On Wednesday I went back to Kansas City to see Nine Inch Nails. The drive was slightly obnoxious because of the weather: the highway cut through thick pockets of fog, and all through the journey, the sky was a constant gray.
Because I’d left early, I arrived in town at 11am with a lot of time to kill. I was too early to even pick up my presale ticket from the venue: they wouldn’t start distributing those for another four-and-a-half hours.
I hadn’t slept well the night before because a giddy anticipation had kicked in. I was still feeling that adrenaline, so taking a nap was out of the question.
I ended up sitting down to play some Rez. I nearly reached the end of area five, but when I got killed I decided I’d had enough. I turned off the Xbox and just sat back on my futon.
It was a little weird to be in Kansas City again. While I had been gone, my mother had arranged for people to come in and clean my carpet, and the result was an apartment with a chemical scent. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was a potent memory-trigger. My apartment smelled the same way when I first moved in, back in August of 2006.
That shit signified the end of an era. I had left the dorms, and for the first time had to become (at least marginally) self-sustaining. I also had a lot more breathing room, because I wasn’t surrounded by people all the time. I could, at last, put a little distance between myself and them. Towards the end of my dorm days, I’d started talking a lot and had tried, in a forced, dumb way, to make friends and become more social. This caused me to do several things I now kind of regret. One of them was going to my first concert.
It was basically the worst “first concert experience” possible: I went to see a deeply, profoundly awful group that played what I think was either third wave ska, pop-punk, or some unholy combination of the two. I don’t fucking know. All I know is this: a guy I sort-of knew had called me, seemingly at random, to ask if I wanted to go to a concert, and on the spur of the moment I’d said “yes,” thinking, hey, I need to get out more anyway.
An hour later I lamented my poor judgement as I sat in an SUV that was rolling and bumping its way to Lawrence, Kansas. The whole way, the guys I was with listened to fucking 311 at about a billion decibels. The concert itself was eminently forgettable and underwhelming. The only nice thing about that miserable situation was that the price was right. My ticket was ten bucks. (NIN, on the other hand, was five times that – and that was for one of the cheap seats.)
I’m not much of a concert guy. I don’t know why that is. It may just be because I’m really lazy. If an act I like is in town, I might toy with the idea of buying a ticket and going, but I never actually do it, because when I think about the logistics of what going to a concert would entail, I decide the whole thing is way more effort than it’s worth.
Even Nine Inch Nails: I’ve actually passed up three chances to see them. The first was in February 2006, when they played an arena right here in Kansas City on the With Teeth tour. That was before I had a car. It was also before I really had any friends, so it wasn’t like I was going to get a ride. And more than that, in early 2006, I liked, but didn’t love, NIN. It wasn’t until about a year later that I went through that all-important bonding phase where I listened to The Fragile a lot and thought, “man, Trent Reznor totally understands my pain and shit.”
The second missed NIN opportunity came in August 2008. The band was just setting out on the Lights in the Sky tour, and they played St. Louis on a day that I had to do some stupid med school shit. Yes, I could have still gone to St. Louis after doing the stupid med school shit, but I would have really needed to floor it, and given that my driving skills are similar to those of a Rhesus monkey, I figured the whole escapade would probably end in a fiery and painful death along the side of the highway. At least, that was how I rationalized it to myself.
My third chance arrived later that same year, in November, and it seemed ideal: NIN would play Columbia, Missouri, Boris would open for them, and the show would fall within my Thanksgiving vacation. Why didn’t I go? Well . . . Columbia was farther away than I was really willing to drive. And the roads that time of year were icy and slick, and I thought about death at the side of the road again. I loved NIN, but not enough to risk my life to see them. Yeah, I’m basically a pussy.
But then Trent Reznor announced that this year’s tour would be NIN’s last. When I looked at the schedule and saw a Kansas City date, I made sure to reserve a ticket.
