Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) Read online

  But in the Hate Machine era, the music was still pretty synth and pretty pop.

  Future Industries

  Trent Reznor grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania, a town on the periphery of the Rust Belt. As Trent headed to college, the majority of the 1983 graduating class of Mercer Area Jr/Sr High School went to work in nearby Sharon’s many steel mills. Within four years, the mills were closed.

  Reznor enrolled at Allegheny College, a small liberal arts school north of Mercer, and began coursework in computer programming. The IBM PC had been introduced two years prior, and computer science departments were just getting started in the country. Smaller schools like Reznor’s focused on practical job training in programming languages and math fundamentals. More interested in programming instruments than crunching formulas, Reznor dropped out of Allegheny after a year. By that time, he’d already met a girl, played in the band Option 30, and lived among a crop of passionate tech nerds. He wasn’t going home again.

  And because of this—his deep, early, and fervent embrace of computer technologies and single-minded drive to use them in music—Reznor would escape the wrath that microprocessing brought on the rest of his graduating class. While ultimately it was the managers, not the technologies themselves, who made huge numbers of workers redundant in the 1970s, the steel industry’s rapidly changing technologies were one of the major contributing factors of the deindustrialization that decimated midwestern industry. With microprocessor-controlled systems, different products could be made on the same assembly floor by reconfiguring the program. Flexibility became the key target for factories. At new plants, preferably for management in nonunion towns, there were more machines and fewer workers. A walk through Mercer today shows a town still struggling to make sense of life after the closure of the mills.

  And the factory was just one place where microprocessors changed everything. While guitars and basses had been electrified since the 1930s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that electronic keyboards became part of the ensemble for most working musicians. Prior to that, there was only one price for analog keyboards—expensive—and that hurdle, along with the machines’ considerable weight and difficulty in programming, meant that only a few musicians could use them. However, the keyboard industry of the 1970s and 1980s piggybacked off the innovations of the computer industry, which lowered the cost of research and development for new instruments. Expanded microprocessing capabilities allowed designers to make synths with more and more features, going from mono- to polyphonic, then adding tone-bank memory and, finally, samplers. In the years between 1983 and 1988, digital synthesizers with better usability, options, and prices flooded the market. A generation of musicians jumped at the chance to play these new, affordable instruments.

  When Reznor spoke of his DIY awakening in an interview with Spin magazine in 1996, he didn’t recall expressing an interest in the punk sound or community. Instead, his ideal was the independence from community afforded by the use of synths. He described this feeling as “the excitement of hearing a Human League track and thinking, “That’s all machines; there’s no drummer. That was my calling. It wasn’t the Sex Pistols.”18

  After dropping out of college in 1984, Trent moved to Ohio City, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Cleveland. The area had suffered intense disinvestment but was on an upswing because of the restoration of historic homes. He and fellow musician Tom Lash lived across the street from Saint Ignatius High School, a Jesuit preparatory school that anchored the neighborhood. With an armload of keyboards, obvious talent, and a working knowledge of Top 40 music, Reznor quickly found work in the local music scene. He also got a job at Pi Keyboards, the major supplier of sound electronics in the area at the time, located on Brookpark and Broadview Road in Parma, a suburb south of Cleveland.

  The Cleveland music scene into which Reznor crashed was a healthy one, supporting dozens of local artists in numerous genres from funk to punk. It was dominated by local rock radio station WMMS, whose programmers broke David Bowie and Roxy Music and supported Bruce Springsteen early in his career. As a result, major acts, especially British ones, began their tours before adoring Cleveland audiences, giving local bands a chance to open for cutting-edge international pop musicians.19

  Once in Cleveland, Reznor was a constant presence at shows. He was a regular at a punk dive in Lakewood called the Phantasy Nite Club, owned by John Malm Jr.’s then girlfriend Michelle DeFrasia, and it was at one of the many clubs in the Flats where Trent first saw Jane’s Addiction. Lash recalls that Reznor was mesmerized by Perry Farrell’s energy and wanted to bring that dynamic front-person show to his own music.

  From his childhood daydreams of Kiss, Pink Floyd, and Supertramp to the widened horizons afforded by the Cleveland scene, Reznor had his eyes open for the biggest and best—he didn’t want to be small, indie, or underground. He first joined the Urge, one of the best Top 40 cover bands in the regional circuit. (Later, in the early NIN days, the band and its roadies would pass the time by singing the worst songs they knew. To the shock and amusement of the group, Trent was able to bang out the riffs to any cheesy eighties tune they named.) He then left the Urge for a band called the Innocent,20 which featured ex-members of the Cruisers, the backup band to Pittsburgh AOR chameleon Donnie Iris. The Innocent recorded an album called Livin’ in the Streets (1985) and toured regionally.

