The End of the Eighties, Track 34

“Sin”
Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1989

The original two-disc compilation I made for the Bowling Green collection each carried its own subtitle. And, like Track 09 of this playlist, the subtitle for what was the second disc was taken from a Nine Inch Nails song. This time, “Sin”. And while the previous subtitle (“Just a Fading Fucking Reminder of Who I Used to Be” from “Something I Can Never Have”) is open to all sorts of interpretation, this one’s a bit more straightforward. After all, college (and the reminiscences of that experience) is about nothing if not “stale incense, old sweat, and lies, lies, lies.”

“Sin” is a song that always reminds me of John, if only because I know it’s his favorite track off Pretty Hate Machine. It’s a nice little nihilistic ditty about giving everything – sexually, I assume – and not having the emotional weight of the encounter reciprocated by the partner. Like much of the album, “Sin” takes life experience and runs it through the buzz saw angst of young adulthood to blistering effect.

The End of the Eighties, Track 28

“That’s What I Get”
Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1989

Once again, it’s all about the flow within the playlist here. “Batdance” somehow fits perfectly against the synthesized steel drum percussion opening Nine Inch Nails’ “That’s What I Get”. It’s a song that is musically stark, devoid of softness. The only real emotion is conveyed by Trent Reznor’s vocals. Interestingly, though, the beats of Pretty Hate Machine’s leadoff single, “Down In It”, suddenly appear in the latter half of this song.

Thematically, “That’s What I Get” is all about the nihilistic place I found myself in between Pam leaving and my further self-exploration at Bowling Green in 1989. It’s as if every word of this song was ripped from my heart as I tried to navigate my victimized feelings over Pam’s departure. 

Just when everything was making sense

You took away all my self-confidence

Now all that I’ve been hearing must be true

I guess I’m not the only boy for you

That’s what I get

How could you turn us into this

After you just taught me how to kiss you?

I told you I’d never say goodbye

Now I’m slipping on the tears you made me cry

That’s what I get

Why does it come as a surprise

To think that I was so naïve

Maybe didn’t mean so much

But it meant everything to me

The song’s sentiment is echoed in hundreds of different variations throughout my writings of the era. Portrait of a Tortured Punk Poet as he attempts to find his way through both his feelings and the larger world, dressed in black, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and approaching his freshman college responsibilities more as “guidelines” as opposed to requirements.

The End of the Eighties, Track 25

“Get Down Make Love”
Nine Inch Nails
Sin Maxi-Single
1989

It’s kind of shocking to me that Nine Inch Nails’ “Get Down Make Love” was nowhere to be found on either of the original playlists. It’s probably my favorite NIN song alongside “The Only Time”. The first time I heard “Get Down Make Love” was at the Phantasy Theater on the Pretty Hate Machine Promo Tour at the end of the decade. I attended the show with coworkers from the CD store I worked at, and when my boss (a classic and prog rock dinosaur) yelled over the din, “This is a Queen song!” my mind was completely blown.

It was a crazy thing to see Nine Inch Nails live in the late ’80s. Surrounded by anger and bathed in aggression, those early shows were physically demanding of both the band and the audience. The ferocity of the performance lent an unpredictable air of excitement to the proceedings. It was antagonistic. It stirred you, pulled you in. I’m not a big guy, but this is the music that could draw me into the fray. Jostled and bruised, you would emerge from the cornstarch haze of the venue and head out into the Northeast Ohio night carried on an adrenaline surge. 

This was the first of an inspired list of Nine Inch Nails’ covers, leading directly to Pigface’s “Suck”, Adam & the Ants’ “Physical”, Joy Division’s “Dead Souls”, and beyond. Recorded or live, “Get Down Make Love” feels so much more raw than the rest of Pretty Hate Machine. This song is all about attitude. Opening with a sampling of the insistent sexual history interrogation from 1962’s The Cabinet of Caligari (co-starring Glynis Johns of Mary Poppins fame!), the slow menace of Queen’s original is transformed into a spiraling nightmare. There is a sense that this shit was just thrown together – the raging percussion, the screaming chorus. It’s all open wounds and bloodied knuckles. And, frankly, some of the best industrial pop you’ll ever hear.

The End of the Eighties, Track 20

“The Only Time”
Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1989

At the crossroads of sex and religion, there lie Prince and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, and though these artists weren’t the genesis for my thoughts on these themes, they certainly informed my view. In Prince’s world sex is nasty and fun, but it also lives alongside absolute faith. Reznor’s vision is darker, blacker, more violent and questioning, borderline hopeless. Reznor credits Prince for “ideas and sounds” on Pretty Hate Machine, and nowhere is that influence more tangible to me than on this provocative track.

