by “I had a life-changing experience,” Trent Reznor said. The scene was one countless people know well, also marking it as a moment where everything shifted. A young person enters a shopping mall and makes a beeline to the record store; nothing is the same again.
It really only takes one thing: one song, one album, one gig. Every artist has a story about their own, as Paul McCartney recalls hearing Elvis Presley for the first time, or Patti Smith remembers seeing Jim Morrison live. Every artist has their first musical loves who proved to be immeasurably influential in the years to come, not only prompting them to get into music, but still shaping their perspective on it decades down the line.
Sometimes they’re more obvious and understandable. It’s easy to see exactly how Elvis influenced The Beatles, or how the wild Jim Morrison inspired Patti Smith’s own frantic and crazed stage presence in the 1970s. But sometimes, they’re more covert, like Reznor’s love for a deeply theatrical act.
They simply got him at exactly the right time. “I must have been 13-ish, right in that range,” Reznor recalled on Rick Rubin’s podcast, stating, “Around that time, girls were becoming interesting and the band, Kiss, seemed too good to be true.”
For a 13-year-old boy living with his grandmother in Pennsylvania and feeling cut off from the rest of the world, the revelation of Kiss in a record store one day felt eye-opening. “I don’t know why I want to do these things, other than my desire to escape from Small Town, USA, to dismiss the boundaries, to explore,” he said in 1994 as Nine Inch Nails got big, so for the kid version of him, years and years before, Kiss felt like boundary breakers that could open the door to the life Reznor was craving.
“It was exciting, it was taboo, it felt larger than life,” he said, adding that he’d listen to their music and simply think, “I didn’t know you could do that.” While the band can sometimes feel cringe or pastiche today with their makeup and costumes, for a kid back then, they were wild. “It felt like you might get in trouble if you had that Hotter Than Hell album,” he said, as Kiss weren’t just a band, they were a gateway to rebellion.
Perhaps it was the music, or perhaps it was simply the way Kiss seemed to represent the free and exciting life Reznor wanted, but either way, the rock band became a blueprint: “It just clicked that I want to be in a band, I want to do that,” he said as Gene Simmons and co changed his life.
Are there really any similarities between Kiss and Nine Inch Nails? No, not really, or at least not beyond volume and a clear seductive streak. But that early experience and the sudden eye-opening revelation of what he wanted to do gave him fight and focus, leading him to join his first ever bands and build his skills, morphing him into the multi-talent he is today, even if he doesn’t don the makeup and sequins of his earliest heroes.