  In 1985, Reznor joined his first cutting-edge group, the Exotic Birds, comprising three Cleveland Institute of Music students. They became the go-to opener for bands such as the Eurythmics and the Thompson Twins. (Birds manager John Malm Jr. would become Reznor’s own manager until their court battle in 2005.) During this time, Reznor sold his Linn drum machine to Chris Vrenna, a drummer from an Erie, Pennsylvania, synth band that had played with the Exotic Birds. Then still in high school, Vrenna visited Cleveland often. After Vrenna went to Kent State, Reznor asked Vrenna to drop out and join the Birds, which he did, becoming Reznor’s next roommate.21

  As an Exotic Bird, Trent was offered the chance to play in a fictitious new-wave band called the Problems, in Light of Day, a film being shot in Cleveland. The story follows a brother-sister rock act that fails to break. The film’s dénouement places Patti (Joan Jett) in a bar with her brother Joe (Michael J. Fox) and friends. In the background, the Problems are playing onstage, with Reznor hopping behind a synth to a cover of Buddy Holly’s “True Love Always.” The table of rocker friends joke about their failure and the unfortunate vogue for “concept” bands that sound like A Flock of Seagulls.

  This bleak narrative of beautiful losers with hopeless rock dreams on the dismal shores of Lake Erie was the invention of Paul Schrader, known for his exploration of the American lower-class male psyche in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and the underappreciated Blue Collar. In 1981, Schrader asked Bruce Springsteen to write the theme song for the film, but Springsteen turned down working on the project, then titled Born in the U.S.A. But Springsteen did end up writing the song, which he extracted from the more low-key Nebraska sessions he was recording, and he made it the title track of his next album. Springsteen consented a few years later to write a new theme song for the renamed film. That song is a live-show highlight of Springsteen’s. The film has yet to be released on DVD. In the film credits, Trent Reznor is the last name to scroll.

  The Great Lakes club circuit in the mid-1980s supported many bands like those depicted in Light of Day. But the scene was changing. Ohio’s drinking age rose from 19 to 21 in mid-1987, ending the state’s wild culture of regional bar bands. Trent joined Slam Bamboo, a more mainstream electro-pop project whose first single played for 22 weeks on local radio. Trent started playing with the band in time to record the second single, “White Lies.” However, singer Scott Hanson wouldn’t share the project’s money or credit, so Reznor left and began playing with Tom Lash in Lucky Pierre, an avant-garde post-punk band started in 1978 by local musical savant Kevin McMahon. Lash remembers driving to San Francisco with Reznor and recording tracks with McMahon while there. “W
hen [Trent] heard the caliber of stuff Kevin was doing, it was an impetus to do his own stuff that was interesting and unique,” Lash says. “Kevin was writing stuff that was way more advanced than anything in Cleveland. He was like Ray Davies — he could do the hardest, noisiest, craziest stuff, and then piano ballads, cabaret.”

  After returning to Cleveland, Reznor got a job at Right Track Studios and decided to put gigging on hold to concentrate on recording solo material.

  Some stories of Nine Inch Nails’ origin state that Reznor was unable to find bandmates and thus “had” to record PHM demos alone and on synthesizer. But Reznor had played in six bands in four years. He has been clear that while he operated with a limited budget during the PHM era, he did not use synths as placeholders or work alone because he had to. As he told Keyboard magazine in 1994, “I use electronics because I want to, not as a compromise for something else.”22

  Hired as a general maintenance man and MIDI programmer, Reznor jumped in at Right Track to do sessions, play keyboards on demos, and clean up at night. The studio’s owner, Bart Koster, acknowledged that Reznor’s focus was already so singular that even “when that guy waxed the floor, it looked great.”23 He would often work on the clock for clients until late at night and then work on his own material until the morning.

  Reznor claims never to have written a song prior to “Down in It,” NIN’s first single. Many early versions of Pretty Hate Machine tracks, available on the widely circulated bootleg Purest Feeling, attest that he was a novice in arranging, even as his strong sense of pop song craft was in place. The transformation between Purest Feeling and Pretty Hate Machine is the sound of Reznor’s decision that a broken machine sounded better than a well-behaving one.

  The grainy, lo-fi digital bleeps of eighties keyboards could little mimic acoustic instruments. The men and women who adopted keys as their own were part of a new wave, pushing the artifice of the sounds by refusing to place them in traditional song structures, to mix them with traditional rock instruments, or to fulfill the traditional expectations for a live-band setup. Instead, the adoptees celebrated the otherness of the sounds through lyrics full of obtuse or cold emotion, queer longing, and loneliness, as well as pleasure, while the beats demanded dancing, and long-sustain pads issued a bit of melancholy even as orchestral and horn stabs laughed at the whole thing. All these new-wave elements come into play on PHM’s demos.

  The industrial turn for synth use was, either through ineptness or strategy, to get ugly sounds out of the neat box, sounds that were more subterranean than otherworldly. Given the unpredictability of the gear at the time, it was often the easier way to go, but it still demanded imagination to find vocals and structures that worked with the noise. The lyrics followed suit in their examinations of the role of power as imagined through or by the rejection of taboo and the pursuit of pleasure or the exploration of taboo desire.

