Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (15 page)

There was a little punk bar called Thursday’s. Everybody in the Akron punk scene went there. You saw other people dressed in black, wearing eyeliner, with the leather jacket. You knew there was a kinship of some kind there. I don’t think I was so much adopting Trent’s style, because by then I had been in that scene for a little bit. He was more a validation of it.

My parents are devoted Catholics. When I was about 16, they gave me the option to be confirmed, and I said no. My parents weren’t too happy about that, but they respected my opinion. Now I have been confirmed, and my wife converted to Catholicism, and my son is being raised Catholic. There is a place for organized religion in my life now, but all those Matt Johnsons and Trent Reznors helped in the questioning of God, of religion, as violent and blasphemous as it was.

When I was going through my punk phase, it was painful. There were periods when I didn’t talk to my dad. His parents were second-generation Americans from Hungary, and it was totally foreign to them that their grandson was showing up with dyed hair and eyeliner. My parents were yelling, “Are you doing drugs?,” and I’d say, “You raised me, you instilled good values in me, along with what is bubbling up now. Trust what you did with me, because I’m still a good person. I am expressing myself in different ways now.” It’s a small town and we’re known there, so I’m sure that was part of it.

My senior year, I worked at an independent record store, Digital Days, which is now long gone. Musicians would come in, and I don’t know if Trent knew the owner or if he was just promoting himself, but we had an early NIN tape at the store, and we were blown away by it. It was like the perfect hybrid of pop music and industrial music and angst. I had listened to industrial music—Front 242 and Ministry—but the lyrics came through in this. It was very poetic and coming from a raw place, and then there was the shock value that I loved.
Pretty Hate Machine
is the “desert island” album for me. I can’t tell you why, because there’s nothing necessarily remarkable about it. It’s just a combination of where I was in my life and what was on the disc. Plus, Trent was a Cleveland product, so it’s what I identify with.

To me,
PHM
is a standing-tall defiance to everything and anything. I remember New Year’s Eve 1989. I was back in my hometown after my first half year of college, seeing old friends. I was at a party at my buddy’s house, and we played the album. People we invited from Bowling Green came, plus my high school friends. It was like, This is where I’m at. This is where I’m going.

I loved “The Only Time” from the moment I heard it. It expresses anything you can think of, from lust to rejection to anger. In the liner notes, Trent thanks Prince, and I’m a huge Prince fan, like anything from
Dirty Mind
to
Batman
. But to this day, I don’t know if I ever found the Prince influence on the album. In “The Only Time,” you hear every breath. Trent’s doing that sound, the “eh, eh, ohh” after the second repeat of the title. It’s quintessential Trent. You know what? That’s the Prince right there: the cooing and squeaking.

As a Catholic boy, I always assumed the
PHM
themes of sex and religion were connected. I wouldn’t say the music I was listening to at the time helped shape my ideas about sex
and relationships, but it highlighted the question, Is what I’m doing immoral?

One of the people I met at the Warehouse Club got me into this whole thing, and she became my girlfriend. She was very free and listened to all this music I’d never gotten into. She was artistic and really pushed me to write and explore that side of myself. It was cool, but I look back at it now, and it was also fucked up. All my friends’ parents were married in our perfect little world. But her parents were divorced. Her dad was manic-depressive, and she had this fucked-up life.

She ended up moving to the West Coast, and I thought, What did I do to drive her away? It had nothing to do with me, I know that now, but back then I felt angry and helpless. One of my guilty pleasures is watching
The Real World
. To those kids on the show, everything hinges on
this moment
. That is your life at 18. Those anxieties and insecurities are very much in the lyrics on
PHM
. I remember when I met my wife and we were comparing the romantic skeletons in our closets. Everybody’s got shit, but you get to a point in your life where you realize that the world is bigger than you.