. . . So when it was 3pm, I couldn’t take the anticipation anymore. I drove to the venue – Starlight Theatre, somewhere in the middle of Swope Park. On the way I passed a Cash America pawnshop and a weird memory came back to me: suddenly it was May 2007 again and I was driving through the greater Kansas City area, systematically hitting up pawnshop after pawnshop in a meaningless quest for old videogames. (I had been on a mission to buy my childhood back.)
Pickings were slim, but what I did get was great. The best find: at one store I found Phantasy Star and Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star III and Phantasy Star IV, all in pristine condition, all for five bucks each. This was someone’s collection I was buying, and though I was elated at what I’d unearthed, I also felt kind of horrible and guilty as I handed my cash over. Given the state of these games, somebody had really cared about them. What was their story? Had their owner even wanted to part with them?
At one store, I parked my fairly-shitty Honda in a cracked and dirty parking lot and realized, with a creeping sensation of guilt, that it was by some distance the nicest car there.
At another, I stood in line behind an old man who was trying to sell a ring.
“It’s worthless,” the employee had said.
“Are you sure? Not even a couple dollars?”
“No.”
The old man looked like he was about to cry. He shuffled sadly out of the store. And there I was, a fucking douchebag, about to say, “yo, how much for that Sega shit over there?” Two kinds of people visit pawnshops: the desperate poor who try to liquidate stuff, and the comparatively rich vultures who swoop in after them, buying anything good and leaving all the other detritus by the wayside. I was a vulture.
One of the very worst streets in urban Kansas City is called “The Paseo.” Drive down the Paseo for any distance at any time of day: you’re guaranteed to see at least two cop cars pulled over by the side of the road with members of the force conducting an arrest. Some of the people they arrested were probably actually dangerous. I’m sure others were just poor. But poor and dangerous – and black, for that matter – all kind of equate to the same thing in America, anyway. There’s a street called Troost Avenue that more or less racially divides Kansas City in half. The Paseo is on the black side of town.
I remember speeding down the Paseo (between pawnshops – that whole area is a goldmine for ‘em), with my car stereo blaring “Vessel,” from Year Zero, a song with a chorus where Trent Reznor rhetorically (and repeatedly) asks, “Can it go any faster?” before adding, “I don’t think I can last here.” Pretty good song. I remember cranking that shit up, rolling down a window, sticking my hand out, and letting the flowing air caress it while I heard police sirens in the distance.
So I got to Starlight way too early. Lame, yeah, but look, I was excited. The parking situation was odd. I was directed to park not in an actual lot as such, but in a large, grassy field. I did so. As soon as I got out of my car, a dude accosted me. He just popped up out of nowhere and asked me a question.
“Are you from India?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
The guy grinned widely and thrust a shrinkwrapped DVD case into my hands.
“I want you to have this,” he said. “This very special DVD has an ebook of the Bhagavad Gita on it. Have you read the Bhagavad Gita?”
“Uh. No,” I said. “My mom keeps telling me to read it, though.”
“Oh, well, your mom is right! You should read it! It’s very enlightening. That’s what this DVD does. It enlightens you. It has some meditation sounds on it, too, and exercises. The sounds clear your mind. You become one with everything.”
“Uh. Cool.”
“Anyway,” the man went on, “I’m from a group of traveling monks. We distribute these DVDs for free, but most people, what they do is, they give us a donation.”
I gave the guy a kind of blank look.
“It can be anything,” he said. “Most people give ten dollars. Or five dollars. But anything else is perfectly acceptable.”
I fished a five dollar bill out of my pocket and passed it to the guy.
“Thank you. Thank you for your charitable donation.”
“Yeah,” I said. The guy turned away, and I felt relieved. I opened my car door and tossed the DVD into the passenger-side seat; meanwhile, the monk had moved on to someone else who’d just parked next to me.
I walked to Gate 4 – the designated presale entrance – and picked up my ticket at a nearby tent. Then I just kind of stood around waiting. What else was I to do? I’d come out to Kansas City to see NIN. I wasn’t there to do anything else. And for a boring guy like me, there isn’t much else to do in Kansas City anyway.
