True Believer

Sadie Sartini Garner recalls a Nine Inch Nails concert from the year 2000 and wonders where those she stood shoulder to shoulder with have gone.

By Sadie Sartini GarnerAugust 23, 2024

• Music

• Memoir & Essay

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS YEAR 2000, always “the year 2000” at the time, a year whose very name couldn’t be trusted to connote properly in its natural context. The New Orleans Arena, tucked between the crook of I-910 and the Superdome. The former stadium was not yet called the Smoothie King Center. The latter was not yet called the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, nor (later) the Caesars Superdome. Nine Inch Nails, a band name that was more like a pseudonymous cloak for one guy—Trent Reznor—who was slowly melting down in a recording studio but who nevertheless needed a band around him to bring his music outside of that studio. It was still possible, if barely, to give something a generic name, or a name so hyperbolic that it became generic.

By the time my house got MTV, Nine Inch Nails were between album cycles. It was rare to hear their hit “Closer,” even on the alt-rock radio station, maybe because its chorus was essentially impossible to censor. You know it, but in case you don’t: “I want to fuck you like an animal,” stated plainly, in a disarmingly conversational tone. I first experienced it as one part of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “The Alternative Polka” medley, the word “fuck” neutered first by the sound you hear in Warner Bros. cartoons when Bugs Bunny plucks out someone’s hair, then by the sound you hear when someone drops an anvil on their foot. Weird Al’s song is a very good joke: in three minutes, he deflates all the depressive pomp of the alt-rock scene, rendering Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” camp. How can you be confronted by the dark hole of a lyric like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “I love all of you / Hurt by the cold / So hard and lonely too / When you don’t know yourself” after you’ve heard Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz shiver “brr!” as Weird Al sings the word “cold”?

I didn’t understand music as being dark or upsetting. I didn’t understand lyrical expression as that—expression—so much as just slogans or phrases. Things to shout. When Deftones’ Chino Moreno pleaded to “shove it, shove it, shove it / (The sun) shove it, shove it, shove it / (Aside),” I only knew that shoving things aside was awesome and that shoving the sun aside was super awesome. I read enough music magazines to know that Kurt Cobain was very depressed, and that teenagers loved Nirvana because they were depressed too, but when I listened to Nevermind (1991), I felt … cool? Big? The fullness of my teenhood? In a new mood? It’s obviously impossible to say now, but what matters is: I’d seen the Hullabalooza episode of The Simpsons, and I knew that making teenagers depressed was like shooting fish in a barrel. I didn’t know much of anything about myself, but I knew I was a teenager.

Nine Inch Nails hadn’t toured in years. Until the previous September, two months before I turned 15, the same month my parents told me they were divorcing, Trent Reznor and his band hadn’t released an album in even more years. Proof of torment. That’s what I read in the issues of Spin I’d buy at the grocery store. Reznor had writer’s block. He didn’t know what to say. He’d spun all the way through things with The Downward Spiral (1994). His depression had made him famous, or rather his ability to throw found static, modular synth programming, unnatural drumbeats, tape hiss, and the words “pig” and “fuck” in the direction of his depression in the hope that they would define the ungodly amount of space it took up.

Did I like Nine Inch Nails in 2000? My mom had taken me to the mall shortly after she moved into her own apartment in 1999. We went to the Sam Goody, and there was a sign advertising preorders for The Fragile, the first new Nine Inch Nails record since The Downward Spiral. I gave them $20, and a few weeks later we came back and picked up the double CD. The alt-rock radio station had been playing the single “We’re in This Together” for the last month or so, so I skipped straight there. Right now, as I write this, it’s a minor cliché to say you hear a bit of shoegaze in something, the late 1980s/early ’90s genre currently being resurrected and reimagined by young bands. Nevertheless, I hear a bit of shoegaze in “Together,” not only in the impenetrable wall of noise Reznor creates with thick guitars and strobes of ARP synthesizer, but also in the way the song builds into a state of ecstasy. It’s not a fast song—it’s over seven minutes long—but it seems to grow more quickly than the music itself can contain. You can feel it squirming its way out of its body. I listened to it in my headphones at home. I skipped back to the beginning of the track. I didn’t know that the screeches that rip through the song’s verses could be a nod to Bernard Herrmann. I didn’t know that there was a special metatextual power in someone as known for writing depressive songs as Trent Reznor writing something that was supposed to be understood as happy and hopeful and bright, or at least desperate to be those things. That you might see he was teasing, tempting you to read the chorus—“You and me / We’re in this together now / None of them can stop us now”—as sarcasm, or irony, ultimately daring you to experience warmth while listening to a Nine Inch Nails song.

