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

  Reznor’s goal, especially after NIN’s first, notoriously uneven tour opening for Skinny Puppy in 1988, was to foreground the expression of raw emotion, be it through vocals or guitars. Beavan understood this best, acknowledging that the balance of industrial texture with big, upfront vocals like those of Annie Lennox was Trent’s goal, and produced parts of Pretty Hate Machine (and later The Downward Spiral) in this way. Trent saw the pop vocals as something to upset the industrial tradition from which he had drawn inspiration but never planned to be part of.

  According to Reznor, Gottlieb called the tracks of PHM “a complete abortion.”28 The term was used frequently as the opposite of a “runaway hit” in commercial radio programming parlance. Reznor had indeed aborted the commercial aspect of the demos, replacing it with a lean, sparse industrial sound, with shades of hip-hop and white funk. It was something Gottlieb didn’t want, but Reznor was going to keep it.

  It is impossible to know if PHM would have succeeded as it did had it sounded more like its demos, but it is unlikely that the single “Down in It” would have fared well without the sub-bass of Adrian Sherwood. “Head Like a Hole,” a response to Gottlieb’s meddling with Reznor’s work, wouldn’t have been made at all. The most obvious difference between Purest Feeling and PHM is the drums, some of which were played live on Purest Feeling. The PF beats were either awkward, poorly miked, straightforward rock in 4/4 or extremely simple new-wave/industrial-hybrid electronic patterns (especially the italo bass of non-album track “Maybe Just Once”). “Down in It” on Purest Feeling was a rough blend of Eric B. homage and Thrill Kill-style sampled industrial atmospheres, with unabashed rapping by Trent. Only the keyboard and guitar hooks of the chorus are familiar. The song was reworked for the album by Sherwood so that the drums hit deeper, the vocals relaxed a bit, and the synths lingered more ominously upfront. And in “Down in It,” as everywhere on PHM and NIN’s subsequent recordings, the bass works as both rhythm and melody, another synth with a shorter attack, stronger hook, and more obvious presence.

  The vocals on Purest Feeling are strikingly similar to those of PHM, showing that Reznor’s single biggest traditional musical gift is the ability to sing idiosyncratic pop melodies full of emotion. From the beginning, it was obvious that he intended to use his voice as his primary musical expression, and he avoided processing that would rob his vocals of gesture, keeping them high in the mix. On Purest Feeling, Reznor’s anguished legato lacks control, and he often resorts to lounge vibrato to mask his anxiety over singing lead-vocal parts, an insecurity that never really left him. He mostly let go of the overperformance, although some Vegas schlock can still be heard in the opening of “The Only Time.” Reznor’s reedy tenor doesn’t have a large range—you can hear him croak like Skinny Puppy’s Kevin Ogilvie as he struggles for a low note on the demo of “Terrible Lie”—but he finds his real strength in a large range of breaths, whispers, and screams, often coupling these with vocal and instrumental effects that merge voice and machine on the scream-to-synth solo of “The Only Time.” On the demo, he doesn’t have the control to deliver those whispers as well as he can his anger, and his quiet confessions come out underwhelming in a flat, nasal western Pennsylvania sotto voce.

  With PHM, Trent learned how to get intimate with the mic. One of many such moments comes after the first chorus of “The Only Time,” when he repeats, “This is the only time I really feel alive” and releases a long exhale. It cracks mid-breath like a lover’s sigh in what could be the most erotic moment on the album, a sonic match to Trent’s seduction of the mic in the “Closer” video.

  Breath is an index of the body doing its work, and Trent learned early that it can be used to great effect against the coldness of a song’s synthetic space. Audible inhales frame the pseudo-rapped verses of “Down in It.” They show up on the first verse of “That’s What I Get” or extensively throughout the verses on “Sin,” where Trent draws out the last word of each line with rhythmic vitriol until it resembles another syllable. The technique returns on much-maligned parts of the PHM-redux With Teeth. While generally phrasing behind the beat like a torch singer, Reznor lands ahead of the beat when the lyrics demand an agitated state: “I am JUST-ifed, I am PURE-ified.” His voice shifts registers and slipping ahead of the circular bass line.

  Much has been made of Reznor’s merger of synths and guitars, but it is important to note that when Pretty Hate Machine came out Reznor was seen as a sellout to American industrial in part because he didn’t use enough hard guitar. A comparison with Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, which came out only one month after PHM, would suffice to prove this. Broken, Nails’ 1992 follow-up EP, would address this critique and pay homage to Ministry with a furious onslaught of guitar. The PHM demos have more guitar than does the final mix, which pushes up the pads and plays down live sounds while losing the horror samples altogether. Guitars in the album have an unusual distortion created by plugging direct, tracking to a Mac Plus, and exporting the files to an inexpensive early computer sound synthesis program called TurboSynth. With TurboSynth, Reznor manipulated the sample to produce a truly strange, fearsome tone unlike a traditional rock guitar sound.