Now when I listen to
PHM
, I hear myself 15 years ago, and it’s like a bookmark in my life. I’m not that angry poet person anymore, but it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. Same with the album. Sometimes people think, The music’s crap, but at least I got the memories, but I think it holds up. It’s like
Citizen Kane
in that you watch it and think, It’s so cliché, but when it was released, it was brilliant!
PHM
made alternative and industrial music acceptable. It defined those clichés.

When I was 21, I worked for Disney, but I quit because I was offered a job at a Hilton on Sanibel Island. I moved down there in December, and in February I got fired. I went back to my apartment and for 36 hours just listened to
Broken
and
Fixed
. That’s all I remember, because I was completely
smashed. Then I came out of it and said, Okay, what do I have to do? How do I break my lease? That’s my personality: control what you can. But I needed that mourning. I will never forget playing those two albums over and over. I was so embarrassed to be fired, and it was toward the end of the dark period of becoming an adult. Even then I knew I had to move past it.

Broken
was a quickie, whereas
PHM
was a long-term relationship.
Broken
is much too violent and angry. I don’t go there anymore.
The Downward Spiral
was the turning point for me as a fan of NIN. That’s where I left Trent. It’s not an album that I listen to from start to finish, whereas
PHM
to me is like a cassette or record, I expect B to follow A. It was then that the machine took over, the appropriation of the product to the frat boys. I’d never listened to
The Fragile
until my wife picked it up.

I saw Trent a lot in the
PHM
era at the Empire Club and all those places in Cleveland that are now gone. At the club there were the new-wave kids and the art-school people who knew what was happening and were there to see the band. And then you had the traditional college kids who were just there to drink. You could see the confusion and anger in their eyes, like, This is not right. Where is “Brown Eyed Girl”?

These places would be dank, dark, and bathed in a specific light. I remember shows being lit in red or purple. And just the ferocity onstage and hearing those live instruments with the synthesizer. I am not a big guy, but I would be down there in whatever semblance of a pit for as long as I could. It was that aggressive, animalistic bass pulling you, propelling you forward. Looking back, it almost seems like the cornstarch stuff was the only way Trent could get through that fourth wall. It was just a cloud of music and emotion and cornstarch.

I’d never been to a NIN show other than those during the
PHM
era, so I had my reservations about going to the Blossom show, because
PHM
is so specific to me and to certain periods of my life. I was worried that I would feel out of place, that there would be all these new fans, all kids. My wife (who is also a big NIN fan) and I were walking around after Bauhaus’ set, and we had the same conversation that surely every 30-something person did: “Look at all this Hot Topic! Back in my day, we had to go to a thrift store to buy this shit.” I laugh at the fact that the goth subculture is pop culture now, how you’ve got characters like Violet Parr in
The Incredibles
, the archetype of the introverted, introspective artist-type kid. I see Hot Topic as a bastardization, but I can understand why it is adopted by so many people. I mean, I adopted it myself, and it is so much a part of who I am, inside.

I remember at one point during the show, Trent said, “It’s good to be home, all grown up,” and my wife and I looked at each other and were like, Man, that is just way too appropriate, because that’s how we felt. I knew once the show started that I was supposed to be there, that I was supposed to come back to that experience of Trent’s music and lyrics and presence. I had forgotten how much muscle was behind NIN when there were a live guitar and drums. The album sounds incredibly sterile compared to hearing it live. When they did “Head Like a Hole” to close the show, it was absolutely ferocious. I was just enjoying the moment, being there with my wife. Everything about that night was right, even the rain.

Aaron, 29, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio

Aaron responded to a flyer I placed at Blossom Amphitheater. We met shortly afterward on a few weekend afternoons in his windowless law office in Boardman, Ohio.

I grew up on the south side of Youngstown until I was 8, and then my family moved to Canfield. We moved because the area was getting to be not so good. My parents knew there was some violence in the area, and there were reports of a drug house down the street. My dad grew up in western Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. He went from high school into the Reserve around the time of Vietnam. He somehow avoided that, and started working at Westinghouse in Sharon, and then moved here and started working at the GM plant in Lordstown. He had one other job, but other than that he worked at GM his entire life. My mom grew up in Niles in an old, Italian family, and she was a nurse until I came along, and then she didn’t work until I was about 13.

