Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (8 page)

I always liked
PHM
, but I liked
The Downward Spiral
more. I didn’t like
Broken
, which was more guitar-based. I liked
PHM
for its soundscapes and textures of digital noises. With
TDS
, everything’s in its place perfectly. There’s a theme to it, and Trent is willing to reveal more, to really explore his mental condition. For me, the song on
TDS
was “The Becoming,” just becoming colder, that’s something I could relate to. I was not seeing anyone, not reaching out to anyone, not leaving the house—just listening to music. I felt dictated by whatever electrical impulses went through my brain. One of my psychologists told me that depression is caused by slow neurons, so I think I thought that at that point, I wasn’t in control.

By the time
The Fragile
came out, I was more into raw-sounding production than what was on that album. I like the potency of feedback, the erratic squealing of noises. Raw power. About that time, I started my first band. I sang and
played guitar, and we did covers of the Ramones, New York Dolls, Black Flag, and some originals that weren’t very good. All the music that I did was pretty primitive punk music, so it wasn’t like NIN was a big influence on the way I play my guitar. Maybe I tried the look, but I didn’t have good equipment to make a NIN sound. We played mostly in, like, people’s basements or at American Legions. There was one punk kid besides us in high school who was the gateway to the punk scene. It was separate from the high school world.

Part of the punk thing I liked was that everyone would know everyone else at the shows. If I were going to be successful with music, I’d like to feel like I could know [all the fans] and have common ground. Whereas a national band sells, like, 12 million records, and it doesn’t seem to have that personal quality to it. It seems like it would be lacking electricity or the aura you experience at a concert. That’s a huge thing when they talk about punk music being made in reaction to, like, Styx, Boston, and Led Zeppelin. So yeah, I’ve never seen NIN live.

The punk scene makes itself scarce as to whom it would appeal to. I never expected to play the Varsity Club to guys in frats. We played some shows for punks, and that’s what we did. My view of the music business and radio wouldn’t really allow me to expect to be famous with the kind of music I was playing. I don’t know if “compromising” is a made-up thing people say when they’re not famous. Like compared to eyehategod’s albums from the same time, Nirvana is just watered down. But Nirvana was accessible, and if they hadn’t been accessible, I wouldn’t have ever gotten into them. But when I did have access to other stuff, I could find better things. Whatever I think about people’s motivations, it always seems that they’re only out for their own gain. I don’t have a high regard for the punk scene anymore because
it seems like those attitudes were all cultural capital for that scene. But I never abandoned heavy music.

After high school, I didn’t go to college. I got a job at a place where I called people to ask questions for surveys. I was also playing guitar in another, heavier band that was like New York hardcore. We played shows around Youngstown and we went out of town a few times. I guess the stakes were higher. There was more of an expectation of some success, and I guess we got a little. We recorded, had songs on a compilation, and people asked us to play in other towns a few times. But we broke up because we didn’t get along.

It seemed pretty apparent that there wasn’t much of a future at the call center and that it would probably close down because of the Do Not Call registry. Youngstown State University was the only college I applied to. I got serious the semester I took three art history courses. They were required for studio art degrees, and I realized that I could write about art. It wasn’t daunting anymore.

I don’t hope that I end up in Youngstown for the rest of my life. I’d like to go somewhere with a more prosperous economy and attitudes that are more forward-thinking and not stuck on these, like, weird assumptions and morals that aren’t applicable or realistic. Like about labor and working. I don’t know if whatever disdain or discontent I have is directed at Youngstown or Middle America in general, but there’s probably more that I’ve rejected than I’ve accepted or adopted here. I don’t know if that makes me, like, a negative person or if I am on the line between objectivity, cynicism, or skepticism.

Gus, 19, somewhere near Cleveland, Ohio

Gus and I met through nin.com and have been corresponding over e-mail and IM for several years.

