Having just weathered a six-week long hockey ring tour with David Bowie, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails decided to kick back a bit with a nice quiet club tour, with Helmet on board to add to the mellow vibe.

"It's way more fun to play clubs than it is to play big hockey arenas, which we've been doing," Reznor said. "By the end of the [last] tour we ended up being this big bloated arena band and it just wasn't that much fun."

While NIN were happy about the club tour, openers Helmet seemed a little crabbed out by the whole thing.

"We've been out for so f---ing long and we played like, two shows," Helmet's Page Hamilton groused. "We sat in Pensacola, Florida, for five days. Trent blew his voice out in New Orleans. We weren't informed 'til the next day when we were sitting in Pensacola."

"We forgot to call them until it was too late," Reznor said.

There was also the issue of the stage set-up ...

"You can't see anything onstage anyway because [NIN] have so much smoke," Hamilton said. "You don't know what's going on onstage. Every once in a while a light comes on and you see a guy running across in like, buttless chaps."

Whitney Houston was getting the word out about her upcoming flick "Waiting to Exhale."

"I had decided actually that I wasn't gonna do any music at all for this," Houston explained. "I didn't wanna do any music because I just wanted to do the acting."

Imagine the dismay of the film's director, Forest Whitaker, upon finding out Whitney Houston would not be singing on the "Waiting to Exhale" soundtrack. The last time Houston sang on a soundtrack album -- "The Bodyguard" -- it sold 32 million copies worldwide.

"Of course Forest goes, 'I just don't understand, Whitney, I just don't,' " Houston said. "So I said, 'Alright, maybe just one [song],' and then it became three."

While longtime Whitney collaborator Babyface wrote and produced the bulk of the album, for a brief moment Houston feared he had lost his juice.

"He's got these 'shoop, shoops'! I'm going, 'He's run out, the man has ran out of songs. Oh my god.' Then I heard the lyric, 'Everyone falls in love sometimes/ Sometimes it's wrong, sometimes it's right/ For every win, somebody must fail/ But there comes a point where you exhale.' That's poetry. We all wanna exhale sometimes."

Snoop Dogg, a man who liked to inhale, saw his protégés the Dogg Pound hit #1 on the Billboard albums chart this week in 1995 with their debut album, Dogg Food. They were helped in this feat, no doubt, by the pronouncement by anti-rap crusader C. Delores Tucker -- before she ever heard the record -- that Dogg Food was the dirtiest gangsta rap album yet. According to the Poundsters themselves and their label chief, Suge Knight, however, these guys weren't just cashing in on the waning gangsta phenomenon -- they were simply coming into their own.

"I got a lot of respect for the Dogg Pound," Knight said, "because Kurupt and Daz said, 'Look, we know we could come in with y'all and get our stuff done, but we wanna show you we're not just here taking free money. We wanna work. So we want to produce it. We wanna write our own stuff. We wanna rap our own stuff.' They did just that."

"It ain't nothing like having your own hit album out," Kurupt said. " 'Cause me and Daz, we've been a part of everybody else's situation, everybody else's musical project, and now it's our turn."

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