Fragility Tour as part of the Fragility v2.0 Tour On September 10, 1998, at the
1998 MTV Video Music Awards, a thirty-second teaser trailer was shown on television to promote the then untitled album. It would be more than a year before the album was finally released. The tour consisted of two major legs, labeled Fragility 1.0 and Fragility 2.0. The live band lineup remained largely the same from the previous tour in support of
The Downward Spiral, featuring
Robin Finck on guitar,
Charlie Clouser on keyboards, and
Danny Lohner on bass guitar. Reznor held open auditions to find a new drummer, eventually picking then-unknown
Jerome Dillon. Nine Inch Nails' record label at the time,
Interscope Records, reportedly refused to fund the promotional tour following
The Fragile's lukewarm sales. Reznor instead committed to fund the entire tour himself, which quickly sold out. He concluded that "the reality is, I'm broke at the end of the tour", but also added, "I will never present a show that isn't fantastic." The tour featured increasingly large production values, including a
triptych video display created by contemporary video artist
Bill Viola.
Rolling Stone magazine named Fragility the best tour of 2000. In 2002, the tour documentary
And All That Could Have Been was released featuring performances from the Fragility 2.0 tour. While making the DVD, Reznor commented on the tour in retrospect by saying "I thought the show was really, really good when we were doing it", but later wrote that "I can't watch it at all. I was sick for most of that tour and I really don't think it was Nine Inch Nails at its best."
Reznor's drug overdose and recovery In the years leading up to the Fragility Tour, Reznor's personal life had been complicated by addiction and grief. Following the commercial breakthrough of
The Downward Spiral (1994), Reznor struggled privately with
alcohol and
drug use, which intensified after the death of his grandmother, the woman who had raised him. The loss profoundly destabilized him, and he began using substances heavily to cope.
Cocaine and alcohol became central to his daily routine, with sessions often blurring into days of
self-destructive excess. Reznor himself could not appreciate its reception. In an interview cited by
Exclaim!, he admitted that during this era "nothing felt good anymore, not music, not success, not anything". By the time the Fragility Tour began, Reznor was carrying the weight of his addictions into one of the most elaborate and demanding concert productions of his career. The most serious event occurred in June 2000, during the European leg of the tour in
London. According to
The Guardian, Reznor obtained what he thought was cocaine but which turned out to be
heroin, specifically a highly potent form sometimes referred to as "
China white", a type of
fentanyl. In a 2005 conversation he stated: "If I drink again I’ll probably die. And I don’t want to die." ==Reissue==