Current FILTER frontman and former Nine Inch Nails guitarist Richard Patrick has revealed the reason he left the band back in 1993.
Speaking on the Stop! Drop & Talk podcast, he explained it was a conversation with Trent Reznor after the band “[got] big” that led him to realise he’d prefer to be his own boss.
“There was a point in time where Trent just kind of looked at me, and I said, ‘wow, you’re going down to New Orleans to go live in this beautiful house that you’re getting, and I’m gonna go back to my mum and dad’s house,'” he began.
He continued: “And Trent goes, ‘well, go write a record.’ And I was, like, ‘wow!’ What do you say to that? He goes, ‘you should have seen your face. ‘Cause you were kind of pissed at first, and then you were, like, ‘no. I should.”… and I remember thinking to myself I’m gonna literally go back and eat out of my mum and dad’s kitchen every night, and this guy is gonna go off and write ‘Broken’ and whatever else he was gonna go work on.”
“But I sat there and I took his words of advice, which was, ‘go do something.’ His advice was, ‘go get off your ass and do something. Don’t wait for me to do it. Don’t wait for me to write a record without you. Just go off and do it.'”
Patrick went on to reveal that the “final straw” was Reznor’s suggestion that he work for a pizzeria in order to “make some extra cash.”
Unbeknownst to Reznor, Patrick had already begun working on FILTER at this time, and had “five record companies ready to sign [him].”
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“I was like, ‘hey, dude, I hate to tell you this now, but I quit. And I’m so sorry. But I fucking quit. I’m not gonna sell pizzas and I’m not gonna drive for a [pizzeria].”
Patrick maintains he has no regrets over the decision, saying there is “nothing like being your own boss.”
“Since that day, I have literally woken up, and the only person I have to answer to is myself or my wife and my kids,” he said.
“Have I made mistakes? Absolutely. Have bad things happened to me? Sure. But at the end of the day, I know every day that all I have to do is apply myself and work and be sober and be connected to what it is that makes me alive, and that’s music.”
As for Reznor, Richard Patrick revealed the pair still “text all the time” even after all the Nine Inch Nails stuff.
“Trent and I talk; we text all the time,” he said. “[When] it ended, it was kind of weird. But how many people have you gone through these experiences with? You’ve gotta stay connected.”
Check out ‘Head Like A Hole’ by Nine Inch Nails:
