The Reznor's Edge Saga

Since this page is beginning to show its age in a most dramatic fashion, I thought I would preface it with a bit of an explanation. Long about 1995, I created a website called "Reznor's Edge - Trent Reznor's Personal Homepage," during the early days of the Internet's mass acceptance. Since it was also the peak of Nine Inch Nails' career, the page fooled a lot of people and got a lot of press. These days, that might seem a bit far-fetched, but a quick perusal of Google's USENET archive will help you understand the scope of what happened. I essentially invented a new NIN album, which never existed and never will. I called it "Impossible Pain." People went nuts for it, and all things related to it. To see the 1,270 posts made to USENET about this fake album, click here. It will be a good primer for you before you read this story, which is more arrogant than I would probably have written it nowadays, but still quite entertaining. The whole story of the page unfolds below...

- Eric Seven, 2002

The Beginning
It all starts with IRC, the Internet's evil "Relay Chat" system, to which I had an unholy attachment Starting roundabout 1994 somewhere (which remains with me to this day). I remember the first time I joined IRC. I had just discovered this group "Nine Inch Nails" sometime earlier (circa 1991) and since I was so interested in the music, for lack of a better idea, I wondered to myself: "hey... do you suppose there are people on #nin?"
Well, duh. With such small thoughts, history often begins.
I remember CrazyF and SayTan and HoRnBlAsT. Great people. Great bot. Of course, I didn't know it was a bot. That was one of the million things that I had yet to learn about the vast, worldwide chatting network. One of the other things I had yet to realize was that the world is filled with idiots and morons. IRC taught me that lesson well.
That's not to say that my compatriots on #nin were morons. Far from being morons, they were almost without exception incredibly intelligent people, and I do not exaggerate when I say to you here that I feel like that was one of the single biggest strokes of luck in my life, because most people on IRC are not looking for intellectual stimulation. Anyone that actually might be looking for such stimulation would likely walk away depressed and feeling awfully alone in the world. Were it not for the music of Nine Inch Nails, my first chat experience may well have been one like that, and IRC would have been only a minor footnote in my life.
It didn't turn out that way.
I'll stop the IRC nostalgia now. Suffice it to say that I learned very quickly that #nin was a channel of elitists, and were I to fit in, I had to be an elitist too. This wasn't hard for me, because I considered myself a reasonably intelligent person, and since I have such an infinitesimally small amount of patience with grammatical and spelling errors, I soon found myself disgusted with most of the "newbies" on IRC, whose grasp of the English language was not quite as good as my neighborhood 7-11 owner's was. Kicking people off of an IRC channel because they can't tell the difference between "your" and "you're" became one of my favorite pastimes...
Disgust with newbies who can't cut the intellectual muster is what #nin is all about. You thought it was about Nine Inch Nails?
Whatever.
Now, that's not to say that those of us who live on #nin don't discuss or enjoy the music of Nine Inch Nails. It's a thread that we all have in common. For many of us, it's the only thing we have in common. But if you want to be on #nin, the first thing you have to do is prove you can deal. The second is to prove that you can dish. All the while, you need to realize that the people in this channel aren't just people that come in to catch the latest NIN news and then leave. These people are friends and they spend a good bit of their lives on this channel. You, as a newbie, are just that. A newbie. Nobody knows you, and you're probably not going to stick around and be a friend (most people don't, honestly) - so why the fuck should anybody care about you? Why should they care about your questions? Why should they care about your opinions?
I'm trying to set a mood here. The reason will become apparent shortly. Once you realize the mind-set of the people on #nin, you can understand what happened next in this story.
Enter the lameass newbies with the same lameass question.
"Does Trent ever come in this room?"
First off, don't call it a fucking room. It's a channel, for Chrissake... this is the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T, not America OnLine. Whenever someone says "room" it's generally a dead giveaway that they're going to be an asshole or a lamer, but probably both.
Second, no, of course Trent doesn't come in here. Theoretically it's possible, but I mean... what are the chances? And if he did, would he tell us? Not likely. And if he told us, would we believe him? No. Would we care if we were wrong? No. Most of us don't need to live our lives vicariously through Mr. Reznor, and we despise the simple-minded hero-worship that the newbies asking this question were exhibiting.
Frankly, it got tiring.
So one day our good friend "Youth" had the bright idea to try and fool one of the newbies into believing he was Trent. He turned on his logging, and set to work. The results were truly hilarious. The newbie in question was a girl who claimed that she had had sex with Trent at a concert. While we were all pressing her for details, Youth was playing the part of the forgetful rock star that needed his memory jogged. She lovingly obliged, and, armed with the details that we were squeezing from her and passing on to Youth via private messages, he slowly began to "remember" things.
She would tell one of us about throwing the pink bra onstage at him and his reaction, and about how Trent told her she had a nice smile and a few minutes later, Youth comes out with an admittedly cheesy "Oh you're the girl with the pink bra! You threw it on the stage and had that great smile... yeah. I remember now."
But she became a believer quickly. Astoundingly quickly. Prodded with questions like "Well, so did you think my cock was too small?" she divulged an incredible amount of personal information with an ease that made you want to cry for humanity.
The power.
So anyway, sometime thereafter, my friend "freek" and I were dicking with a newbie, insisting that I was Trent and that he was my brother, "Bob Reznor." She blithely believed this outrageous and wildly ridiculous lie ( ! ), and I think freek may well have been able to score with this chick, if he'd wanted. The whole thing was riotously funny to us, and afterwards, we discussed it.
The First Page
"I'm going to make the 'Bob Reznor Mini-FAQ.'"
That was freek, and that was the beginning of Reznor's Edge.
"You know what..." says I, "you should do that! And I'll make 'Trent Reznor's Personal Homepage' and I'll link to you!"
There was no stopping it now.
Of course, at first, the idea was just that we could send newbies to it from IRC to reinforce our assertions (for the few that were skeptical). We had no idea that we were starting an international firestorm. We were just getting a lot of kicks, and enjoying ourselves to no end. Keep in mind that my HTML skills at the time were less-than-enviable, so this page was wildly amateurish-looking. Of course, this was 1995. Everything was amateurish-looking... still, it seemed to me, that there was nothing about the page that lent it any air of authenticity. In fact, I thought quite the opposite.
As I got deeper into it, I realized that the greatest humor could be gained by making the page the more outrageous. After all, the more ridiculous the lies, the more the "victim" would be kicking his or her self in the butt. I was hesitant to go full-bore into this, as I figured that to get the page too outrageous would be to ruin the fun. The silliness had started with Bob Reznor. How much further could I push it without people scoffing at it?
As it turned out, a lot.
Things Get Serious
At this point, I emailed Jason Patterson, curator of the popular "Unofficial Nine Inch Nails Homepage" and at that time a #nin regular who used the nick "ncruncher." Jason was working directly with Nothing at this point on their ill-fated company website which to this day two years later is still not up. He knew about the newbie-fooling that went on, and so when I told him about my idea to make a fake Trent Reznor web page he thought it was hilarious and wished me luck. I took this as almost tacit confirmation that no one at Nothing would care.
The first addition to the page was "Impossible Pain" - the fake new halo. My strategy was for the page to be at once both believeable and insane. To lend the page the believability, it had to have information that would be unavailable from anyone but Trent himself. To be insane, it had to be so obviously stare-you-in-the-face fake that once you realized the truth, you'd want to kill yourself for believing. I sat around and thought up the name "Impossible Pain" one day after having a discussion with a non-fan who was a friend of mine. He said something along the lines of "it would be impossible for one man to be in that much pain" in an attempt to convince me that Reznor was a consummate salesman. How perfect, thinks I. "Impossible Pain." It embodied (for me in a funny way) the only thing you could poke fun at Trent for. His schoolboy angst.