I have written at length about the influence of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, but “The Only Time” has always been my favorite song on the album. This darkly raging exploration of uninhibited lust and the act of losing oneself in another opens with the simple declaration: “I’m drunk.” Reinforcing the emptiness of the moment, this is followed by the admission that “right now I’m so in love with you / And I don’t want to think too much about what we should or shouldn’t do.”

As much as I love the shocking vulgarity of first verse’s “Lay my hands on heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars / While the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car,” it’s the delivery of the next line that seals the deal for me: “Nothing quite like the feel of something new.” The idea of this graphic image being almost disposable gets to the heart of the detachment from reality that was a cornerstone of late ’80s/early ’90s young adulthood.

Looking back on my relationships of the era, I realize just how influenced by this song they were. I took to heart the notion that there needed to be turmoil to make a relationship real, to really feel. Reznor’s notion that “This is the only time I really feel alive” in the chorus echoed all the self-absorption of my late teens and early 20s tortured soul mindset, and resulted in many-a subconsciously sabotaged relationship.

Clever turns of phrase like “My moral standing is lying down” and imagery of “The sweat in your eyes, the blood in your veins are listening to me” work perfectly in front of the music’s clashing industrial synthesizer noise and looped breathing samples. Aggressive animalistic basslines thrust my reeling mind through an off-kilter fun house of emotional damage in the same way they propelled me through crowds at those early live shows.

I listen to this song nearly 25 years later, and I am immediately transported back to New Year’s Eve 1989, I’m in the music store I worked at through late high school and college, I’m at all those early shows at the Phantasy and Empire, I’m fucking up relationships that deserved better, and words are pouring from the tip of my Sharpie on to unruled paper at a furious pace. The sway this song and this album have over me is staggering, a catalyst to lay bare everything that was swirling inside me.

Who We Used To Be

Nine Inch Nails
27 June 2006: Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is a folk hero in these parts. A musician friend of mine once observed, “Everybody in Northeast Ohio has a Trent story.” And she’s right. My wife has hers (tales of Trent dating her best friend and of watching Trent play in his garage), I have mine (memories of Trent frequenting the record shop I worked at, bringing in and playing demos of what would become Pretty Hate Machine) and our friends have theirs. Even now, over 20 years after he arrived in Cleveland, Reznor’s impact on the local music landscape is as legendary as the way he changed the face of industrial music on a global scale. Given all that history, when he plays here, the shows seem to be about more than just the music.

I have seen Nine Inch Nails in concert more times than I can count, and all of them at assorted hole-in-the-wall Cleveland bars and venues in support of Pretty Hate Machine in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The debut album was a perfect storm: The fury and passion behind the lyrics mixed with a completely different sound that bled into my world; I found it at a time when I was also discovering new sides of myself. The album came along at just the right time to be the single most influential collection of songs in my life before or since. For that reason, I originally approached Reznor’s homecoming show with reservation. But at the urging of my wife, and the opportunity to see Goth godfathers Bauhaus, I was persuaded.

And when Bauhaus strolled on stage amid fog machines and white light for their hour-long set, I knew I had made the right decision. It was strange to see the founders of the Goth movement playing while the sun was still up. The rains and humidity had created real fog just off to the left of the amphitheater stage, carrying the theatrics into the crowd of Goth girls in black prom dresses and punks who weren’t around when Bauhaus originally formed. We were close enough to the stage to see the band well, but far enough away to preserve my original images of the group in their heyday.

Songs like “Double Dare”, “In the Flat Field”, “Rosegarden Funeral of Sores”, and the one-two closers “Stigmata Martyr” and “Dark Entries” all sounded as fresh as they do on 1982’s live effort, Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape. Thoughts of an album of new material danced through the heads of the faithful as the new tunes, “Adrenaline” and “Endless Summer of the Damned”, were unveiled -- although the latter was slight on substance and long on cliché (as evidenced by the title), even for these guys.

The sibling rhythm section of Kevin Haskins and David J carried the show, and you could feel the muscular beats pulsing in your chest. Peter Murphy’s singing was spot on, and he sounded every bit the English gentleman, even as he bitched out the lighting people from the stage – pointing out the differences between left and right and telling them not to fuck it up again. Daniel Ash, sporting a white shag carpet vest and oversized bug-eye sunglasses, was the consummate glam rock guitarist. And his on-stage shtick was the same as it was 25 years ago – stalking the stage, playing guitar on his knees, and punctuating songs with his saxophone skronk.