  Non-demo track “Head Like A Hole,” often thought of as having heavy guitars, has only four distorted notes of guitar in the chorus. Most of the song’s feral energy comes from a dominating Prophet-5 bass line, the relentlessly upfront vocal, the dense drum programming, and a multitude of backup layers that mimic chant. There are no more than four pitches of guitar on any one song of PHM and the guitar is used only for choruses and in middle eights. Reznor has said that “Terrible Lie” was his audition song for guitarists because it’s only two notes, but he wanted fingers to bleed for them. Where the synth offers melody and control, the guitar in NIN is a machine for displays of affect: it is a fury of attack and chaos of distortion.

  The gothy shimmer played by early NIN member Richard Patrick for “Sanctified” is the only non-distorted guitar on the album, although the demo of “Kinda I Want To” has a New Order-like acoustic guitar buried in its chorus, which was replaced by a snare fill on the album. Closing track “Ringfinger” features perhaps the most typical use of guitar. Appearing after two iterations of the chorus, a short distorted solo leads into the Jane’s Addiction “Had A Dad” sample and the final synth-bass outro, where turntables, guitars, drum machines, and samples battle then fade into an electric sizzle, as if Trent’s studio had short-circuited in the aftermath of such a rock cliché.

  A listen to Purest Feeling makes it obvious that Reznor had rejected the experimental structures of dance and industrial music from the outset in favor of the verse-chorus familiarity that allowed Nails’ singles to cross between dance and pop formats. The album’s sequencing, complete with song cross-fades, stitched together the disparate tracks into a story of faint hope after betrayal, making it possible to hear PHM as a Romantic-style industrial pop concept record, one that could tie into the prog-rock aesthetic from which Trent had come.

  Still, PHM wasn’t meant to be heard as a rock album. In the context of early 1990s guitar bands with which Nine Inch Nails shared airplay, it became part of the alternative rock music of the 1990s. But if you think of Pretty Hate Machine as it existed in 1989, it is possible to hear the album as a becoming, as the next step of a process of 1980s new wave, dub, hip-hop, and industrial experimentation, the product of a decade of rupture in and from rock, a work that could have been one of the next mainstreamed successes in an alternate history of American pop music, one where grunge never happened.29

  Pretty Hate Machine arrived relatively unannounced in stores on October 20, 1989, but the earliest listeners heard only the singles, which played heavily in video bars and the alternative dance-music scene. First came the 12-inch “Down in It,” then the single “Head Like a Hole,” while the album slowly made its way into the underground. Though its origins were in the dance-music community, the album was subsequently heard and adopted by metal, indust
rial, rock, punk, underground, and college-rock enthusiasts who were later blended together to form the category “alternative” in the wake of Nails’ seventh U.S. tour (in two and a half years) as part of the inaugural Lollapalooza Festival. Each group picked up on different aspects of this seemingly sparse album as indicative of its belonging to—or exclusion from—their listening worlds. It began to weave itself into the lives of its listeners through these associations, becoming a dance record, a breakup record, an angry record, a desperate late-night record, a hopeful record, an energetic record, or a romantic record to different listeners or to the same listeners at different periods in their lives.

  Trent has a favorite story about the impact of the album.30 After the release, he sent a tape of it to his uncle at the Reznor Heating Corp. His uncle gave the tape to a prospective secretary to listen to while he finished a meeting. When he returned to the waiting room, she was gone. He called her to ask why she left, and she said the tape made her realize that she didn’t want to work for the company.

  “That’s pretty much what I was setting out to do,” said Trent.

  Mercer, Pennsylvania

  Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

  Pink Floyd, “Time”

  Mercer County forms a line between western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. It’s a square turned quote by a sharp protuberance at the county’s southeastern edge. It seems to be voicing what Butler County has to say about its Pittsburgh-bearing southern neighbor Allegheny. One-third from its bottom and nearly half from either side sits the borough of Mercer.

  In the late seventeenth century, William Penn traveled to Switzerland and Germany, posting notices that invited skilled workers to his new colonial land grant. Penn had a soft spot for oppressed Central Europeans, and many Protestants from the Palatinate (modern southwestern Germany) took up his call. After Penn’s woods became part of the new United States of America, the government offered revolutionary war veterans land in parcels of 200 to 2,000 acres in western Pennsylvania. Some 3,000 soldiers began settling there in the late 1700s. In 1800, 200 acres were donated to make a county seat in Mercer, and the town’s first permanent structure, a Presbyterian church, was built. A stagecoach route between Pittsburgh in the south and Erie in the north turned Mercer into a hotel town and traveler’s way station in the nineteenth century. Since that time, Mercer’s population has always hovered at about 2,000. Ninety-six percent of the area’s population is Caucasian, a statistic that has not changed more than a few percentage points in 100 years.

  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 19
65, 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).