So anyway, I had a title. Not only that, but I had a title that actually sounded like it could be the title of a Nine Inch Nails CD. Wonderful. I began thinking, though, that the title was actually a little too real sounding, unless you were in my head, in which case it was really funny. What could I do to make this thing silly enough to maintain my objective?
It hit me like... well, like a ton of bricks. I needed song titles. At first, I'd considered adding in a bunch of totally fake ones, like "Impossible Pain" - each one making fun of yet another aspect of Reznor's angstiness or something. That could have been fun, but it wouldn't have helped me with the silliness factor unless I tried really hard at it. If I tried too hard at it though, I really might give it away. What to do?
I settled finally on another bright idea. I could make all of the songs on "Impossible Pain" be exact polar opposites of real NIN songs! This way, they could sound real, but still kick people straight in the face with their own stupidity. The first one I thought up was "Mr. Reconstruct" (Mr. Self-Destruct - in the most blatant of the title flip clues) and that settled it. I laughed my ass off.
Maybe I haven't stressed enough that this whole experience was done strictly for my own personal entertainment. I'm an only child, and entertaining myself has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I really do amuse myself to no end (although I try not to be a smug bastard) and the hours and hours of giggling and belly-laughing that this brought me was worth it all, even if no one else had noticed.
It went on like that for a while, we entertaining ourselves and they falling for it like lead balloons. It got to the point where the entire channel was in collusion, and if anyone ever came into the channel and asked if Trent Reznor was ever in it everyone would say "yeah, he goes by the nickname 'blackrose.'" A lot of people were fooled in the months that followed, because they find it so hard to believe that 6 or 7 people on an IRC channel could all be lying to them about something at once. What newbies on IRC often fail to understand right away is that IRC people usually aren't just a random gathering of strangers - they are regulars. Many of them have no social life but IRC, they all know each other very well, and the atmosphere of a popular channel becomes almost family-like after a while.
It was during these first heady months that SayTan changed my info on #nin's website from "Eric Seven" to "Trent Reznor" and I changed my finger information (a "finger" is a method by which someone can find information out about a unix user) to "Reznor, Trent" with a link to the website - which further helped the mythology that Trent hung out on #nin. People were falling for it right and left, much to our amusement, and my HTML skills began to pick up.
Since my HTML skills were improving and I'd managed to snag a copy of Photoshop, I decided to add some eye candy to the page, which up to now had pretty much been mostly text with a few cropped pictures and a shitty header made with "Paintbrush." I made the website look a bit more attractive by adding a black background and using a color scheme that was reminiscent of "broken." I then created some graphics, including a fake album cover for "Impossible Pain" and it's newly created "remix" version "Improbable Pain," the inspiration for which came from "broken" and "fixed" (I even made "Impossible" with a red cover and "Improbable" blue - clever clever!). In my mind, "Imporobable Pain" and the story I wrote around it is probably the funniest part of the whole site. It was easy to write funny shit because I was talking about a remix album, and I had the freedom to talk about who will be doing the remixes. In thinking about what to write, I'd heard about Trent being into "gangsta rap" and decided that it would be funny to talk about Trent "having lunch with Coolio and Dr. Dre" about doing remix work. Just the idea of those three sittiing in a posh restaurant having lunch made me want to spasm with laughter. I would have to say, however, that the best overall idea I had came in the form of a nameless "bum" that hung out in the alley behind Nothing Records.
When I wrote the bit about the "bum" (who later became quite a press darling) I'd just listened to "Fixed" for the first time. I didn't like it. As a matter of fact, I'd never bought "Fixed" because I'd always thought remix albums were a waste of my money, being (in my mind) generally bad rehashes of the same music. A friend of mine forced me to listen to Coil's remix of "Gave Up" which just blew my mind. Could it be that Trent Reznor's remix albums were going to buck convention and actually be worthwhile? I had to know, so I bought "Fixed." As it turns out, Coil's remix was the only one worth a damn, so no, Trent's remixes turned out to be as lame as everyone else's. In fact, as I was listening to "Fixed" I became disgusted that I had spent the 8 bucks on it. To me, any idiot could make a remix album... it takes some special creativity to come up with something like what Coil did, and for the most part, artists don't bother with trying to make remix albums that interesting.
Since I have such a low opinion of remix albums, it occurred to me as I was working on "Improbable Pain" that any monkey with a mixing board could make a remix and it would be taken seriously no matter how bad it was. I tried to imagine the most unbelieveable person Trent could have remix his album. I figured someone with absolutely no knowledge of music or mixing would be best, and who better but some bum passed out in the alley out back at Nothing? I could imagine Trent, headed out back to be alone and stretch his legs or whatever, and here he sees this guy back in the alley and he thinks: "hey! Wouldn't it be cool to sober this guy up, teach him how to remix and see what he could come up with?"
For a moment here, I'm going to skip ahead in the story, so try and stay with the timeline. I thought this whole bum/remix thing was crazy. I thought nobody in their right mind could believe it. I mean, sure, maybe Trent has a half-brother named Bob, and maybe Coolio or Dr. Dre would be doing some remix work (Dr. Dre, as it turns out, actually is collaborating with Trent - another example of fiction writing history) - but come on! A bum off the street remixing an album?
Kerrang magazine, however, got hold of the website, read it, and thought Trent's idea was absolutely the most wonderful avant-garde thing they'd ever seen! They reprinted all of the tripe on my page in a giant two-page spread as if it were fact, with a sidebar headlined: "Pretty Vagrant! Reznor Hires Tramp To Remix Album." As you can imagine, when I saw this, I nearly lost my lunch laughing. I'll get to that and more of the page's press later on.
Back to the present. So the page is coming along now, I've added some actual content, and we're having a blast. Then an odd thing happened. A number of Internet search engines, crawling my personal pages on iglou.com found the Reznor site and indexed it. Now all of a sudden you could search Yahoo, AltaVista, Webcrawler, etc. for "Trent Reznor" and my fake page with the caption "Trent Reznor's Personal Homepage" would come up!
Now, keep in mind, that up until this point, my whole focus with this page had been to fool newbies on IRC into believing I was Trent. To that end, I put my email address up (at the time blackrse@iglou.com) as a way you could "email [Trent] with any thoughts you have about this [web page] idea." Within a month, I was getting 50 emails a day from people who thought I really was Trent Reznor. You're probably thinking,"well, that was the whole idea of the page, wasn't it?" but you have to understand that when we told newbies that I was Trent, most of the time we would let them believe for a while but we would always fess up in the end.
As an example, I give you "mepoet" - a hapless fellow from Florida (but a good sport in the end) - who so believed that I was Trent Reznor he was ready to go buy a plane ticket and fly to New Orleans and have dinner at a restaurant just to meet his idol, who of course, had we let him go, wouldn't have been there. I told him the truth shortly thereafter. I'm not cruel in the slightest... at least not that cruel.
Now, I have 50 people a day emailing me thinking I'm Trent and I have no way of responding to them to say that I'm not. I have to admit though, that for about 2 days, reading the emails was amusing. After that, it just became a tedious bunch of shit - it was all the same, and it was an annoyance. Still, there's something to be said for the notoriety this page seemed to be gathering, so I let it ride.
I'm not stupid though. I knew notoriety carried with it a certain responsibility. I decided that it was time to put a disclaimer on the page, but I was unsure of how to approach it without ruining the fun! I finally decided to put a comment in the HTML itself that would be invisible unless someone clicked on "View Document Source" with their web browser. The source comment reads:



Since I later had some people complaining that a source code disclaimer wasn't enough, I decided to write the "why" page and link to it in the source code. To make it more fun, I sprinkled links throughout the site to the "why" page so that anyone who spent any time browsing the pages would inevitably run into it. For Instance, on "trentlinks" is a line that looks like this:
Many people are unaware that I am a huge Neil Diamond fan. Click here to take a look at my complete collection of Diamond recordings.
If you click on "here" - it takes you to the "why" page, where the first thing you see is:
"y0 whatup, f00? - If you are reading this it most likely means you are yet another victim of the practical joke known as 'Trent Reznor's Personal Homepage.'"
It then goes on to explain briefly about what the page is and how it came into existence. I figured with these disclaimers I was within legal boundaries, especially since you could get to them from every page on the website. I also took the email address down, because, even if it wasn't illegal, I supposed that that was the only thing that was mildly unethical, and it was an annoyance anyway.
I put the disclaimers up just in time, because the website's hits and popularity exploded. I started taking so many hits that IgLou Internet Services, my provider, was charging me over $125 in extended transfer fees which, for a starving artist in Lexington, Kentucky is no small amount of bread. I had to do something about it, so I moved all of the graphics offsite to a friend of mine's (who goes by "dorqus") server, freek.com in NYC. dorqus is a good friend and an important player in the story, because when things got tough, he didn't buckle. Anyhow, having the graphics on freek.com saved me from having to break my bank, and I was free to sit back and watch things unfold.

