Nailed

I remember first encountering the name Nine Inch Nails in the parking lot of my first high school in 1989. My classmate Dan Krueger was playing "Head Like A Hole" and I instantly liked what I heard. "Is this guy from London?", I innocently asked. "No, Cleveland."

I didn't understand the lyrics of the album Pretty Hate Machine until women started messing with my head and stomping on my heart.

But then I went off to college. My freshman year roommate happened to be a theater major at the famous Tisch school of the arts. Some sicko in the housing office was probably laughing as he paired a theater major with a computer science major, but I tried my best to like this guy. It was not an easy road... he was a theater major and because of it I almost felt like he was constantly acting in a play rather than living life. Everything was literally dramatic. He really did look like a nerdier version of that dude Patrick Dempsey who was then "famous" for being in that film Loverboy, the pizza delivery guy who delivered more than pizza to women, and he believed he was him. My favorite memory of him is that whenever he would meet a girl who he thought could eventually be his girlfriend, he wrote her name in pen on the speed dial button list on our phone. By the end of the semester, all the fields were crossed out.

One of the ways I learned to cope with his odd ways was playing the Nine Inch Nails Broken album as often as possible. That album (or EP for those who care) for me was perfect... sonically, lyrically and it was just mysterious... with its two hidden tracks as tracks 98 and 99 on the disc. The liner notes had a warning that "this album is not intended to be played on mono devices and damage may occur". There were times in the record, chiefly the song "Wish" where static and noise were literally used as an instrument. There was beauty within the noise.

Reading into the creation of the album, it was largely a rant against the head of his first record company (the dedication was written as "the slave is released from bondage only to find a stronger set of chains") who would not allow him to record a new album under his terms so he fled when Interscope saw the genius in him. Jimmy Iovine, a seasoned record producer who ran Interscope and produced records for Springsteen, U2, Patti Smith and John Lennon was quoted as saying that every so often a musical genius comes along... Lennon, Bono and Reznor were it for him. Of course, how things have soured between Reznor and the machine.