Every contemporaneous review I can find of The Fragile considers “We’re in This Together” a positive song—one still in keeping with the Nine Inch Nails mode of overbearing intensity, but positive nonetheless. The rightly revered Ann Powers, writing in one of those grocery store issues of Spin I almost certainly would have bought, calls it “a sweet pop tune encased within the armor of industrial rock.” Screaming out the album’s soon-to-be-arena-shaking anthems “are his usual way of drowning out those ghosts,” Powers writes. Can you scream louder than a ghost? Can the corporeal ever overtake the eternal? How is it that something happening outside of you happens so loudly that it penetrates your skin and your skull and traps itself inside of you?

My question for 1999 Ann Powers is this: If Trent Reznor was trapped inside of muscle-man-machine rock music, and he was singing a lovely pop song in there, what does it mean that he built the machine himself? What does it say about that pop song?

Sitting there in my room, with my headphones on and my Discman spinning the left disc (disc one; the second disc was called the “right” one), what did I hear? Did I hear a song about trying to be happy despite unfathomably hard times? What did I focus on? The way the song strains? The way it’s selling its insistence on unity awfully hard? The way the intense heat gives way to a simmer, a single guitar micro-boiling long after the spirit of the song has evaporated?

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Anyway, the year 2000. A school night, a two-hour drive to New Orleans in the van of a parent of a friend of a friend. We are, most of us in this van, students of rock music. We know about how the band greased themselves with mud before going onstage at Woodstock ’94. There is a rumor going around that the opening band is the side project of Tool’s singer, Maynard James Keenan; unlike nearly everything I had ever heard about a band outside the pages of a magazine to that point, this turns out to be true. One of us, my actual friend, writes “I took too much acid and think I’m a bottle of Coke” on a piece of notebook paper and starts holding it up to drivers. Once he has their attention, he assumes panic and pretends as if he’s trying to twist the top off of his head. He is very good at miming despair.

On the floor of the venue. How did we get these tickets? I have never done this before, standing on the soft concrete apron of a basketball arena to watch a rock concert, but I have heard plenty about what it’s like from friends who’d seen Smashing Pumpkins or Bush at the Cajundome. I can and do expect it to be physical and dangerous. I am a hockey player, against all cultural odds, and I am small, so I am used to my body being thrown around. This, I’m told by the goalie on my team who knows he’s killing me by telling me how much fun he had seeing Korn at the Family Values Tour, is nothing like that. This is not something you can skate away from. This is not violence. This is something more like mania. It’s hard to explain. The previous year, while Pearl Jam was playing to a passionate crowd at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, nine fans were killed in a crush and over two dozen others injured. I have no way of realistically imagining what I’m about to go through.

One thing I thought I knew: I was 15 years old, surrounded for the first time by people I understood to be goths. There were so many of them. I was not a goth; I was not anything, as far as I could tell. Which is to say, I had a feeling that the only way to think truthfully about myself was to think about what I was not. And thus where I did not belong.

The band was set up behind a scrim that was draped across the front of the stage, and as they began the grind of “The New Flesh”/“Pinion,” strobe lights lit them from behind. The lights threw the group’s shadows across the giant sheet, one light flashing Reznor’s silhouette stage right, the next one making it look like he was stage left. The keyboardist’s shadow made him appear impossibly small, as if he were hundreds of yards behind the rest of the band. The sound of distorted guitar was fed backwards, seeming to suck against itself, a hoarse keyboard moaning, everything mostly in darkness until the strobes flashed on the downbeat, shifting the band’s position on the stage every time. It built to a crescendo, the scrim dropped on beat, and there was Nine Inch Nails, 20 feet in front of us all, flat lighting rigs hung lower than a basement ceiling pinning them in place and flooding the front of the stage in white. Soon, the rigs would rotate back and up and reveal themselves to be massive LED screens; they roamed back and forth across the stage, never showing video, only soft minty light. The band played “Terrible Lie,” a song I had never heard before whose chorus I shouted back with conviction.