During Bauhaus’ set, the rains stopped and the temperature dropped. Blossom’s lawn took on mudslide qualities and visions of Reznor’s infamous Woodstock appearance were replaying in my mind. Although the mosh pit in front of the stage was complemented nicely by a mud pit at the base of the sloping lawn, a recreation of the literal mud-slinging of that ’94 incident never materialized here. Shortly after sunset, the house lights dimmed, and the deafening roar of the crowd was supplanted by the slow build of “Somewhat Damaged” – the first of five songs off of 1999’s The Fragile. (The song selection was the most curious aspect of the show. Apart from the new song, “Non Entity”, the band only played three songs off of the support album, With Teeth, and three off of the critical and popular darling, The Downward Spiral. Four songs each were played off of Pretty Hate Machine and the stop-gap Broken EP.)

Hearing songs that I had never previously experienced live was a treat. The folding cage of lights that was lowered and raised throughout the show was partially down during “Closer” – where the center section slowly “filled” with red Matrix-style dashes and blips of light, but it was the funky workout of Broken’s “Suck” towards the end of the set that really stood out. The touring band, which includes Jordie White (formerly Twiggy Ramirez of Marilyn Manson’s band) and Josh Freese (who has played with Akron’s Devo), allowed the song to retain its aggressive nature while stretching and breathing in a groove.

While “Hurt” was an expected showstopper, it exceeded expectations. Reznor was exposed, alone on keyboards, and it was as intimate as any of the 100-listener shows I saw him perform over two decades ago. Something about the ringing piano and Reznor’s melodies never seem quite right, they always seem broken – musically, emotionally. Although the song isn’t a sing-along, per se, the crowd made it one in the most reverential of ways and as the band came in at the end for a beautiful slow burn, there was nothing left but passion.

Of the new songs, “Only” could be the next “Down In It”. From its emphasis on synthesizers to Reznor’s more-rapping-than-singing approach to the “tiniest little dot” lyrical reference, the song is a throwback to the Pretty Hate Machine material.

Things got arena-rock clichéd, though, during the chorus, when too-clever lighting took the focus off the band and put it on the crowd during “There is no you” and reversed the effect during the “There is only me” lines. The clap-along to “The Hand that Feeds” also treaded the cliché, but that is today’s Nine Inch Nails – including a Reznor who has transformed himself from skinny kid into Henry Rollins’ little brother, complete with ’roid-y muscles, sleeveless shirts, and a buzz cut.

Although I understand what Reznor has done with his music (and image, for that matter), I have had a love/hate relationship with him since the early days, when he wrote the soundtrack for my life and then turned around and marketed it to frat boys. And “The Hand that Feeds” almost seems like an acknowledgement, an apology for it – “What if the whole crusade’s a charade / And behind it all there’s a price to be paid... Just how deep do you believe? / Will you bite the hand that feeds?... Are you brave enough to see it? / Do you want to change it?” – wrapped in a neat industrial-pop package, of course.

This night, it was the Pretty Hate Machine cuts that were the most amazing. I had forgotten how powerful these songs are when played live. The synths of “Something I Can Never Have” were mixed behind the chest-rumbling bass and stripped-bare vocals, complete with a cough by Reznor that made it all the more real. Synths poked through the guitars’ wall of sound like glass stabbing at skin on “Down In It”, and the party spun out of control during the set closing “Head Like a Hole”. Ferocious, angry, exhilarating. Hands and voices were raised as one: “Bow down before the one you serve!” The crowd noise was deafening as the house lights came up, the cage lowered, and the “NIN” logo was flashed in lights on it. No need for an encore.

Regardless of the mixed up nostalgia and confusion that accompanies growing older and watching your heroes do the same, everything about this show felt right. And between songs, Reznor summed it all up perfectly when he told the crowd, “It’s good to be home. All grown up.”

(Edited versions of this piece have been published by PopMatters and Field’s Edge.)

The End of the Eighties, Track 09

“Something I Can Never Have”
Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
1989

I have always listened to all kinds of music, from pop to new wave to hard rock to synthpop to alternative to alt country. But in my mid-high school years, I was deep in classic rock. I loved the Who, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Queen, Boston, the Kinks, the Stones. Also on that list was Pink Floyd. Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, the post-Roger Waters A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and, of course, The Wall all rotated through my various cassette decks. It seems there are very few white, suburban, adolescent boys who don’t fall under the sway of The Wall at one point or another. It’s an album that, despite its rock star narrative, speaks to the isolation of youth. And I was no different.

While maybe not apparent at first glance, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine was a logical progression for me. Thematically, it represents the tumultuous stretch from teen to young adult that follows. Where The Wall plays to adolescent confusion, Pretty Hate Machine mines the raging hormones of teenage angst.