USENET Enters The Fray
About this time, the denizens of USENET's alt.music.nin began wanting to start an IRC channel. I'd never done anything on alt.music.nin, so I didn't know them very well. The only reason I knew anything about them wanting to set up an IRC channel was because I had met a guy who goes by "Wolver" in Atlanta. I'd gone down to Atlanta to visit two IRC friends of mine, "eden2" and "acidjazz." We went to the Catherine Wheel concert at The Masquerade (a cool nightclub downtown) and this guy was standing in front of us with a t-shirt that said "alt.music.nin." We introduced ourselves as IRC #nin weenies, and he mentioned that he came on IRC every now and again as "Wolver" and that he would stop by sometime soon. He did, and he soon became a #nin regular.
So I began helping the alt.music.nin people set up a bot (an IRC script that maintains IRC channels) on #amnin. Since I was meeting so many of them and they all seemed like cool folks, I decided to head over to USENET and check out the newsgroup, which I'd only done briefly once or twice in all my life. Being an IRC dork, I never could understand the appeal of USENET. I figured it out later.
At any rate, the first time I headed over to alt.music.nin, I was pleasantly shocked to see a number of very heated arguments raging over the authenticity of Reznor's Edge!
This went on for some weeks, with me just lurking in the background. I didn't want to spoil their fun or mine, but by this time, I'd gotten to know a few of them on IRC and my jig was about up. After a while, I finally decided to post to the newsgroup and let everyone in on the joke. reaction was, to say the very least, mixed.
That's not to say that by this time I hadn't already taken my share of abuse. I had! When the "fan mail" started pouring in, soon thereafter so did the hate mail, especially after I put the links up to the "why" page so that people could find out that they were duped. Some of them were right scary:

From: ruiner [ruiner@axe.intercall.com] To: ruiner@axe.com i cant believe this shit. i just punched a fucking hole in my wall. WHAT IS NEXT. what is this shit??? hasnt nin been desecrated enough? hasnt it been publicised enough?
its bad enough seeing little girls wearing nin shirts, when i know they couldnt possibly comprehend a damn thing about trents music.
this is just another thrust by this bogus capitalist facsist society, aimed at the destruction of anything sacred.
i would like to issue a stern FUCK YOU to the creator of this page, for you are aiding in the process. fuck you and all people like you. you should be purged from this earth with great vengence. someday i will make my plight and kill off as many of you fuckers as i can.

Now, naturally, my first thought was: "here's a guy who doesn't know that capitalist and fascist are antonyms." My second thought was: "if this guy ever met me, he's probably serious enough about the bullshit in this letter to be violent." It was enough to give me pause, but only for a little while. I realized though, that I had to do something about the hate factor. I had to slow it down, or I might actually come into some bodily harm!
I decided to rally my forces. Using my rapier wit [wink], I came up with what many people tell me is their favorite part of the website: "The blackrose Email Hall of Flame." USENET was about split down the middle between people who believed the page was real and were pissed off about it when I told them the truth and people that believed it was fake who were laughing at the other half. This wasn't good. Even the half that believed it was fake all along were somewhat sympathetic after a while, and many were telling me I'd made the page too real, that I should put up a more obvious disclaimer.
I ran into a moral dilemma at this point and I had to decide what I believed about this page. It wasn't easy, but I finally determined what my convictions were, and I intended to stand by them:
1) Trent Reznor is a public figure and is fair game for parody
2) Parody does not have to be obvious to be valid
3) Anyone who fell for my page did so out of their own blind desire to believe, and not because I hadn't done enough to make the page "fake" or to make it so they could find out the page was fake easily (this was an important one)
4) I am not engaging in libel of any sort and my webpage is not mean spirited
5) I am not violating any laws, including copyright laws