I grew up in a suburb right next to Cleveland. I don’t know which side of Cleveland, but I know it’s next to it. It’s actually a lot better here than people say it is. I’m happier here than any of the other cities I’ve lived in. I go to Cleveland when I am going to a concert or indy wrestling show. I don’t want to sound like a potato, but I’ve only been out of the state once, to Niagara Falls. I live with my dad and stepmom, and I’m happy with it.

I’ve been washing dishes at a local pizza place for about two months now. It’s non-aggravating, and the employers are family friends. I’d rather wash dishes at a pizza place than flip burgers any day. At McD’s people look at you and talk to you like you’re crap. A pizza shop like the one I’m at now is independent and more of an Italian restaurant.

My childhood was rough. I was teased because I have psoriasis. Mine has always been a bad case. My skin cells rapidly reproduce, causing my skin to dry faster than a statue. It’s controlled now, but when I was a kid, my scalp was infected. My mother made me use a special prescription shampoo, but it burned through my scalp, so we threw it away.

In fourth grade, I was teased so badly that I had to transfer classes and then schools, because my teachers called me a distraction. I was the freak, the leper, the untouchable. Maybe it was because I was creative, a little monk: quiet, peace-seeking, with deep thoughts. Kids would pick things they didn’t like, like my skin disease and chubbiness and other things. Some kids to this day are shocked that I still keep my head high, and sometimes I am amazed myself. That was also the year of my dad’s first heart attack.

Ninth grade was worse, because I was betrayed by my closest friend and hospitalized for abdominal pain. I had my appendix removed and returned from the hospital on 9/11 to see the tragedy on my first day home. The pain continued, and I found out a month later it was actually kidney stones. I was teased for being a poor kid living in a rich city, and my dad had his second heart attack. We prayed for him, and he recovered, and then our mother left, blaming me and my brother, Matt. I have seen her once since then, at my high school graduation.

I’m always asking my dad and Matt if they’re all right, ’cause they are the two most important people in my life. While I idolize Trent Reznor, Eddie Vedder, and Maynard James Keenan, my dad is my only hero. My dad and Matt mean as much to me as God means to the Pope, if not more.

I knew from the moment I left high school that I wanted to sing and write. I tell my dad and grandma and everyone else who’s close to me, “One day me and Matt are gonna be a
magazine headline: ‘Cleveland’s Own: The Rocker (me) and the Wrestler (my bro).’” I’ve been working on my musical entity since the bad shit in my life passed. I take my lyric writing seriously but have been self-conscious about it because, like my family, my music is a big part of my life. It’s, like, a piece of me, like NIN is to Trent. It was hard, but I picked the 15 best lyrics and edited them in the last two years. The only thing left to do: record and produce them.

I want to revive true Cleveland rock. I hate how rap and urban have taken over. But this is the city of rock ’n’ roll; they cannot kill it. No matter how many people try to overlook it, Cleveland has become very urban, ghetto, in my opinion. You cannot walk along the city streets without worrying. I mean, I know crime, violence, and urban culture has increased everywhere, but it hasn’t always been like that, and if people really put effort into it, they could start to restore order in the world. What I’m saying is, rock is no longer the choice in Cleveland, but it’s not gone.

I haven’t done anything since high school. I was too scared of the real world, like going to school and getting a career. I wanted to be the kid who got the college education and a big career, and dreaded becoming the worker, but I didn’t feel I was prepared or responsible enough. I’m still not sure, because I don’t drive and stuff like that. I’m starting to get my act together with work, school, a social life.

The first time I heard Nine Inch Nails? Well, NIN was strangely always on during the most difficult times in life. I would always randomly hear “Terrible Lie,” “Head Like a Hole,” and “Hurt” when I was in need of music the most. I kept blocking it out of my head and told myself it was coincidence. Then a few years ago, I couldn’t sleep one night. I went with my dad in his old snowplow truck to plow my grandma’s driveway. We talked about the past and all
the hardships that he, Matt, and I have endured. We were questioning, “Is it God’s test to us? Have we gone through the toughest of times, with the slipping of health, and Mom leaving us and blaming me and Matt, and the years of being teased?” And I told my dad that one day we would get the good things we deserved in life. Just then, I had this sudden aggression for my mother and for all those like her. My heart was beating, and I told my dad, “To calm me from my thoughts and to keep us awake this early in the morning, let’s listen to some music.” The first song I decided to play was the clearest thing I ever heard in my life: “Terrible Lie.”

