Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (6 page)

At the center of the 1.2-square-mile town stands the county courthouse, with a cupola so high, it can be seen nearly anywhere in Mercer. Businesses ring the courthouse: banks, a video store, an antiques shop, the local historical society, the Republican party headquarters, a hot dog shop, a fitness center, a piano dealer, and a soda fountain. Other businesses line an access road that leads south toward nearby Interstate 80. Homes in Mercer radiate out from the square in lots with tight fronts. Many have back and side yards of odd configurations because they were first owned by abolitionists who grew gardens to feed runaway slaves who came to them through the underground railroad. They didn’t want the shopkeepers to wonder about their purchases, and in a small town people notice. Mercer is the financial, mercantile, and intellectual capital of the otherwise rural county. The borough ends abruptly, dumping cars into the surrounding fields.

Fourteen miles through those fields is Sharon, a city of 16,300 nestled in the Shenango Valley. It’s a hilly place with a downtown more like a main street than a square. This street is home to the Winner—an upscale women’s store that used to employ a grand-piano player—and across from that is the
Vocal Group Hall of Fame. It might seem like an odd place for a pop-music museum, but Sharon is the hometown of Tony Butala, one of the Lettermen. The museum had been his dream since he began the harmony-group nostalgia circuit in the sixties.

In the mid-nineteenth century, coal and steel magnates feared labor unrest in Pittsburgh, so they built Sharon as a new, more docile industrial center. The first blast furnace was built in 1845; in the next 25 years, there would be more than 450 manufacturing companies in the area. When the mills closed, the town had no fallback plan. Butala bought an abandoned theater in 1984 for $10,500 and built the museum there to entice tourism. Today it stands closed among dozens of red-brick buildings that seem closed even when they aren’t. The owner of the Winner had a better idea. In 1986, he invented The Club, a steel rod used to lock steering wheels. That same year, he opened Tara, a
Gone With the Wind–
themed Old South fantasy hotel in a neighboring community. It is a popular local honeymoon destination. Mercer’s other neighboring city to the east is Grove City, famous for its outlet mall.

Mercer was not a steel town, but many of the borough’s residents commuted to work in Sharon’s mills. Some used the income to supplement their farming, while others worked solely in the mills from the time they graduated from high school until retirement. The only other out-of-town job Mercer’s young could imagine was the military. War memorials on the square attest to the borough’s many residents who chose that path. Others worked in the one large factory within the borough, the Reznor Heating Corp. Begun in 1880, the company quickly emerged as an industrial leader in heating equipment, with the name Reznor becoming world-renowned as early as 1905.

Reznor
is undoubtedly German, although
Resner
is the closest German spelling. The patriarch for whom all subsequent generations would be misspelled was named John. Family historians believe John saw Penn’s call and left for the New World in the mid-1700s. A redemptioner like John would get on a ship with about 500 people in Germany and six weeks to six months later dock in Philadelphia. Once the free passengers exited, the remainder could leave only after they’d sold themselves into three to six years’ servitude to a person: payment for their passage. John likely went to an English-speaking family; once he worked himself free, he settled in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and got married. His grandson John III was the first direct descendant of Michael Trent Reznor to live in Mercer. The son of John III was George Reznor. Born in 1835, George was wounded during the Civil War and returned home to marry Alice Amanda, daughter of a Scotch-Irish family that had fled Ireland as part of a massive wave of Ulster-Scot immigration to the U.S. Alice’s father had been a fifer and drummer in the Revolutionary War, a soldier in the Indian Wars, and a drummer in the War of 1812.

George was a dabbler. At first he manufactured wagon and buggy hubs, then he was a druggist, and then he went into coal mining. In the 1880s, while in the plumbing business, he began tinkering with gas heating. He made his own gas heater in 1885. By 1900, he had built his first factory to manufacture the heaters, and in 1917, the company moved to the edge of town, on McKinley Avenue, where it operates to this day. George passed the company on to his son George Foster Reznor, who later passed it on to his sister Stella’s son David Reznor Webster. In 1961, David brokered a deal to make Reznor Manufacturing a subsidiary of Bell & Gossett, which was then acquired by the International Telephone & Telegraph company in 1963, part of ITT’s “conglomeration
years” between 1960 and 1977, when they acquired a new company each week.
³¹
In 1992, Thomas & Betts acquired the Reznor brand, retaining the name for its own line of products. Its slogan for the brand states that Reznor is “the name for warm air.”