Since I was so early, I was really only surrounded by hardcore fans who had backstage passes; they cradled vinyl records that they wanted Trent Reznor to sign.
A line eventually formed, and I stood there for a couple of hours and listened in on arbitrary conversations. A group of older-looking fans wearing NIN t-shirts talked about all the past shows they’d been to. They speculated about whether Trent would ever play “The Perfect Drug” and they talked trash about Boris. (“Yeah, I went to that show in Columbia. Remember that awful fucking band that opened? Boris? They sounded like complete shit. I thought there was a problem with their sound setup, but then someone told me it was actually supposed to sound like that.”)
After Kansas City, these guys would follow the band to Chicago. They would probably go to even more shows after that.
The mist and fog slowly, gradually gathered. There came a point where the sky was just a pure, clean white: the clouds had all become one and the sun was nowhere to be seen. There was a wetness in the air. I could smell rain. I looked over at Starlight; it was a nice place, I guess. Maybe it was kind of fruity. The stage was designed to resemble a castle.
Two women in front of me were talking. One was smoking a cigarette. She took a drag, and then let out a long, thoughtful puff of smoke.
“You know,” she said, cigarette still held halfway to her lips, “the thing Trent doesn’t realize is this: when you can see the world, the world. . . the world can see you.”
Her companion at first just looked at her. Then she spoke.
“What is that even supposed to mean?” she said.
The woman with the cigarette waved her arms. “You know. It means . . . you know.”
It must be pretty weird to be Trent Reznor and to have a bunch of fans who all think they’re on a first-name basis with you.
There would be no soundcheck for this show – nin.com had mentioned something vague about time constraints – but we could hear the sounds of the band practicing or something from within Starlight itself. The sound of various drums being hit wafted towards us, and a truncated instrumental rendition of “Suck” started suddenly and cut out just as suddenly.
At five pm, they let all the presale ticketholders into the venue. We lined up to be searched. A guy checked to see if I was carrying any knives or grenades or whatever in my pockets and/or socks. I walked past the barrier to the other side, and – again – a dude approached, catching me off guard.
“Hey,” he said. “You look really familiar. Do I know you?”
“Uh. Probably not,” I said.
“Are you from around here?”
“I go to school here. You?”
It turned out the guy was actually from Springfield. Yeah, I told him, you may have seen me somewhere.
“This your first time seeing NIN?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I felt weirdly apologetic about that answer. I thought I needed to say more:
“I got into NIN pretty late. My friend turned me on to The Downward Spiral back in 2005. Maybe a month before With Teeth came out.”
“Oh, you’re just young,” the guy said. “I’m pretty old. Thirty-six. This is gonna be my twelfth time seeing Trent.”
“Yeah, I’m twenty,” I said.
I did get into NIN pretty late, and it had started with The Downward Spiral. I’d downloaded a 128kbps copy of it via Soulseek. I listened to it again and again on my shitty Samsung mp3 player. That was senior year of high school.
I went through the rest of Trent’s back catalog, but hadn’t really internalized it all by the time With Teeth came out, so it wasn’t until the runup to Year Zero two years later that I felt real anticipation for what Reznor would do next. For Year Zero, I was watching the whole time. I downloaded “My Violent Heart” – the first Year Zero track to leak. I had a shitty radio rip of “Survivalism” before that single had even been released.
When the single did come out, I kept listening to it, trying to anticipate what the album would sound like. I even lurked echoingthesound to keep an eye on the ongoing alternate reality game. When an incredibly-low quality listening party recording of the whole album found its way onto the Internet, I downloaded that and painstakingly tagged each .wav file. I integrated the listening party recordings with the higher-quality leaked tracks, and burned the resulting patchwork onto a CD-R that I put in my car.
I kept waiting for Year Zero to leak in its entirety. It eventually did, and when it happened, I was online. Someone on echoingthesound was downloading it from Oink, and was going to upload a torrent to Demonoid as soon as he had the whole thing. It was slow going for the guy; the Oink leak only had one seeder.