  PHM is a record of late 1980s synthesizers. There was the Prophet-VS, the first and last Sequential Circuits digital synth, and the Oberheim Xpander (1984), which the website Vintage Synth Explorer called “the most flexible non-modular analog synths ever built.”24 (Another characteristic instrument Reznor has used ever since his first album is the Minimoog, with its warm, low bass.) But the primary instrument was the E-mu Emax SE, an upgraded version of the Emax, the first affordable (retailing in 1985 for $3,000) synthesizer to include a sampler. Easy to use and with a famous sample library, the Emax was a cutting-edge piece of technology in the mid to late 1980s, and the synth favored by industrial artists, including My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Front Line Assembly, both from Chicago’s Wax Trax! label. With 512K of built-in memory, it could sample only a few seconds of material.

  Two years after the release of PHM, artists who sampled others’ work were getting sued regularly, but in 1989 there was nothing stopping Reznor from using the sampling seconds of his Emax to borrow freely from his influences. Reznor, who over the past 20 years has been known to lurk on the forums of his “ninternet,” once posted on Prodigy with a comment on the famous Midnight Express monologue sampled under the chants in “Sanctified,” saying, “PHM had loads of samples from other people’s records, in fact, i think almost every drum sound was ‘borrowed’ as a starting point for manipulation.”25 The monologue’s presence on the album is notable, since most of the horror and sci-fi samples of Purest Feeling were cut. Reznor thanks Prince, Public Enemy, Jane’s Addiction, This Mortal Coil, Clive Barker, and the Success (Screaming Trees U.K.) in the liner notes, and their samples are among the easiest to identity (Prince’s “Alphabet St.” and Jane’s Addiction’s “Had a Dad” in “Sanctified” especially). A scratch from Eric B. appears as the panning intro noise of “Sin.” A comparative listen of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It” and Reznor’s first demo, “Down in It,” reveals even more influence. He admits it was a near total rip.

  Reznor’s preference for programming in solitude was a choice made as a form of discipline. After four years of screwing around in the Cleveland scene, he realized it wasn’t the way to succeed. He’d also been getting too high and never tried very hard at anything. So he began a work schedule that would dominate the next decade of his life. Of his first recording experience, he told Alternative Press magazine in 1990, “It was complete isolation every day. I figured I could round myself out when the record was finished. It weirded me out. I got to the point where I couldn’t be around people.”26 Journalists repeated this simple story until it took on another significance, becoming an origin tale of Reznor’s isolation from society, his gothic withdrawal from the world.

  Reznor began and thrives as a lone musician/engineer, and has come to rank among studio-rat superstars such as Prince, Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and Brian Eno. As such, he embodies the shift from the twentieth-century commercial recording industry’s complex labor pool of songwriters, musicians, recording engineers, producers, and mixing professionals to the twenty-first-century home-studio composer/musician/engineer, which allowed him to claim, with some truth, in Pretty Hate Machine’s liner notes, that “Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor.”

  The recording studio was moving from a place that hosted a cacophony of bodies to one full of interconnected, autonomously operating gear, and Reznor came to Right Track at a time when it was almost possible to replace all musicians with machines. With the adoption of MIDI—a digital language that allows components made by different manufacturers to talk to one another—musicians in the 1980s could use a single instrument to control entire orchestras. While digital effects processors and instruments dominated studio production in the 1980s, it was not until the 1990s that home-computer microprocessors could handle the complexity of audio recording. Reznor was one of home audio recording’s first “digital natives,” and has recorded each one of his albums with the aid of a computer. As personal computers became faster and more affordable, a new generation of software was developed to track, sequence, and mix sound. Trent became an early adopter of these digital sound technologies, even teaching his co-producers how to get the most out of new computers, outboard gear, and software.

  Today GarageBand comes preloaded on every Mac, and any amateur musician who owns a decent microphone and laptop can create recordings anywhere in the world with a higher quality than professionals could manage in expensive studios 70 years ago. And the musician can do it all alone. As a consequence, major studios with great live rooms, huge and costly analog equipment, and trained, professional sound engineers have shut down all over the world in the past 15 years. In their stead a new class of creative worker has arisen, one that can run an entire studio alone and make quality recordings virtually unaided. Some even record their own material, cutting the division of labor down to zero. These are the new, flexible, specialized, and independent musical laborers of the twenty-first century, and Reznor is a pioneer among them.

  Three of the demos Trent recorded in his Right Track off-hours between 1987 and 1988, which were mixed by one of the studio’s engineers, Sean Beavan,
were sent out by manager John Malm Jr. to small indie labels. All the labels showed interest, and Reznor went with TVT. Label head Steve Gottlieb asked for nothing more than polished versions of the demos. Perhaps he heard Nine Inch Nails as a dark synth-pop band, something along the lines of the then mega-successful Depeche Mode. He must have been overjoyed when Reznor said he wanted to finish the recordings with the very U.K. producers who were making synth-pop profitable in the late 1980s. But once Reznor began working on the record, he realized that his strong vision for the tracks clashed with the professionals’ already codified ideas. This led him to denigrate his work with British dark-wave producer John Fryer in Boston; to chase the producer Flood, whom Trent respected for his methodical programming skills, from the U.S. to the U.K.; and to describe Adrian Sherwood’s work on “Down in It” as too “predictable,”27 even though he admired it.