Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (11 page)

I lost my virginity at 22 while listening to “Starfuckers, Inc.” I played the song really loud because I knew no one else in my apartment would hear us if I did. It was with the girl I’m still dating, the only girl I’ve had sex with. So I can understand when Trent says, “I want to fuck you like an animal.” I know all about repressed sexual tension, because I wasn’t going to have sex until I was married. I remember seeing a pretty girl and saying to myself, If she only knew the horrible things I’m thinking, because I wanted to ravage her. But I was also thinking I couldn’t actually do it. It was horrible, like I wanted to have bad porno sex with women, like clawing and ripping passion, like not-human sex.

At the time I was super-religious, I was thinking these horrible thoughts about girls, that they were inducing sin. I was calling women devils because they were flirty and sexy. It’s like in “Kinda I Want To.” Trent has thoughts he wishes he had some way of acting out, but he feels guilty because
God’s watching. That, to me, sounds like a dialogue he’s having with himself.

I always saw his sex stuff more as part of the theatrics. I think it was the perfect representation of what he was saying, to be that submissive, to be turned on by getting beaten and whipped. Think about the video for “Happiness in Slavery.” A guy gets ripped to shreds in a meat grinder, but it’s a metaphor. What Trent’s writing is the antimusic of the time, and what he’s doing is the forbidden, just like S&M. That’s what the doctors and lawyers do in secret. He’s putting that out there. He doesn’t have that persona anymore, but he established himself as that guy in the eyeliner and tight leather outfit. You think of Trent and of his persona and his music, and that’s what you really want. It makes you want to be a musician.

I met Trent while I was working at the Shenango Valley Mall. When he walked in, it wasn’t, like, suddenly the lights went out and two spotlights beamed down and all these people in chains appeared. He’s a regular guy. Around here, you hear so much negativity about him because of people’s envy. They weren’t a part of his life back then, and now he’s somebody and they want to be part of his life. Everybody’s got a Trent story. It’s either, “We had a good time,” or “I ran into Trent at Merko’s [a local bar] and he was an asshole to me, and we went to high school together.”

One time, Trent’s sister visited Squirrelly’s [Skin Art Inc.], where my girlfriend worked, because she was curious about some tattoo ideas. My girlfriend had the
Things Falling Apart
poster on her wall, and Trent’s sister was like, “You know who I am?” I was like, “Yeah, I know who you are, and you look just like him.” When I worked at Sears, this old guy came in with a NIN hat on, and I was like, “Dude, NIN is one of my favorite bands!” and he was like, “Trent’s my grandson!” He
was so proud of him. When
The Fragile
came out, grandpa Bill walked into the store with both arms up in the air, like, This is the day!, and we high-fived over the CD.

I worked in what
you
call the Shenango Valley Mall, but what
we
call the Shenango Valley
Hall.
It is one row. There was a north wing that had an arcade that I used to go to when I was a kid, the same one Trent used to go to. That wing is closed now. That place is hell. Our area is comprised of the East Park Mall and the Southern Park Mall—those are the two big ones. The Shenango Valley Mall is where everyone else goes because they’re too far away to go to the good malls.

Within driving distance of the mall, you’ve got three types of people. You’ve got the really ritzy people down by the golf course. Then you’ve got people from Sharon and Farrell, the ghetto. It’s gangster over there. It’s worse than Youngstown, Farrell. Then there’s Fredonia and Mercer—that’s the country. If you were to take an hour, you could hit all these areas in one big run. Mercer County, where Trent’s from, is another universe. The people who listen to Pink Floyd like Trent did and the people who love the music I listened to when I was in the mall are few and far between. Mercer people love their country, and they love their rap. Rascal Flatts and Nelly—it’s all just pop.

Our area is a cultural shock. There is nothing defining us. We were defined by our televisions, by the radio. They ain’t fucking kidding about Ohio, we’re “the heart of it all.” We just take what they give us, and pump it back out. You look around here and think, What am I going to do, am I going to own Goldstar Home Improvements? Am I going to own a coffee shop? Am I going to be a rock star in Youngstown? No.