George Watson Reznor, son of George Foster, met his wife, Helene, in high school and married her after returning from college. He worked with his father for 30 years, rising to be vice president of the family company. He was a devout Catholic, and played the accordion at local dances. George and Helene raised six children, including their son Michael Joseph Reznor, who was born in 1947. In 1968, the Reznor’s first son, Ned, died, and the couple moved to Florida to work in real estate, only to return after retirement in 1983.

Michael Joseph Reznor was a popular local musician who played in British Invasion cover bands for high school dances. In 1965, at 18 years old, Michael did not follow in his father’s footsteps by going to college. Instead, he and his girlfriend Nancy Clark (then 19) had a child and got married. The baby’s name was Michael Trent Reznor, but he would be called Trent.

In 1970, after the birth of daughter Tera, Michael took Trent to a soda fountain, bought him a Cherry Coke, and told him he was moving out. Shortly after the divorce, Trent and Tera went to live with Nancy’s parents, Bill and Sally. In the mid-seventies, Michael opened the Homestead Music Store on the town square. By this time, he had become a bluegrass musician and taught guitar, banjo, and mandolin upstairs. He gave his son a few lessons, but Trent said he didn’t want to learn much about the right way to play guitar, and preferred the electric piano that Michael had given him. Michael later became an interior decorator and would occasionally sit in with his son’s band.

Mercer’s former mayor Steve VanWoert says that growing up in the area in the 1970s was like being in
Dazed and Confused
. He has been a proud member of the Kiss Army since 1975. In those days, locals drove to Pittsburgh to go to concerts. Mercerites bought records at the Murphy 5 and 10 Cent Store until the Shenango Valley Mall opened in 1969. Then they would cruise the mall’s National Record Mart, which is now a store called f.y.e. There were no local venues for bands in the 1970s or 1980s, so Mercer musicians would play in one of Sharon’s small complexes of hot-rod and car-nostalgia-themed bar/restaurants called Three By the River, which began in 1974 after the oil crisis forced many of the area’s classic gas stations out of business. The flagship restaurant of the group, Quaker Steak & Lube, is known for its Atomic-flavored chicken wings and, most recently, for its sponsorship of the Pennsyltucky Olympics, an ironic celebration of redneck culture that boasts categories of athletics (hubcap hurl, dumpster dive, git-er-done long jump) and aesthetics (big hair, mullet, and beer-belly wet-T-shirt contests).

In the 1970s, the only known Mercer musician was a regionally prominent accordionist named Johnny Oakes. In 1974, a farmer named Ralph Watson from the neighboring village of East Lackawannock promoted his first Jesus Fest. The original Jesus Fest, held in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1973,
³²
was a response to the success of the nearby Ichthus Music Festival, billed as a Christian alternative to Woodstock, a place for the burgeoning culture of Jesus freaks.
³³
Watson was so inspired by the Morgantown event that he invited performers to his farm in 1974, ’76, and ’78 for three-day weekends that reached an attendance of 45,000.

The Mercer area is what Michael Trent Reznor knew from his birth until his high school graduation in 1983. By
then, he’d played in a two-piece band with a local girl singing Fleetwood Mac covers at Rotary dinners and gigged at the Seafood Express, one of the venues at Three By the River. A quiet, shy kid who played Judas in his school’s production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and tenor sax and tuba in the jazz and marching bands, Trent was known as being both normal and very talented. He hung out in the art classroom when not playing music, played video games at the mall’s arcade, washed dishes at the Howard Johnson near the Interstate, and began fiddling first with an Atari 2600, then a friend’s Radio Shack computer, and finally his own Commodore 64.
³⁴
He listened to Floyd, took piano lessons from a former nun, and applied to college for computer programming. His dad first smoked him up at 14, and Trent has said Mike has always been his best friend and biggest inspiration. Trent left town in 1983. He returns to visit, during which time he’ll walk his grandfather Bill’s dog and wave hello to family friends, but then he leaves again.

