During a new interview with Hot Metal, guitarist Richie Kotzen unexpectedly revealed that he once had agreed to join Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor felt too embarrassed of the idea of hiring a former Poison member to go through with it.
“The closest band that I ever came to joining was Nine Inch Nails — and nobody knows that,” Kotzen said.
“This is a true one. I was friendly with the bass player from Marilyn Manson [Jeordie White, a.k.a. Twiggy Ramirez] who was playing in Nine Inch Nails. He said to me, ‘Listen, you’ve got to come down. We’re having a hard time finding a guitar player.’ So I went down to Third Encore [rehearsal studio in North Hollywood] and I spent the day.”
He continued: “Trent [Reznor] told me, ‘You’re by far the best guy that we’ve tried. I would love to have you in the band. I’m gonna have my manager reach out to you.’ And I left that day thinking, ‘Wow, okay, I’m gonna join another band.”
“And then a week went by. And then another week went by. And I ran into Jeordie and I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, basically, [Reznor] said he didn’t wanna open up Rolling Stone magazine and see [the headline] ‘Nine Inch Nails gets former Poison guitar player Richie Kotzen’. He didn’t want the association with a hair metal band in that camp.
“And, you know, aesthetically, when you think about the fanbase and you think about how people would read into something, I can kind of could see that; I could see the point. So I jokingly said, ‘Hey, I’ll do it under an alias,’ ’cause I wasn’t doing anything at the time and I think he’s, you know, a genius and I would have loved to have worked with him.”
