during and after.
JR: During, Nine Inch Nails to me were all my friends. I had lived with them for two and half, three years, and when you’re out that long with those people they become your friends. What the music meant to me during the capturing of that tour were songs that I always discovered something new in. The more I heard the songs live the more they seeped into me and grew in power, I never got tired of hearing the songs. I was surprised at which ones stood out night after night, I loved “Reptile” and “Sanctified.” Very powerful songs that seemed to shadow everything else, all other genres and styles of music, and it was extremely intense to be close to it all.
After… for me, Nine Inch Nails seems to be our generation’s David Bowie. Trent has grown as an artist in a way that you would want to see him grow just like Bowie. Everything that Trent does feels so emotional and raw but also very intelligent. I have a lot of respect for the fans that gravitate towards that. It just keeps growing for me, how impressed I am with it all. And now he’s doing film scores, and as a film-maker myself it’s so rewarding to see that. And it just keeps growing, Nine Inch Nails’s impact on me.
And now I have to ask, what does Nine Inch Nails mean to you?
TK: Oh lord… Nine Inch Nails to me was the gateway to so much other music. Through them was how I discovered artists and bands like David Bowie, Gary Numan, Joy Division, Soft Cell, and Gang Of Four. All of them are bands or musicians that Trent would cover or say he was inspired by, and that made me want to check them out. And now some of that is music that I give just as much importance to as Nine Inch Nails. So for me Nine Inch Nails isn’t just this band that has made music that has been the soundtrack to parts of my life, but they’ve also been an entryway to whole other world of artists that I wasn’t even aware of at the time who have now also ben the soundtrack to other parts of my life. Nine Inch Nails as a singular monument is fantastic, but also as part of this grand tapestry that they tie into is also fantastic.
JR: That’s great, you have to put that in the interview!
The photography exhibit Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral will run from March 5th-9th at Behind The Gallery in Los Angeles. More information can be found here