The Sharon mills closed in 1987 after a decade of industrial disinvestment throughout the region. A way of life ended in Mercer as a generation of young people found that a century’s tradition of working-class employment was over. Many were forced to leave the area to find work. Today the borough is graying. Folks in town say it’s a nice place to retire or to raise kids. But kids often feel differently.

In a corridor leading off the main hall of the Mercer Area Jr/Sr High School hangs the “Academic Hall of Fame.” A photo behind a locked glass case shows Reznor, a 2006 inductee, smiling with an L.A.-tanned face and crisp suit. It was taken during his first return to the school in 23 years, on the invitation of his former band director Dr. Hendley Hoge. Hoge founded the Community Band (in which Trent played), built the band shell in the park, and is now the
principal of the school. After the induction ceremony the
Sharon Herald
ran a complaint that the school shouldn’t honor someone who makes what pop critic Ann Powers has called “nasty” art,
³⁵
work that bucks social norms and explores the underbelly of society and the mind. One of the Community Band’s members responded:

I am a member of the Mercer Community Band and have often seen Reznor’s grandfather wearing a NIN hat and belt buckle. How shocking that he can enjoy the music we play as well as support Trent Reznor’s music career. Oh, wait. He’s proud of the accomplishments made by a family member. Could it simply be that Mercer is proud of its native son’s fame and talent? It is my belief that Mercer has every right to be proud of Mr. Reznor’s accomplishments. From a county whose best-known products are rusted steel plants and the air pollution of two interstate highways, Reznor’s extraordinary talents deserve recognition.
³⁶

That may well be true, but the Mercer County Historical Society has no Nine Inch Nails file, and indeed, they consider Trent just another part of a long line of influential Reznors who have called Mercer home. Trent didn’t even make the Top 10 Famous Mercer Countians as listed in the
Herald
.
³⁷
Those more famous natives included John Armor Bingham, who drafted the 14th Amendment; Fred Houser, who worked on the Manhattan Project; and
Š
tefan Bani
č
, inventor of the parachute.

David, 42, Youngstown, Ohio

David responded to a flyer I passed out at Blossom, a venue in Akron, Ohio, the area where Nine Inch Nails played during its summer of 2006 Inconvenient Truth tour. We met at a Denny’s in Austintown, and over coffee he shared his story. He also brought and showed me his most prized NIN show souvenir: a broken synth key.

My mom was from the south side of Youngstown. After high school she went to San Francisco, got married, had me, got a divorce, and moved back. When I was 12, she remarried. My stepfather was born in Youngstown and was a schoolteacher in Canfield. But when he met my mom, he was in his 20s and out of work because it was the late seventies and there were no jobs. He went to Texas to work for an overseas construction company called Brown & Root.
²³
My mom went down there and called to say, “Hey, I got married.” I liked the guy, but it was shocking.

That was a difficult time in my life. We moved all around and I went to 12 different schools. My junior year, my step-dad took a job in Indonesia, so I went to California to live with my father. Things were going well when his wife—she was the woman he was cheating on my mother with—took me to McDonald’s and told me, “You’re the reason I’m getting a divorce.” She hated kids. She left my father, and then he dated a girl I was in high school with.

I had a breakdown shortly after that. I had hallucinations, hospitalizations, and was diagnosed as bipolar. I was 16—I was set to go to college—and everything came falling down. You know how in New York City, you’ll see somebody walking the streets and they’re pretty out of it? I was that person: hospitalized, homeless. It’s rare that somebody with the severity of what I had comes back.

I ended up returning to Youngstown because my mom and stepfather came back. As of 1989, I was in a group home. Around ’91, I was hanging out with guys who were high functioning. We were on disability checks but were able to get an apartment. We didn’t have jobs, and we were hanging out at Denny’s, going to see bands and getting high. We had no purpose, but we were always listening to cassettes, and that was what held us together. We’d go down to [the bar] Cedars, and we were into the local scene big-time. We knew all the cool bands that nobody had heard of.

My friend had a cassette of
Pretty Hate Machine
in ’92. It was the most powerful and profound thing I ever heard. To hear what this guy was saying … I was somebody who was in the mental-health system, and I was always trying to reach out of the hole to be normal. My life kind of consisted of partying and not having a good time. I was struggling to really exist and to be somebody. I heard that music and I felt like it became my voice.