What I had to do was perform a very sensitive psychological balancing act. I had to make everyone who fell for it laugh at themselves, which can be a hard thing for people to do. Some folks in the newsgroup (I won't mention names *coumcdgh*) still will not speak to me to this day, even though in real life we might have a lot of things in common (*coudurandurangh*). I just have to shrug that off.
To make the people who fell for it laugh it off, I began engaging in a very purposeful series of postings to USENET designed to make the people who were mad at me feel more stupid for being mad at me than they felt for falling for the page. It took a while, but by and large, it worked - not in small measure due to the fact that I had the support of "stark" - alt.music.nin's resident demigod. From the beginning stark knew it was a sham, and actually we had discussed it many times on IRC. He thought it was great fun, and was a big help to me in posting the "hey, get over it, it was just a joke and you need to calm the fuck down" posts after everything was out in the open.
After that, things settled down immeasurably and alt.music.nin even warmed up to the whole idea of blackrose as resident Trent, almost as much as #nin! After a while, they so enjoyed the joke and the endless series of lame newbies posting to the newsgroup about "Trent's new album, 'Impossible Pain'" that it was almost like there was never a controversy.
I needed alt.music.nin's support in the months that were coming.
Not only that, but I also needed the support to make sure that I didn't get overwhelmed with flamers. The flames were getting more common and more violent. I knew I couldn't let them continue, but how do you stop it?
I love human psychology. The one surefire way to make people stop engaging in a certain behavior is to make fun of them for doing it. This is where the "hall of flame" came in. I put the flamers up and made terrible fun of them. I was merciless, attacking their grammar and spelling while calling them "mindless drones" for "worshipping" Trent Reznor. I held myself up as vastly intellectually superior and opened them up to intense amounts of public ridicule. It's a strong invdividual that can resist this type of pressure, and flamers aren't the strongest of individuals.
I put the "hall of flame" page up on the "why" page, so that anyone who saw the website was a fake would also see me making fun of people for flaming me. I put up statements on the "why" page about how 'most people think it's funny and have a sense of humor, but a few fucknuts that can't laugh at themselves flame me' and guess what? The flames slowed down to a trickle. Nobody wanted to end up in the "hall of flame."
And to be sure, many people were sending me letters of encouragement, so I made a complimentary page for emails from those people, and things smoothed out wonderfully. I'd survived USENET, I'd survived the flamers, and the page was getting bigger than ever. I'd thought I'd made it. Everyone knew my name, everyone knew my page. It was nice. I'd done something different, I'd entertained some people. It's what I do, and what I love, and it was a very fulfilling feeling.
Nothing Rumbles
Long about this time, I received an email from Jason Patterson suggesting that John Malm wanted my page taken down. It wasn't an outright threat, but Jason threw around a few terms in his letter like "libel" and "yellow journalism" and insinuated that, you know, if it wasn't for him intervening, Nothing Records might have filed a lawsuit against me, and that I really should take the page down now.
I gaped.
Let me clue you in a little about my personality. I don't take well to being threatened. In fact, it right pisses me off, straight up. I wasn't doing anything with this page but trying to be funny, and the page didn't hit below anybody's belt, so why were they after me? I wasn't making any money off of it (I wouldn't dare) - I wasn't doing anything illegal - the only thing I was doing was misleading gullible people, and entertaining everyone else. So what's the problem?
I'd always said that I thought Trent Reznor had a sense of humor. In fact. I'd even always said that if I heard Trent didn't like the page I would take it down. The reason I said that was because I figured it could never happen. This is the guy that let "Nine Inch Richards" do "Closer To Hogs," right? This is the guy that let Weird Al do "Closer" as part of a polka medley, right? This guy is going to get mad at me over this page? I couldn't believe it.
So, having that attitude about Trent, and figuring that Trent himself had probably never seen the page, I responded to Jason basically telling him to tell John Malm to either have Trent stop by my office for lunch sometime (to discuss it) or shove it up his ass. Needless to say, that didn't go over well.
Now, I'm not really the overly arrogant type, but I'm going to tell you, in my opinion, Jason Patterson isn't the brightest guy to ever code HTML. He began a private crusade against me in the public arena - and failed miserably. It started with a series of posts to USENET that used all the same tired arguments that had already been discussed and discounted many times previous. My page is too real. I'm engaging in the spreading of disinformation. I don't care about gullible people. I'm causing problems with Nothing Records (no doubt their secretary had to answer the phone a few extra times and say something about "no, it's not going to be called 'Impossible Pain'" - am I supposed to feel bad?), etc.
I countered all those arguments and started making it clear that I thought Jason had turned into a corporate lackey. The posts stopped, and for that matter, so did all of his other posts, because the newsgroup, tired of his endless delays in getting up the official Nothing Records website and tired of his attacks on me, turned against him. It was a sight to see. Patterson, formerly practically a saint on alt.music.nin - now almost universally reviled as a pawn and an idiot.
This didn't set well with Jason, so he went back to John, I believe and passed on my message, while posting this up on "The Unofficial Nine Inch Nails Homepage":
please read the following about reznor's edge and it's falsity.
The link this goes to is a rant about how I'm doing this without Nothing's permission, they disavow everything on the page and furthermore, Jason's had a talk with Trent, Chris and John and they are all "steamed" at me.
The first thing that jumped to my mind was "dude, falsity isn't a word." I have since been set straight by a friend from Korea, Lyseia Hyunjung Lee. At any rate, on the "why" page I posted up a complete response to his allegations with the header: "What I have to say about Jason Patterson." I also would like to say that I don't believe Jason ever actually had any talk with Trent, and I maintain that I won't believe it when someone tells me what Trent thinks of the page - I'll only believe it when I hear it for myself. Period.
The Phone Call
About this time I got one of the most pleasant phone calls of my life from a nice lady in New York named Dorothy Sherman. Dorothy explained to me that she did contract work for Nothing Records, and she went on to explain to me that she'd talked with John and Trent both about my page, and that they both were extremely mad about it all, and you know... don't I think it would be best just to take the page down?
Now, this isn't to call Dorothy a liar, because honestly, she's as nice a person as I've ever spoken to, but I just still couldn't bring myself to believe it. Oh, I believed that John didn't like it. John was coming off like a control freak and an asshole, so I figured he didn't like it whenever he couldn't bully someone into doing something - because he wasn't used to that. But Trent? Trent's busy with other stuff, surely. Right? It was about an hour conversation, during which I prodded Dorothy (who seemed to find the page's content rather humorous herself) with lots of tidbits like "but what about the 'Bob' thing? He didn't think the 'Bob' thing was funny?" She solemnly swore he most certainly did not think it was funny, and she really didn't understand why he didn't, but you know, that's just how it is, and so am I going to take the page down? I politely ended up responding that, no, I didn't think I would take it down, but thanks for calling anyway.
John Malm's Breakfast Cereal
I was getting a bit fed up with the pressure, especially since I didn't figure I was doing anything wrong and John Malm just had some kind of power trip vendetta against me. I even imagined that he was holding it back from Trent, because he knew if Trent knew that he was harassing me like this, he might disapprove. So I decided that I was going to poke John in the eye a bit. That's when I rewrote the introduction to the way it is now - the "breakfast work session" that John has with Trent, in which Trent humiliates John by forcing him to eat kids cereal. I think this really pissed John off.
It was also the introduction of another of the page's most popular features, "Closer-O's" - the NIN themed breakfast cereal "with marshmallow lizards" that John is hoping Trent will approve for manufacture. Of course, what with Trent being so anti-commercial, he has a violently poor reaction to this idea, and John, who is just trying to manage Trent well, is blown out of the water.
The page ended up being my own little sarcastic commentary about the commercialization of NIN in the last few years (which most people recognize and disapprove of). I placed the blame for this commercialization right on John's shoulders. I was trying to get a point across, and I think I did. John started working feverishly behind the scenes for some angle to get at me - you'll see why I say this shortly.
All Hell Breaks Loose
As you know, I find it hard to believe that anyone could look at this page and take it seriously, even if you don't take into account that it's next to impossible to read the page without tripping over one of the links to the "why" page. You can imagine my surprise then, when I discover that "Kerrang!" magazine's December 10, 1996 issue printed a two page spread with the header: "Nine Inch Nails New Album - 'Penis Defying.'" "Penis-defying" is how I (speaking as Trent) define the sound of the guitar on "Impossible Pain" on the "halo next" page. Further reading showed that the writer of the article had discovered my website and printed almost everything on it as if it were fact. I was both stunned and elated.
If I thought I had made it before "Kerrang!" printed this article, I had no idea what was about to come.
A number of magazines followed suit, quoting from "Kerrang!" - including the prestigious "Melody Maker." Radio Stations had been spreading the gospel of the webpage for months (I was always hearing from some friend of mine on IRC about how they heard about "Impossible Pain" on their local radio station) but no print or other media had really picked up on it until now.
More press:
MTV's Kennedy mentions during one of the premier nights of the video for "The Perfect Drug" that Trent Reznor "wanted her to mention that the name of the new album is not going to be 'Impossible Pain' and that Trent does not have a brother, and if he did, his name would certainly not be 'Bob'"
Jed The Fish, a DJ who runs a nationally syndicated alternative countdown radio show called "Out Of Order" mentioned that the new album wasn't going to be remixed by "a homeless man" saying "you can't believe everything you read on the Internet!" A DJ friend of mine, "The Prophet" on Lexington's alternative radio station Z103 sent me copies of that show. Big thanks to him.
People were going nuts everywhere, and John Malm was near apoplexy.
All of a sudden, I started seeing articles in online music magazines about how I was a "non-fan" who was making trouble for Nothing because I had some kind of personal problem with them or something. All along, I'd been very careful not to say anything mean about Trent, or make him look stupid, or hold him up for ridicule. I am a fan, I love the man and his music, but it's in my nature to poke fun and entertain through humor. Knowing this about myself, it made me angry seeing bad press, especially when no one was calling me to get the real story!
The final straw was when one of these magazines insisted that I'd been served two cease and desist orders but was refusing to comply. I had not received any such thing! I began challenging John Malm on the "why" page and on USENET to tell the truth about me and this page for once. I got my real chance at defending myself when "Pollstar" magazine's Jay [last name] contacted me requesting an interview. I granted the interview, and Jay's piece on me was wonderfully done.
"Pollstar" is a trade magazine that covers the live concert/touring industry. They have a website that is an excellent database of upcoming concerts and venues. Since they were being such good sports about all of this, a friend of mine from USENET and IRC named "Yokes" decided that it might be funny to put up a fake "Pollstar" website that had humorous (and of course, all fake) information about Trent's tour supporting "Impossible Pain." Dubbing it the "Improbable Tour," Yokes set out and created an astoundingly good-looking parody of the "Pollstar" site, which he called Paulstar. With fake news reports a-la "The Onion", Yokes' page was a laugh a minute covering not only Trent, but Marilyn Manson (who Yokes quotes as saying "We're going to be doing songs that everyone recognizes... even 'The Macarena!'").
The day Yokes' page was finished, I linked to it from Reznor's Edge. This is where the story takes a turn for the really interesting.
John Blows A Gasket
The next thing I'm about to tell you is the reason why I know that Nothing Records (John Malm, specifically) or someone at Nothing Records (maybe Jason) keeps very close tabs on what I do. Not 24 hours after I linked to Yokes' fake "Pollstar" page, I received notice from my friends at "Pollstar" that John Malm had called them that morning demanding that they remove the "false information" from their concert database. John thought Yokes' fake Pollstar was real! I commenced to have a terribly cathartic laughing fit. The "Pollstar" people, who didn't understand all of the fuss that Nothing was making about my page in the first place, were also laughing their asses off, especially considering that they had nothing to do with it, and I get the impression that they told him so, in one way or another.
This little bit of humiliation seems to have been the straw that broke John's back with me. Shortly thereafter, I received an official email from Arter and Hadden, attorney's at law. Here is what they had to say:

VIA E-MAIL "blackrse@iglou.com"
Mr. Eric Seven 8940 North 8th Street, Apartment 120 Phoenix, Arizona 85020
[Where they got this, I have no clue, as it's nowhere NEAR where I live]
Re: Unauthorized Trent Reznor Web Site
Dear Mr. Seven:
Arter & Hadden represents Nothing Records, Inc. and the band "Nine Inch Nails" in intellectual property matters. It has come to our attention that you have posted a site on the World Wide Web which purports to be the home page of artist Trent Reznor. This page is located at "http://www.iglou.com/blackrose/trent.html".
We are writing to demand that you immediately stop misrepresenting the source of the information contained on this Web Site. Although Nothing Records, Inc. and "Nine Inch Nails" support the rights of NIN fans to comment on the band and its activities, active misrepresentation of the type exhibited on your page are unacceptable.
We have received information that individuals have been confused as to source or sponsorship of this Web Site and mistakenly believe that the Site is approved or authored by Trent Reznor.
Misappropriation of Trent Reznor's persona, misattributing views and opinions to Mr. Reznor which are not his and the slander of individuals affiliated with "Nine Inch Nails" and Nothing Records, Inc. are serious matters.
It also seems that this site makes unauthorized use of "Nine Inch Nails" logos and may be involved in the distribution of counterfeit goods bearing "Nine Inch Nails" designations. We are prepared to investigate these matters further, if necessary, but would prefer that you voluntarily modify the site so that all damaging unauthorized material is removed.
We would appreciate your cooperation in this matter, but are prepared to take additional steps if necessary. We hope you can understand the issues and concerns that are involved in your active misrepresentations.
I am available to discuss this at (202) 775-7980 if you have any questions regarding this matter.
Sincerely, Courtney H. Bailey Arter & Hadden 1801 K Street, NW Suite 400K Washington, DC 20006
cc: John A. Malm, Nothing Records, Inc. Ross B. Rosen, Esquire Richard Meadows, Iglou Internet Services