“Something I Can Never Have” fit perfectly in the headspace of a 19 year-old creative writing major who fancied himself a tortured poet. Every agonizing line of this thing reeks of hyper-romanticized desperation. Lyrically, the fifth track on Pretty Hate Machine is a downward spiral (no pun intended) of adolescent love and loss. The imagery is stark, heart-ripped-out, post-relationship depression, but there is a poetry to the torment that I love. Lines like “My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore / Scraping through my head ‘till I don’t want to sleep anymore” and “This thing is slowly taking me apart / Gray would be the color if I had a heart” were both beautiful and right in the wheelhouse of my own over-wrought conviction.

I subtitled both discs in the original BGSU / Fall 1989-Spring 1990 set with lines pulled from Pretty Hate Machine songs, and “Something I Can Never Have” provided disc one with the perfect encapsulation: “Just a Fading Fucking Reminder of Who I Used to Be”. It’s a good line that works in the song, but taken out of context, I loved how it could be interpreted multiple ways as the title of the disc. Sarcastic bravado or hidden embarrassment of misspent youth? Does it matter?

Musically, the tune borrows heavily from The Wall’s “Goodbye Blue Sky”. The underlying atmospherics ape the song to the point where I have always mentally inserted the “Did-did-did-did-did-did you see the frightened ones?” opening line of the Floyd classic. That’s not a knock on Trent Reznor or “Something I Can Never Have”, I always took it as just another example of the link between what was my old self and my then-new self.

Mix playlists are as much about the song-to-song flow as the song selection. And I love the way the Gothic noir of “The Spy in the Cab” bleeds into the industrial quiet of this particular Nine Inch Nails’ tune. Looking back on the romantic relationships I screwed up in college (and there were plenty), “Something I Can Never Have” perfectly fit the post-destruction sentiment at a time when every emotion was felt on an epic scale. It captured the profound loss of intensely burning love and lust.

Holiday Break 1989, Part 2: Nothing Quite Like the Feel of Something New

Twenty years ago I was on holiday break from Bowling Green State University. There are two things that stand out about those few weeks I was home. First was the debut of The Simpsons, and the other was the New Year’s Eve party at John’s house a few weeks later...
Weeks after the debut of The Simpsons, and just days after seeing Nine Inch Nails live for the first time at the Phantasy Theater, I rang in 1990 at John’s parents’ house with a group of friends that ranged from years old connections to brand new relationships. (Maria wasn’t in attendance this night. Although we were together from that Christmas break through much of that next spring semester back at BG, we never officially dated, and I don’t think she ever actually broke up with her boyfriend.)

Although I contest the clarity of John’s chronology, I fully corroborate the importance of that night and Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine.

(To be clear, I did have an advanced copy of PHM by way of the Akron record store I worked at over summers and on breaks home from college, but by the time December 31, 1989, rolled around, PHM had been officially released and available for a couple of months. Long before that New Year’s Eve, I had the CD and John, by virtue of being not only my best high school friend but also my college roommate, had heard the album many, many times.)

This amazing confluence of old and new friends, alcohol, and music was somehow significant. It was a mingling of high school and college, Bizarre Love Triangles, and the inherent hyper-dramatic sense of trailing childhood’s end. And PHM was the soundtrack to my life at the time. It was, as John put it, “a damn dark raging album,” but more than that it captured the confusion and pain and drama and sex and fun of coming of age. No album will ever be as meaningful to me as PHM was when I was on the cusp of my twenties.

A few years ago, in a review of the Nine Inch Nails "Live: With Teeth" tour I did for Field’s Edge (a neutered version of the review also ran at PopMatters), I described PHM as “a perfect storm: The fury and passion behind the lyrics mixed with a completely different sound that bled into my world; I found it at a time when I was also discovering new sides of myself. The album came along at just the right time to be the single most influential collection of songs in my life before or since.”

At the time, The Cure’s Disintegration was epic, and Matt Johnson’s poetry on The The’s Mind Bomb was incredible, but what Trent Reznor captured in those ten songs on PHM was nothing short of monumental to a Midwest punk finding his way in the larger world. It was more than I could stand to not share it with everyone in my circle of friends – old and new, regardless of our personal history or musical tastes, I played this album for every last person I came in contact with for probably a year straight.

(The closest any other album has ever come to being as fundamentally meaningful to a period in my life is U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Released just after my 30th birthday at the end of 2000, this collection of songs became the soundtrack to our return to Ohio after ten years away, our trip to Paris, the birth of our son, our friendship with Jeff and Anna, our post-9/11 trip to New York City in December 2001, and on and on. But it was different, in that this was a collective soundtrack for experiences Tracy and I shared. And if you’re lucky, your thirties inhabit a very different worldview from that of your 19-year-old self.)

Much of that night two decades ago is fuzzy, and a lot of what I can remember is best left unsaid, but there was something about that moment when we shared Pretty Hate Machine, something of consequence. And sharing that collection of songs with our wider spheres of influence carried weight. A weight worth remembering 20 years later.