When I was little, I had no hope. I thought Hubbard, Ohio, and Sharon, Pennsylvania, would be it for me. I
thought I’d be living here forever. Then I thought I was going to be this gigantic celebrity. I thought I had the entire world at my fingertips. I didn’t. My band opened for King’s X in Cleveland, and that was the high point. Now I’ve never felt the doors as wide open as they are because I let go of all the preconceived notions I had. Now I want to connect with the world like Trent did, whether it’s through music, writing, acting, whatever. I want to find what makes me unique, which is what he did. And I thank him for that.

Michael, 35, Youngstown, Ohio

Michael is a supplier who often came into my mom’s office wearing a NIN shirt. My mom asked him whether he was a serious fan, and eventually his contact information was passed on to me.
We met up at a coffee shop on a commercial strip between my neighborhood and the adjacent, upscale neighborhood of Canfield.

Remember when
E.T.
came out? I was little then, and parents got me a Speak & Spell for Christmas. First thing I did was get my dad’s screwdriver and open it up. “How does this thing talk, man?” Electronics have been the theme of my life.

I was totally different from the kids who went to Poland High School. There was nobody who was into any kind of self-expression, bands, art, or anything like that. They’d bring me into the guidance office and say, “Junior year’s coming up. Go to the vocational school. They have some good programs there.” I’d say, “No, not interested. Next year I’m
going to take advanced calculus!” I drove them nuts because I wore Metallica and Iron Maiden shirts, had long hair, and only went to school when I wanted to.

I had
ultra
-conservative parents. They didn’t react to me very well.

I moved out of my house when I was 18 and went to Youngstown State University. I tried to self-finance that while working at bars and odd jobs. I thought I would go into electrical engineering, but I took a couple of psychology and philosophy courses and liked that more. Education was important to me, but it came to a point where I couldn’t afford it. Also, I had the revelation that I could go to the library and learn anything I wanted to for free.

I began to manage a BP gas station in Canfield, and a guy I knew who was a drummer came in. He said there was an electrical company starting up in Youngstown. I went to work for them, and then the owner of the company I work for now called me one day and said, “My estimators are leaving. Come work with me.” I’ve been with him for 14 years.

The first time I heard NIN was in the Terrace Room of YSU my first year of college, in 1989, and it was
Pretty Hate Machine
. The people I was hanging around with at the time were listening to Ministry and Love and Rockets, what would be known as industrial, and a lot of the old standards, like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. There’s, like, a mechanism in our brains that draws us together, you know? Just geeks. And NIN came to our attention.

I saw NIN in Cleveland in their early days, when they were bumbling idiots. If I were to describe what the show was like, I would say, “Still experimenting.” If you write music in the studio and then immediately go play it live, you really don’t know how to play it, and you gotta learn it, and that was Trent’s methodology. He didn’t know how to put it together,
and the keyboard players looked like, Should I play the low part here or the high part here?

Trent was magnetic onstage. His personality almost put the music in the backseat. He was good-looking, weird, geeky, and wore makeup and fishnet stockings on his arms. Even when you saw him in a little club and the music wasn’t together, you knew he was a star. He was really focused. You’d get a “Thank you” or a “This next song is.…” But it wasn’t, “Hey guys, how’s everybody doing? Go get a beer!”

NIN had a lot of melodies and good hooks, and they were radio-friendly, but they were also aggressive. Other synth bands had melody and the hooks but were really mellow and really British. They could be campy and you expected that, but NIN wasn’t really campy—I guess they were kind of campy, but you know? Everybody dressed like Trent. I think his fashion did for the industrial genre what flannel did for nineties rock: it defined what it looked like to be in a band.

PHM
is clearly well rehearsed, like Trent knew where every vocal inflection was gonna go. What do I like on
PHM
? “Head Like a Hole” is obvious, with the bass line, but the song is like “Stairway to Heaven” for me. “Terrible Lie,” I like the repetition; it’s a weird phrase to be the chorus of a song, like “purple elephant” or something. “Sanctified” is cool for that little sizzling sound: “I am sanctified … [
pzzt
].” “Something I Can Never Have” isn’t really a love song, yet it is in a NIN kind of way. If you were to graph this album, you would build steadily and then hit a valley with that song.