Time for another personality point on me. Remember how I said I didn't like being threatened? Well, that really bothers me, but not nearly so much as having lawyers call my ISP and lean on them does! These fuckers were getting the idea that I wasn't going to buckle down just because they threw around a lot of vague threats and legal bullshit, so they decide to circumvent the whole thing and see if they can't get IgLou to pull the plug on me.
IgLou, of course, didn't want to fight the good fight, even though they are very staunch in their support of Internet free speech. I spoke directly to IgLou. I'd been with them for over two years, so they refused to pull the plug on me immediately, instead opting for an email and a conversation. I told them my side of the story, and while they agreed with me on principle, they couldn't stand up to Nothing's army of lawyers.
Let me make a quick editorial point here. This is, in my opinion, a huge problem with the world. A lawyer can simply write a letter, and people turn to Jell-O. It makes me sick. A lot of people out there need to get some fucking balls and stand up for themselves, because the world's a worse place for their lack of guts. During this period of time, I had a lot of people bailing on me, including freek, who ran the "Bob Reznor" page but pulled it off when he realized the dogs were barking. I hate lawyers, because they wave that pen, they send that letter, and knees bend. It's too much power for a human being to wield, and that's all I have to say about it.
I finally settled with IgLou that I would leave all the graphics offsite, move all the text offsite and put a meta refresh tag at the iglou.com address. This was an amicable situation because the Reznor pages were registered on most Internet search engines with the iglou.com address, and I didn't want to lose that because then the page would lose lots of hits. With the new setup, anyone that went to the iglou.com address was instantly and seamlessly thrown to another site, so it still seemed to be an active link from iglou.com, and yet IgLou was completely absolved of any responsibility because none of the code or graphics that made up the page resided on IgLou.
It was poetic, really. They'd gone to IgLou to shut me down, and in effect, they didn't get shit. I smiled to myself.
I need to mention stark here once again. I was in dire need of somewhere to put the text, and he allowed me to use his own server, 23x.com - a lifesaver at the time. Since then, most Internet search engines have updated to reflect the change, so I dropped IgLou a couple months ago. I'd been living in Phoenix, Arizona for quite some time and it was no longer necessary to keep paying for an account in Kentucky.
So anyway, as you can probably imagine, I disagreed with just about everything these lawyers had to say, and so I told them. Here's what I had to say:

Courtney H. Bailey Arter & Hadden 1801 K Street, NW Suite 400K Washington, DC 20006 VIA EMAIL Ms. Bailey, I am in receipt of your demand, via email, from February 4th. I would like to start by informing you that this is the first notice of any sort that I have received. If you sent out earlier notices, they did not get to me, no doubt due (at least in part) to the fact that you have an incorrect address. I have never lived at: 8940 North 8th Street, Apartment 120 Phoenix, Arizona 85020 My current address is: [snipped] I would appreciate your utmost confidentiality where my personal information is concerned. I would also appreciate a hard copy of your original email request sent to my correct address. That being said, allow me to respond to your letter, part by part. I. Iglou Internet Services I am indeed curator of the satirical website known as "Trent Reznor's Personal Web Page." I am angered that you are including my Internet Service Provider in your cc:, since, as an attorney you must certainly be aware that it is doubtful any ISP would be held liable for individual subscriber conduct in the current political climate. I therefore must assume that the ONLY reason you are including Iglou Internet Services in this discussion is to bully them into blocking my page, and make this entire discourse unecessary. Are you that concerned that you can't obtain proper results by legitimate means? Regardless, out of my concern for IgLou, which I hold in high regard, I have moved the website to a private server. IgLou, as of tomorrow, will have no more HTML or graphics on their web server pertaining to the website in question. I would appreciate it if you would now consider IgLou a neutral player in this matter and focus your energies on me. II. The alleged "misrepresentation" of Trent Reznor You need not consider this letter as the "be-all and end-all" from me, unless you want it that way. I'm willing to write you my thoughts and see if some sort of amicable agreement can be reached. First of all, let me say that while this matter may have "just come to your attention" - I have had well over a year to think about it, and in that year I have carefully cultivated this website in order to not be crossing any legal boundaries. I do not say this lightly. I have no desire to be dragged into court over something that is meant to be entertaining and humorous. I think you may not be 100% informed as to this websites content, intent or purpose. This website is a parody of what a website *might* look like if Trent Reznor had a personal web page. This disclaimer appears in the source HTML (which can be viewed at a click of the 'View' menu): [disclaimer snipped] In addition to this disclaimer, the casual web surfer that is perusing the page is directed to a page I call the "why" page at the click of a number of links. The "why" page explains how the website came about and that it is a practical joke. Each of the pages on the site has such a link, so that anyone who spends any time reading the page will inevitably run into it. Therefore, it is my opinion that I am not engaging in a willful misrepresentation of Mr. Reznor. In fact, quite the opposite, I go out of my way to try and see to it that everyone discovers that the page is meant as humor. The page itself is, if you are a fan of the music, quite funny. Yes, I have heard that it has been taken seriously on occasion, but I believe it's only those people who don't bother to really stop and read the page thoroughly. I consider the fact that some people *do* take it seriously as not quite my problem, because you see, I have made straightforward attempts to see to it that no one is fooled for too long. You understand the term "fair parody" do you not? Trent Reznor is a public figure, and it is my opinion that courts have consistently upheld the rights of artists like myself to lampoon such public figures. III. The alleged "slander" of individuals associated with NIN The definition of slander (usually applied to the spoken word) or libel,as I am sure you are aware, is: "Any statement or representation,published without just cause or excuse, or by pictures, effigies, orother signs, tending to expose another to public hatred, contempt, orridicule; also the act, tort, or crime publishing this." Using this definition, I find nothing libelous about the page. Have you read the page? If indeed, you could point out a passage from it that you consider libelous, I think I would be greatly inclined to remove it! I happen to like Trent Reznor and his music. Nothing about this page hits below the belt. Why? Because I simply wouldn't do that. IV. The alleged "inappropriate" use of copyrighted logos. I will admit that in the past I have made limited use of such logos. Many thousands of sites on the world wide web do so also, and in far greater quantity than I. Do a web search sometime on "Nine Inch Nails" and see how many you get. Then go to them, one by one, and see how many are using your same copyrighted logos. However, using my better judgement, I have admitted to myself that the page has attracted a lot of attention. I have, therefore, altered the copyrighted logos slightly but noticeably, so that indeed, they can be looked at as nothing more than parody, as the rest of the page. V. The alleged "distribution of counterfeit goods." I can assure you that at no time and under no circumstances has this page been used to generate profit of any sort. Neither has there been a SINGLE incident of the creation or distribution of "counterfeit" goods. You're probably referring to Sean's faux "Pollstar" page and his rambling on about "Impossible Pain" T-Shirts. These shirts, like everything else related to this page, are a lark and do not exist, nor have they ever. You may feel free, of course, to investigate these matters until your face turns purple. I have *always* covered my backside when it came to money. I cannot stress it enough: never, ever, in any shape or form, has any money been generated from this website or it's contents. You could look for it, but you'd never find it, because I have made sure that there is absolutely nothing to find. VI. My answer to your demands. While I would be open to your suggestions as to how to improve the page and make it less "offensive" to the powers that be at Nothing Records (read: John Malm), I am afraid that taking the page down is quite out of the question. I believe that I am well within my legal rights, and should Nothing Records, Inc. see fit to litigate this case against me I am prepared to take the consequences. I think it would be an unnecessary waste of resources and an outrageously poor PR move on their part, for I'm certain I would prevail. I look forward to your reply. Eric Seven

After this letter, I never heard from Nothing Records again, except through the grapevine. I imagine they realized that I wouldn't come out of a court battle on the losing side and that it would be a hell of a lot of publicity for me and bad publicity for them. The page, meanwhile, started mysteriously disappearing from big search engines like "Yahoo." I've tried to contact "Yahoo" and ask them what's up, but they ignore me - very uncharacteristic for them. Curious. It doesn't matter. The page is linked to so many private pages and so many other search engines that it won't go away. Even when it's lived past it's usefulness, I'll likely leave it up as a museum piece for a very interesting part of my life. I enjoyed the ride very much.
As a side note, remember how I said I couldn't believe Trent wouldn't see the humor in the page? Well, as it turns out, I may have been right all along. "Kerrang!" magazine recently printed an interview with Trent that they supposedly held with him themselves via the telephone. Since they were responsible for printing the lies in the first place, they of course asked Trent what was up with the whole thing. In a sidebar piece to the interview labeled "Head Like A Hobo - The Strange Story Of Trent Reznor And The Tramp," they ask Trent his opinion of it all. Here's the text of the article:

HEAD LIKE A HOBO - The strange story of Trent Reznor and the tramp... Last December, a news piece appeared on the Internet 'revealing' that the new Nine Inch Nails album was to be titled 'Impossible Pain' and that Trent had enlisted a tramp to help mix it! Reznor was quoted in the news piece as saying: "I can't wait to see what this f**k-nut comes up with!" Kerrang! and a number of other UK magazines reported this story. We all later learned that it was, in fact, a hoax. And how we laughed. "I heard something about that - where a homeless guy came into the studio?" guffaws Reznor now. "Where did that come from? Yeah, of course it was real," he adds, tongue wedged in cheek. "Actually," he hoots, "a corpse came in and started mixing the album!... Nah, it's flattering that people are going to the trouble to come up with that shit!"

A graphic of this article is available here.
Doesn't sound like a guy who is "steamed" at me after all, does he? Hey Jason: EAT MY SHORTS.
I would never have known if I hadn't stuck to my guns. Remember that!

The End?
So, what started out as a simple IRC prank became quite a little trip for all of us involved.
Recently I've updated the page with a new look, one that I hope won't get old quickly. I've been investing a lot of time updating all of my pages. I'm doing all this because I'm entering a period in my life where I'm going to have to concentrate on other matters myself. My band Radio Free America is starting to get popular locally and is taking up the lion's share of my time. I'm writing this page because a lot of people ask me to tell them the whole story, and of course, it's rather long, so it's easier just to be able to point them to a URL and say: "it's all there."
And there it is.
Email me with your comments! (Please mention that you read this story)
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