“Chiropractors and doctors were like, ‘How long did you play college football?’ I’d go, ‘It wasn’t college football. It was Trent Reznor’”: Richard Patrick says Nine Inch Nails’ 1991 Lollapalooza run broke his body – and trashed $40,000 of guitars

Given what they say about the ‘60s, most of the people who rocked up at Woodstock in the summer of ’69 would not remember what went down. How times changed by the time the ‘90s swung around.

Those who were there for the inaugural Lollapalooza in 1991, headlined by Jane’s Addiction, featuring a coltish Nine Inch Nails in full-on total destruction mode – trashing every electric guitar they could get their hands on – might never forget it. And they may even have an injury to remember it by. Former NIN guitarist Richard Patrick sure did.

In an extract from a forthcoming history of the festival, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, published by Guitar World, Patrick says Nine Inch Nail’s stage show was so destructive that he eventually needed surgery afterwards, his injuries so severe that physicians thought he must have been a varsity athlete.

“My knees are still fucked up from that tour,” he says. “I actually had to have back surgery because I walked with a limp for, like, ten years. Because my whole right leg was just whaled on. Chiropractors and doctors were like, ‘How long did you play college football?’ I’d go, ‘It wasn’t college football. It was Trent Reznor.’”

Written by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour, the book gathers oral testimonies from those who were there. In this extract, Reznor offers his own logic for NIN's uniquely hazardous stagecraft; the crazier it got, the more people liked it. The goal, explains Patrick, was to be “punk as fuck”.

“We were absolutely dedicated to total mayhem and anarchy,” he says. “Trent would tackle me several times during the show, I would throw beers at him, I would throw beers at the audience. It was the most decadent, crazy, do-not-give-a-fuck thing.”

What’s revealing about this snapshot in history is how times have changed, and not just from the long, lysergic and hot summers of the ‘60s. Just think how Nine Inch Nails’ “punk as fuck” approach would be looked upon now.

Which festival would entertain such anarchy from the late afternoon act? Just think of the internet outrage at the guitars being destroyed.

In 2021, Phoebe Bridgers relieved a Danelectro 56 of its structural integrity during her SNL set, sending it crashing into a wedge monitor – and there was such an overreaction online that when she gave an interview with CNN, it was the first thing Christiane Amanpour asked her about. Danelectro had even given her its blessing.

“I’ve always wanted to do it,” Bridgers said. “And when I mentioned it to the show, they were really excited and they built me this whole monitor that would look like it was exploded even if I wasn’t hitting it that hard. So yeah, just a bucket list thing.”

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The following year, Mike McCready smashed his Stratocaster at the climax of Pearl Jam’s tour and, again, the internet lost its mind.

But these isolated acts of guitar violence are chickenfeed compared to NIN’s Lollapalooza wrecking ball. To keep the show going, they had to send their tech, Marky Ray, out with bundles of cash to find cheap electric guitars to smash.

So long as they had good pickups, NIN were good to go. An accountant must have the receipt that documents the exact cost of the damage, but Patrick, who left the industrial-rock trailblazers in 1993 to front Filter, has got a fair idea. He puts the figure at a cool $40,000.

And it was all fun and games just so long as it was Ray’s pawnshop finds that were getting smashed. But when one of Ice-T’s entourage sent a Gibson Explorer to meet its maker, Ray recalls Rollins taking it bad: “Henry would sit there on our bus, incensed, going, ‘How can a guy break a fifteen-hundred-dollar Explorer? What kid wouldn’t give his right nut for something like that?’”

You can read the full extract at Guitar World, where Reznor shares his memories and Dave Navarro recalls happily joining in during a seminal moment for alternative rock that probably couldn't happen now.

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival is available to preorder, out 25 March through St. Martin’s Press.