I refreshed the echoingthesound thread impulsively as I waited for the Demonoid link, and I jumped on the torrent as soon as that link appeared. I watched the number of leechers grow and grow exponentially. It was like seeing an explosion happen in slow motion.
I put the album on my iPod and even though it was late and I had a headache, I just took a Tylenol to take the edge off the pain and jammed my earbuds in anyway. I wanted to listen to the whole thing. Then I tried to listen to it a second time, but fell asleep with the earbuds still in my ears.
Year Zero leaked towards the end of organic chemistry, a class in which I was doing extremely poorly. The final was in two weeks, and I knew it was going to destroy me. Failure was not just an option: it was starting to look like an inevitability.
I needed some kind of assistance, so I called a friend – a chick I know whose IQ is slightly higher than the temperature of the sun in Kelvins. I figured she’d know what to do. She told me to get the hell away from my laptop, which may seem like obvious advice, but it wasn’t to me at the time. I put my iPod away, too, and tried to focus in and study.
It was tough going. I pulled the grade I needed in the end, but man, did I spend a bunch of nights staying up until the wee hours of the morning memorizing reaction mechanisms with – for some weird reason – “God Given” skipping around and around in my head.
Sometimes, when I felt (feel) like shit was (is) really going down the tubes – when I walked around the med school and saw motherfuckers I hate(d) and didn’t want to make eye contact and didn’t (don’t) know how the hell to deal with it – parts of “The Great Destroyer” kind of echoed around in my head. “I hope they cannot see / the limitless potential / living inside of me / to murder everything.”
That song is supposed to be about a science-fiction suicide bomber of the future. I think. (Honestly, I don’t really know what the hell Trent’s talking about in most of Year Zero; I’ll be the first to admit that to be a fan of the man, you really, really cannot be someone who places too much importance on lyrics.)
I’d hear “The Great Destroyer” loop through my brain and I’d imagine myself exploding in some kind of giant disgusting ball of pulsing organic energy. Like some shit right out of Akira.
The Fragile and The Downward Spiral are both “better,” but Year Zero is mine in a way that those albums are not and probably never will be. They’re great, but I wasn’t there when they came out. They’re trapped in amber that I can chip away at but can’t entirely remove. It’s a shame, but, you know, that’s how it works. You just had to have been there.
Right after I talked to that guy from Springfield, it started to rain: this was some serious, hardcore, extreme, drenching rain that came down in ripping sheets. Fortunately, an overhang covered the part of the venue to which we were confined. (They weren’t going to let anyone into the seating area until it was six.)
The merch table was under the overhang. I bought a vastly overpriced hoodie that had the “Echoplex” symbol on the front and “2009 NIN” in red on the back. It was absurdly expensive, but I knew the thing would see a lot of use: rare is the occasion on which I am not wearing a hoodie. And it was getting pretty cold; what with the rain and everything, I needed an immediate upgrade to the stupidly-thin Old Navy hoodie I’d been wearing at the time.
When it was six, they – at last – let everyone head down to the seating area. I walked down a steep, slippery incline to my seat, which was all wet and nasty. I tossed my old hoodie onto it and sat down. A guy with very long legs sat to my left and I felt kind of squeezed. Someone else sat immediately to my right.
“So, where you guys from?” the guy on my right asked me.
The guy on my left mumbled something; I said “Springfield.”
“Oh, Springfield! I’m from Lawrence,” he said. “I guess that means we should be mortal enemies, huh?”
“Ha.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Sports?
“This your first Nails show?” he asked me.
“Uh, yeah. You?”
“Number six,” he said.
Man, I felt pretty inadequate.
“You heard any of this Street Sweeper stuff?”
He was talking about Street Sweeper Social Club, the Tom Morello side project (with a fucking asinine name) that was going to open for NIN.
“Uh, no,” I said.
“It’s good stuff. I mean, it’s Tom Morello. You ever seen Rage Against the Machine?”
“No,” I said.