My parents were absolute hippies. My mom had long black hair parted down the middle, and my dad still has long hair. They were into the lifestyle, the drugs. My dad has some hysterical “bad acid” stories. But then my parents became born-again. My dad was a big music fan and was really into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. I have a picture of him wearing those huge headphones as he’s rocking me to sleep, but by that time he was probably listening to Christian rock. The law was that you separate from the world and stop listening to music, so my dad sold his collection, which he now regrets. I have a picture of them going to Jesus Fest ’74 with my aunt and uncle.

I have a natural younger brother, but after him they told my mom she couldn’t have any more children, so they became foster parents, and that’s been a full-time job for them. We started off with one, and the next thing you knew, there were three. We’d have crack babies with monitors, a number of handicapped children, a few whom my parents ended up adopting as well. Right now I’m not even sure of how many children there are—I think six or seven.

My parents kept adding additions to the house, and at some point they asked if I would move into the basement. I had my own little world down there. By then, they no longer inspected everything I was reading and listening to, and I got tapes of music from a friend whose older neighbor always fed him good music. One day, when we were playing “Mortal Combat,” he put on
Broken.
Before that I had been listening to Metallica, which wasn’t as phony as the hair-metal bands, and I picked up on the guitar sound. Then he put on
Pretty Hate Machine
. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard. I got him to make me a tape, and I listened to it obsessively in my room.

My favorite song on the record has always been “Terrible
Lie.” I liked the questioning of God that was going on. That last line, “I want so much to believe,” always brought it all home to me. It would’ve been so much easier for me if I had gone along with it all. If I hadn’t questioned it, everyone would’ve been a little happier. Instead, I was the one who was always like, “Wait a second here.”

I think the terrible lie is that religion and God are somehow going to save you from this life, and if you believe, you’ll see everybody in heaven. The betrayal is that it doesn’t exist, it is all, for lack of a better word, a facade. In the song, Trent’s definitely not a believer. The opening lines are “Hey God,” but it’s like a letter addressed to somebody who doesn’t exist, like, “Dear diary.”

I struggle with it every day, whether or not God exists, but my big problem has always been with organized religion. I think we don’t want to acknowledge that our lives may be meaningless. There’s a lot to Marx’s statement that religion is the opiate of the masses. People want to believe that if they’re suffering on earth and don’t make a lot of money, don’t find themselves in an optimal situation, that it’s going to be okay in the second life that religion speaks of.

I don’t think when Trent wrote “Terrible Lie” he was necessarily questioning the politics of religion. I’ve always looked at “Head Like a Hole” as how people view wealth. For me, money is always something that’s worshipped, whether it’s through materialism or whatever. “HLAH” is probably the only song on
PHM
that has a political bent to it. You can easily connect “HLAH” to being antiauthority and rebelling against kind of a structure that’s placed to hold you down, whether it’s political or socioeconomic.

I didn’t hear the anger so much as I heard the question. And that’s what resonated with me. That was just a big thing for me, asking, “Does God exist?” and “What am I supposed
to believe?” For an example, somebody in church will go on about how I should never drink alcohol or smoke, because those are bad, bad sins. Then why do I go to church with all these people who will stuff their faces with giant plates of food at a church picnic? Isn’t that gluttony? If I wanted to have a beer, everybody would look at me with shocked faces.

That’s something I struggled with, and in songs like “Sin,” “Kinda I Want To,” and “The Only Time,” I latched onto it, like, Here’s somebody who has these … wants, desires, needs … and is going to experience them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that. My take on it has always been that you as an individual should be able to figure out what is good and what is bad. “Kinda I Want To” is one of my favorite NIN song titles, which I think summarizes what people who grow up in church struggle with. “I want to listen to this kind of music, I want to have these experiences, but if anybody finds out at the church, I’m going to be in trouble.”