I first bought a NIN album about two months after that,
And All That Could Have Been.
Then I bought
PHM
. I gave my best friend, David, the lyrics to “That’s What I Get,” because I felt bad that his first girlfriend had broken his heart. She left him for a boy two years younger than him, who had barely hit puberty. The second I introduced David to
PHM
, he became as addicted to its healing effects as I was, and we got closer through that album. With his lyrics, Trent uncovers a deep, untouchable emotion and then touches it, because that is the only real way to reverse it. “Terrible Lie” has brought so much clarity to me in dealing and relieving the pain of the past. “Head Like a Hole” is a song to bring me up, and “Sin,” and to swell in my sadness, if needed, “Something I Can Never Have” helps.

In “Something I Can Never Have,” Trent is haunted more than in any NIN song, ever. I felt like this a lot: You are happy someone finally comes along, but then just as fast, they’re gone. Your emotions take so much out of you that you start to think of what could have been in life. I was balancing a social life so I would not be cast out again and trying to talk to girls in a more serious tone, but the more girls knew I liked them, the more they went away. I don’t know why,
but people close to me say that I either go for the wrong kind of girls, or I try too hard or too little. It’s like the line in “That’s What I Get”: “Maybe didn’t mean that much/But it meant everything to me.” No matter how close I’ve come to getting the girl, I have
never
gotten the girl. I’ve felt so alone since I became a teenager. Recently I’ve learned to be a happily single guy.

On
PHM
, Trent moves from, Damn, I hate you—look at how you’re making me feel, to, Now it’s starting to hurt so deep, it’s really making me low, to, I understand it all too well, maybe too well. “Down in It” was Halo 1, the first single, and it reminds me of one of my songs, “Bad Blood,” which is likely to be my first single one day. In the lyrics of “Down in It,” Trent submits to the place where he is. He figures something out, which causes him to fall into something even bigger that he has yet to figure out. The sound of the drums makes it original, but it’s not rap; it’s still rock ’n’ roll.

I think Trent Reznor, Eddie Vedder, and Maynard James Keenan’s music shares something in common, and it helps me build a shield to prevent people and things from breaking in, so people don’t succeed in making me fragile.

As much as I try to do the right things in life, there is only one bad thing I want to do: I want to get famous, and to the people who have kicked me to the curb in life, I want to say to them, “F**k you!” I really want to prove that I will not be the nothing they said I would be. I want my dad and bro to see me succeed, and to thank them for making it possible. Trent has that sort of edge to him, one I feel in the back of my mind. It’s like his expressions say, “F**k the doubters!” Like one day people will go from saying, “What a dreamer,” to “What a rebel.”

When I die, I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heaven’s work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell

Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown”

The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor Museum is a well-designed space meant to blend the building’s stature with its subject through stylized stacks and brick. Opened in 1992, the museum is filled with exhibits, a library, and archives that collect, preserve, and display the story of the city’s industrial past. The museum is always empty. For several months I haunted it, especially the library, where I watched dozens of videos—oral histories, promotional films, and documentaries—that gave me a glimpse of what Youngstown was, and how it was remembered. Four films in particular stood out as stories to frame life in this town.

The first is a 1945 Office of War Information educational film dramatizing work life on the home front. Here is a line from the opening sequence:

This is my hometown. It’s called Youngstown and it’s in the state of Ohio, near the Pennsylvania boundary. In Youngstown we make steel. Make steel and talk steel. I guess it’s the same in Sheffield, England, or in that place the Russians built in the Urals. Look down the street and you’ll see the mills at the end of it. Twenty-five miles of them, 15,000 a shift, 24 hours a day.
⁴⁰