We’d all stopped at the merch table on the way to the floor. I clutched my T-shirt, jet-black with the NIN icon in the middle in white, the logo’s lower half missing in a nod to the way it appears on The Fragile’s cover. I bought a notebook with the album cover on it too, conscious in the moment that teenage Nine Inch Nails fans are expected to write about their feelings in a notebook. I was concerned, somewhere deep in my mind, that I would be enacting a cliché by doing so; I was concerned, somewhere nearby, that doing so would certify me. Months later, the notebook still clean, I pasted in the cover of the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head (1992), blacking out the album title and writing “three dopey white boys” in Wite-Out in its place. It seemed like something someone who loved Nine Inch Nails would do. There were lines drawn between the pure terror of Reznor’s music and the laid-back fun of the Beasties; it was impossible to imagine someone who’d seen what was on the Nine Inch Nails side ever rapping “I’m as cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce” alongside MCA. But I liked the Beastie Boys. I was conscious of that fact while I was working at my project. In this journal, which never left my house and in which I never wrote again, I wanted to see myself as someone with mystique. Someone who knew how to reject things. I was hoping to be a person whose thoughts took them outside the mainstream. Or maybe just someone who had thoughts. I wanted to stand with a critical eye, one brow cocked, bemused to find out you like that shit. “As much as his music screams ‘Fuck you,’” Rolling Stone’s Anthony Bozza wrote in a 1999 profile of Reznor, “it whispers ‘Love me.’”

There was some moshing. There was some crowd-surfing. The rest of us settled into life as a wave pool. We undulated, oblivious to the rhythm coming from the stage. Late in the night, a thin synth sound wisped overhead and furled like a flag in the wind, blowing gently. It hung around, stayed a moment, waited to be recognized. Not many reacted. When the pacemaker thump and hiss of the rhythm track on “Closer” finally started to hit, the crowd surged. “Closer” was and is a great song. The very specific texture of that beat—the kick-drum sound contracts with a damp and hollow gulp, like water is being rapidly sucked out of it; the snare tone, which probably sounds like a stock drum-machine snare outside of this already haunted context, answers with a grainy tap—would ignite an erotic glee in me if I did happen to catch it on the radio. The bass line is technically the most prominent sound in the mix, but the amount of hissing and tapping and stirring happening around it makes it hard to look at for long enough to notice its little neon-green Herbie Hancock strut. It’s also, it has to be said, an embarrassing song to love at any age for anyone with a modicum of self-awareness. A teenage virgin saying “I want to fuck you like an animal” while listening to music in their childhood bedroom? An adult woman decades later responding “I want to feel you from the inside” while commuting to work? The gulp of the kick drum, the hiss of the snare. Baroque worry and stock defiance. There is no way to sing it without ironizing it. “You tear down my reason,” Reznor pants, and the crowd goes wild.

“It isn’t a bad place where I grew up, but there was nothing going on but the cornfields. My life experience came from watching movies, watching TV and reading books and looking at magazines,” Reznor told Jonathan Gold for Rolling Stone in 1994, while on the first leg of the now-legendary Self Destruct Tour, which culminated with Woodstock ’94.

And when your fucking culture comes from watching TV and every day, you’re bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was You’re almost taught to realize it’s not for you.

Elsewhere in the piece, describing the way Reznor loses himself onstage to violent ecstasy, Gold says that he is “enraged by a world he does not understand.”

By the time Nine Inch Nails got to Woodstock, Kurt Cobain was dead. Grunge, for whatever it was worth, had crested, revealing itself to be simply one set of waves rolling through an ocean the American radio public had just discovered. It’s common, still, to hear people say that the popularity of Nirvana changed everything, that it brought alternative culture to the mainstream of American life and forever messed up the definition of both. But it’s easier to see now that Nirvana, as a phenomenon, was not a lodestar; they were an inevitability. The American indie underground had steadily built audiences for challenging, interesting bands working outside the mainstream record industry for years. Soundgarden was already scoring minor hits on a major label. Jane’s Addiction was following metal to its natural next step by tickling it with fey artsiness. Red Hot Chili Peppers had gone gold with Mother’s Milk (1989). Henry Rollins made the jump from Black Flag singer to major-label artist.