The guy on my left suddenly spoke up. “Yeah, I’ve seen fucking Rage. Fuck yeah. Fucking Lollapalooza last year. It was a fucking amazing lineup, fuck. You had fucking Radiohead, fucking Rage, and fucking Nails. All fucking headlining. Fucking awesome.”
“Yeah,” guy on the right said. “Yeah.” And then he disappeared.
Man, was it just me or was there just something inherently awkward about this concert chit-chat? It was probably just me.
I realized I was coming off as a know-nothing with no cred. I made a mental note to get on eBay and drop five grand on a Reznor-signed Pretty Hate Machine-era t-shirt next time I go to a Nine Inch Nails show. Then I remembered there won’t be any more Nine Inch Nails shows. So much for that idea.
Street Sweeper went on at seven, and they sounded exactly like Rage Against the Machine except – impossibly – even more grating. They covered M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” though, and their version was vastly superior to the original. Really, though, anybody’s cover of anything by fucking M.I.A. would, by default, be a huge improvement on the original, so that ain’t saying a lot.
Just as NIN was about to go on, the guy who was originally on my right but had disappeared came back clutching a beer.
“Looks like I timed this shit just right, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He really had timed that shit just right. About five seconds after the guy sat down, the show itself started. Smoke flooded the stage.
Trent Reznor appeared at a microphone stand and started to sing “Now I’m Nothing.” His voice sounded pitch-perfect, with none of the raw strain that would creep into it over the ensuing ninety minutes. I felt something like awe, and when “Now I’m Nothing” crashed into a brick wall of guitar noise and segued into “Terrible Lie,” I was, for a second, convinced I was witnessing one of the greatest things ever. (Then rationality took over; it always barges in and ruins everything when I have an epiphany.)
The sound seemed like it was physically present. The energy was tangible. And the band did not ever stop. They clicked along with a surreal, icy precision; the songs slid into each other like magnets. Trent was always moving. He played “The Wretched” and “Burn” and “The Becoming,” which are some of my favorite things the dude has ever done. As they played on, the sky faded from white to gray. The moisture in the air was growing. It was going to rain.
Trent apparently could sense this too, because, between songs, he paused briefly. “It’s not gonna rain,” he said. He was right. It did not rain.
(Well, okay, it did rain, eventually, but not until much later. It started raining more or less exactly as NIN’s set ended. Dude is obviously a secret thunder god or something.)
Yeah, if I wanted to, I could pick nits about the setlist – for example, I’d have probably given my right kidney to hear “Home” or “Reptile” – but hell, what they did play was solid, forceful stuff. And it goes the other way too: there are several NIN songs I can’t stand; they didn’t play a single one of those.
There was an incredible moment towards the end of the set: they played “The Way Out is Through” just as dusk yielded to night; as Trent Reznor sang “underneath it all / we feel so small / the heavens fall,” that shit was simultaneously happening in real-time. By the time the song came to an end, it was, for the first time, legitimately night. The sky was straight-up black. No actual stars were visible.
Something was different after night fell: the atmosphere of the place had changed. The stage lighting didn’t look the same; the strobes were all brighter, and somehow it felt as though the entire crowd had kind of merged into one – some real Bhagavad Gita shit. Nearly every song Trent broke out after “The Way Out is Through” was one of the big guns, one of the huge hits that everyone knew the words to. (Though he did take a little detour to play “Physical,” which – needless to say – was great.)
“Wish” and “Head Like a Hole” were quasi-religious experiences. I even found myself getting caught up in what was going on, despite my reserved nature, and in defiance of all rationality; it seemed like everyone was headbanging and singing along in unison. I was no longer really even aware of my own physical being; I felt like I had shed my earthly form.
When NIN’s set ended, I sat down, still reeling. The lights went up and anonymous stagehands swarmed the amps and carted them away. A fine rain started to fall. I dragged my Old Navy hoodie out from under me and sort of awkwardly stuck it on top of the NIN hoodie I was wearing, like a dorky makeshift poncho.