Then
PHM
picks back up with “Kinda I Want To,” which probably should’ve never been on it because it’s so cheesy. Still, it fits in the program of the album, which to me is about a spoiled rich kid not getting what he wants. Maybe before I knew Trent’s biography I would just say spoiled kid. It’s kind of pretentious, the gloom and doom of it all. I don’t buy it.
I enjoy not necessarily Trent’s point of view as much as his ability to write a good song, put the lyrics together, make it sound good, create a good hook, put together a nice little story, make a nice little song. I’ve always been of the mind-set that you make a good song and don’t read into it too much. A guy’s just a musician; he’s not a prophet.

For some reason, after
PHM
, Cleveland hated Trent Reznor, and he hated Cleveland. After
Broken
, he started to come back around, and he was big-time. The radio would announce, “At 3 o’clock NIN is going to play a free concert, but we’re not going to tell you where until 2:50 p.m.” So we would go up to Cleveland and wait and listen to the radio, and everybody would bust ass to get over there. Oh, it was nuts! Some of the most fun I ever had.

As far as Cleveland bands go, for me it was Pere Ubu, Prick, and Lucky Pierre. I enjoyed them because of the franticness, the looseness, and the vocals, especially Kevin McMahon’s. I think Kevin smokes Trent vocally. Trent was really passionate in the older stuff, but after
The Downward Spiral
… not interested. Trent had an opportunity, like U2 did when they made
Rattle and Hum
or
Achtung Baby
. He should’ve come out with an acoustic album or something completely different, but he took the safe route. It sounds good, no question about it. As it should, I’m sure it cost him a lot of money. But some of those albums that sound terrible sound great, too.

I started on the guitar at probably 12 or 14 years old by emulating Black Sabbath and Metallica, with the real heavy guitar sound. At 15, I joined a band. Our originals sounded like Cinderella,
Mötley Crüe
, Bon Jovi-type stuff. The songs were something different: it wasn’t Lynyrd Skynyrd or Led Zeppelin, whom we respected. It had the same rawness of the older stuff but a new vocal approach.

At that time, it was easy to get shows as a local band. You just walked in. I mean, they weren’t paying you anything, or maybe they’d give you 50 bucks. We were paired up with a lot of local bands in the area that were still doing covers but were more popular than we were. So we’d say, “Can we open? We’ll do it for nothing. Give us 30 minutes.”

And then NIN came out and combined the guitar with the synthesizer, and they had this ability to bring in, like, a funk sound. I mean, you can dance to NIN. Some of the earlier Ministry wasn’t dance-y-type music; it was industrial for industrial’s sake. This new music changed the way I played guitar, leading me to take a more experimental approach and not worry. Even though NIN stuff is very structured, a lot of it, especially the remixes or the songs on
Broken
, is free-form. Like, when you listen to Coltrane and you lose the thread, but then it comes back and it’s like, Oh, now it makes sense. A lot of NIN is like that.

NIN told me I could break the rules. I got a lot of heck from my other band members, because they shunned this kind of thinking. We were a good band doing rock ’n’ roll in the nineties, like Soundgarden were popular, and that was the style we were into. We got to be pretty popular, but times change. And I told the guys, “I realize people like us, and we’re making pretty decent money at this, and we can play wherever we want to play, but let’s change it up.” I told them, “If we don’t make a change, I’m going to quit.” One day I stopped bringing my guitar to practice. I started bringing a keyboard.

In the end, we didn’t change. So I left. They turned into a three-piece and started doing Van Halen covers. After that, in my recording studio, I worked with other bands, did some production and artist management, went to L.A. and checked out the scene there, made some contacts. Now I’m running
a studio in road cases. I moved to a new house about a year ago and was going to reinstall the studio in the basement. But things didn’t work out with my wife; we’re in the process of divorce. We decided to not keep the house, and I didn’t want to dig too far and install the studio.

I remember when the steel mills shut down. My dad worked at United Steel, but he was in management, so he was able to pick up another job at a similar company. I remember seeing the life drained out of our family as well as this town over the businesses shutting down. And that was pervasive throughout the sixties and seventies. Everyone knew what was coming. It was a staged shutdown until the middle seventies, when they said, “That’s it. Flipping the switch on the last one, guys. See ya.”