By the summer of 1991, while Nirvana were sitting around waiting for Nevermind to come out, the first Lollapalooza tour showed that a loose conglomerate of bands with similar sensibilities, if not sounds—including the Butthole Surfers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, and Nine Inch Nails—was both a viable culture and a viable product. Sonic Youth were prepping their second major-label record. The Smashing Pumpkins were already being called poseurs. R.E.M. were three years into a touring hiatus necessitated by their immense popularity. That December, with Nevermind still gathering steam, Spin declared that “what has formerly been considered alternative rock” had “in fact moved into the mainstream.”

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It feels right and reasonable, though, to think that Nirvana changed everything, that the power of a truly great song can flip culture on its head. It’s good to have a tidy story. It keeps the world mystifying. It allows us to be happily confused when we think about how a band like Nine Inch Nails, a crackling machine that at that point was running on pure spite and pain, wound up crowning the sequel to a festival famed for its peace and love.

But many of the artists who appeared at the original Woodstock were playing music that was violent or at least terrifying by mainstream standards in 1969, and nearly all of them were driven by an anti-establishment ethos. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” sang Richie Havens, a Black musician echoing and proclaiming the spiritual orphanage of centuries of Black Americans, himself just a dot in a very long line. Despite their broader reputation—and their then-recent history of playing benefits for the Black Panthers—the Grateful Dead were ideologically listless, apathetic, worn down, ready to split, as slack as any band the early 1990s would spit out. Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Roger Daltrey hoped he’d die before he got old—not a negation of his own life so much as contempt for anyone who’d tried to live one before him. There is so little peace and so little love in the way Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” soaked in feedback on a cold and dewy morning. In the last song Hendrix played in his instantly beatified set, the last song of a weekend that had finally encroached on Monday, he sang about going down to shoot his old lady. There are many ways to think about and soak up violence; good vibes help. Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered by the Manson Family on August 8, 1969. Woodstock was held the next weekend.

Charles Manson didn’t really understand the specifics of the counterculture he found himself surrounded by in the late 1960s, though he was an expert at reading the vibes. Before he sent his team off to Cielo Drive, he told them to make sure and mark their territory. “You girls know what I mean, something witchy,” he told them. The meaning of the words themselves was less important than the steam they gave off. Susan Atkins—“Sexy Sadie”—dipped a towel in Tate’s blood and wrote the word “PIG” on the front door. “Death to Pigs,” her accomplice Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel wrote on the wall of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s home the following night. A few days earlier, Bobby Beausoleil had killed music teacher Gary Hinman and written “political piggy” on his wall in blood after Manson told him to make it look like the work of the Black Panthers. Neither Tate nor anyone else in their house that night had any connection to politics, the police, or authority of any kind; the same with the LaBiancas. Hinman was a music teacher. But the murders did what Manson wanted. They put an image out there.

In 1992, Trent Reznor moved into the Tate house. He carted in a 56-track recording console, dozens of synths and guitars and samplers and drum machines, and a Mellotron like the one the Beatles used. There, on the other side of the door, in the living room, he wrote and recorded The Downward Spiral, though that’s not how the home studio is credited in the album’s liner notes. Officially, The Downward Spiral came to life at “Le Pig.” He wrote two of the album’s best songs, “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs,” there. He recorded a bit of Marilyn Manson’s Portrait of an American Family (1994) and shot a couple of music videos. He recorded the Nine Inch Nails EP Broken (1992). Tori Amos came to visit and tried to cook her famous baked chicken; after six hours in the oven, the chicken was still bloody and raw. Reznor moved out when he finished The Downward Spiral, and he took the front door—the most famous front door in countercultural history, other than the one to which Martin Luther tacked his 95 Theses—with him when he moved to New Orleans, where it greeted people who entered his Nothing Studios on Magazine Street. The old house on Cielo Drive was torn down before anyone else could try to interpret it. A new, blandly nice sprawler was built in its place by the guy who created the tissue-soft TV show Full House.

It is hard for me to think clearly about Trent Reznor in 1992, 1993, 1994, working as hard as he can and failing to make a cohesive record. Spending every day inside a myth, conscious—as he very quickly became—of the many meanings that might be read into someone making a record about a violent unraveling and the loss of one’s idealism in the same room where the most metaphorical murders of the 20th century happened. In 1969, and thus for every year since, the Manson murders symbolized the end of everything, the bursting of the utopian bubble blown by the first hippie to lay out a blanket in Golden Gate Park. Things had gotten so out of hand, so big. The barometric pressure inside the bubble was virtually the same as that outside of it; it was a matter of time before something like Manson made it pop. How was someone supposed to find hope after that? It is impossible not to imagine Trent Reznor there on Cielo Drive, trying, squeezing, generating hours and hours and hours of noise and uselessness in the hope that there might be something worthwhile buried in the static, and not also imagine the entire scene as a pure symbol.