The show as a whole wasn’t over yet; Jane’s Addiction would go on in about twenty minutes – they were co-headlining with Nine Inch Nails. I realize this is something I did not even mention up until this point, but that’s because I don’t give half a shit about Jane’s Addiction.
Hell, in the interest of full disclosure I have to admit something: I’d been planning to leave before Jane’s even went on. Laziness and the fact that it was raining and I didn’t feel like driving back home yet were the only things that stopped me from actually doing that.
So when Jane’s Addiction’s set started, I just kind of relaxed. I put in the earplugs I’d brought with me. I hadn’t wanted them in while watching NIN because I wanted every serrated guitar edge to burn itself into my eardrums; now, I no longer cared. I was confident that there was no way Jane’s could ever follow up the thunderous hammer-of-god that Reznor had dropped. I realized, eventually, that I was kind of wrong. Half-wrong, to be exact.
I was right that Jane’s Addiction would suck. Man, I can’t stand those guys. Yeah, Trent Reznor – a dude I hugely respect – apparently thinks they’re great, but that just baffles me.
The thing I was wrong about was the NIN-set-as-religious-experience thing. It might have seemed like a religious experience to me, but it. . . I don’t know. Maybe that had just been in my head.
The thing is, while nearly every Jane’s Addiction song sounds exactly the same to me, that wasn’t the case with a huge number of those in attendance. The crowd energy – the singing along, the bouncing, the headbanging – that I’d felt so connected to during the NIN part of the show was now happening again; the same experience, viewed from the other side, looked alien and, frankly, kind of retarded. It was bizarre and preposterous to see all these people happily singing total nonsense in unison.
For a moment I wondered if the whole Nine Inch Nails thing had been a weird illusion, and if Trent Reznor was more of a charlatan than a thunder god. But no, that was a dumb thing to think. There really had been an energy there; it had just been something intangible, something you would’ve had to have been entirely a part of to comprehend.
As fans around me mouthed the words to every Jane’s song, I realized something: throughout much of NIN’s set, I’d been doing that too. It was involuntary. Over the past few years I’ve accidentally, unintentionally memorized and absorbed all the lyrics to almost every damn thing Trent Reznor has ever written. I had already been a part of the Nine Inch Nails fold in a way that let me make a connection with this ineffable, intangible thing, whatever it was.
I suspect I had instinctively recognized that all along. Perhaps that was why I didn’t even bother to bring a camera to the show. What could a camera have captured that my eyes couldn’t have seen?
It’s now been a little over twenty-four hours since the show ended, and YouTube videos of fan footage are already surfacing. I watched a video of “Now I’m Nothing,” and while it did kind of capture what was going on, it wasn’t getting that ineffable thing. Trent’s voice, I realize, was not actually pitch-perfect. It just sounded that way to me at the time. The performance as recorded doesn’t have the vitality that was there. The video does not communicate enough. You just had to have been there.
After the show had ended (last song was “Jane Says,” one of the, uh, two Jane’s songs that I think are okay) I drove home – slowly – through choking, building layers of mist and rain (with, yeah, Year Zero in my car). When I got to my apartment, I opened my laptop and paged to a blank Google document, where I tried to recall the NIN setlist from memory.
You know what? I couldn’t even do that. That’s how fucking. . . fleeting this shit is. I did get all the songs, but I got them in the wrong order. I had to check the list I’d come up with against nin.com, and I had to make corrections. The specific details were dissolving, and NIN had only played a couple of hours before.
After I tried to reconstruct the setlist, I typed out a rough, typo-riddled version of, well, this. I was really tired, so I kept losing my train of thought and fumbling along the keyboard, but I wanted to get all this down before I went to bed.
I’m back in Springfield now. I’m still on break through the end of this week. Life as normal has resumed. In time, the intensity of the show is going to fade away, which is a little saddening. I know everything fades away, but man. I guess that’s why this thing here is so long. I want to be able to read this someday in the distant future. I want to feel it all flooding back.