The image of hope and acid and free love that shined so brightly throughout the 1960s was a hollow shell. The nihilism and heroin chic and the idea of feeling you from the inside was the hollow gulp in response. It’s the right of youth to define themselves, both individually and collectively, and to spin up some kind of framing device that explains why they’re drawn toward ecstasy and annihilation and dissatisfaction with the world around them. A person can’t help but make meaning out of things. But so often, what feels like meaning is, like so many things, all vibes and only vibes.

On the floor of the New Orleans Arena. Back there, the year 2000—the age of jetpacks and flying cars, a year in which every new thing that existed in the present was said to have come from the future. We are heaving. We are tired. Hundreds of teenagers, sweaty with awe at what we’ve gone through tonight, leaning on one another and trying to keep our feet on the ground. It is quiet. In my memory, the light is golden, diffused in the steam of the arena, shining from the back of the stage out toward all of us, Reznor’s silhouette punched out before us. I had never heard the song “Hurt” before, but I knew about it. I’d read a quote from a Rolling Stone interview in a book I had where Reznor talks about what it was like recording it at the Cielo Drive house: “We were crying when we made it, it was so intense. I didn’t know if I even wanted to put it on the album.” I imagined this, a song so powerful it could make someone like Trent Reznor weep when he saw at its birth how closely it resembled his own pain. Sometime in 1994, the book went on, he heard the song at a strip club: “[T]here we were, and there it was, and girls were taking their clothes off to it.”

A few years later, though not many, shortly after Johnny Cash would record his own version of “Hurt” with Rick Rubin and, as everyone who heard the Cash version insisted, dispossess Reznor of the song and make it his own, a friend and I wandered around Magazine Street in New Orleans, hoping to darken the door of Nothing. It was 2004, and Reznor had moved out by then, leaving New Orleans behind. The address we’d found somewhere led us to a laundromat that someone insisted was secretly a restaurant that made great burgers. We went drinking upstairs at the Balcony Bar across the street and told ourselves, Actually, I’ll bet this is where Nothing was. We went back to the Balcony Bar many times over the next year. For a minute, it became our spot—a whole gang of us would show up. On the night of my 21st birthday, another friend and I hatched a plan to drive to the suburbs to find Gram Parsons’s grave. Parsons had no real connection to Louisiana, but his estranged stepfather, desirous of the fortune Parsons had inherited from his mother, had him buried in Metairie to take advantage of the state’s unusual inheritance laws. We liked Parson’s music fine enough but weren’t devotees; it just seemed like something fun to do. When we got there, the cemetery was closed.

“Hurt” was the last song Nine Inch Nails played at the New Orleans Arena that night in the year 2000. Though the song builds into a kind of insistent, needling pattern of dirty noise, the crowd stayed calm. We all bobbed along together, in this together, aware of what this song meant to teenagers like us. How painful, to be only 15 years old in a world so loud. “I will let you down,” Reznor sang, “I will make you hurt.” This was not a new truth, that people in your life are capable of disappointing you. Everybody knew that, just as we all knew he was talking about heroin addiction. But as the song played, creaking and cracking and turning on its axis, the night was still. We breathed with ease.

Where did these people go? The millions of people who bought The Downward Spiral and who made Nine Inch Nails a festival headliner? Trent Reznor wins Oscars for making film scores, and every now and then he’ll scrape together a new Nine Inch Nails project, but there is, really, no remnant of what the world was like when it decided this was its favorite band. The mud has all been scraped off. But the people who flung it are still alive, mostly. Are they working in your office now? Have they followed the path down into normal, settled, quiet lives? Do they think about what it was like to hear a song that harmonized with their little teenage self? That reasserted who they were before the gaseous sighing of the world seeped into their bodies and nearly smothered them? Have they gotten over that? Is there no such thing as a true believer?

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Featured image: Concert still from And All That Could Have Been, Nine Inch Nails live DVD, Nothing/Interscope, 2002.