Holly Bailey

The LA Times’ Jonathan Gold, who  passed away last weekend, was an amazing food critic and has been rightfully honored as someone who brought Los Angeles to life for his readers. But before he wrote about food, he was a pretty amazing music writer, and what I will remember him for the most is this incredible Rolling Stone cover story he wrote on Trent Reznor way back in 1994. Yes, I am a huge Nine Inch Nails fan so I loved the story. But I was also a young writer, and I can honestly say that over the last 24 years, my mind has returned again and again to these handful of sentences where he described watching Reznor perform “Closer” at a concert in Detroit:

You haven’t really lived, I think, until you’ve heard a gang of Wayne State sorority sisters moan, “I want to fuck you like an animal,” the chorus to “Closer,” which has sort of the same resonance that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might have had 30 years ago. Dressed in already-clammy NIN T-shirts newly purchased from the concession stand, whipping clean hair over their eyes, shoving the pimply skanks who dare to block their view, wild-eyed with hatred and desire, the women howl along with Reznor, who in turn howls into the black-rubber void with such intensity that you fear the throbbing balconies will sag and collapse, sending 200 tons of concrete, steel and slam-dancing teen-agers onto your sweaty head. The women crush their eyes shut and scream, “You get me closer to God.” All of them sound as if they mean it.

Vivid. Funny. And this perfect encapsulation of the cultural impact Reznor and that song had at a moment where the mainstream was still somewhat scandalized by the mere use of the word “fuck” in a song on the radio. It was just a few sentences, but it’s a piece of writing that really influenced me as a journalist to try and always capture the electric, to make readers feel like they are right there. So thank you Jonathan Gold. Also you haven’t lived until you’ve read this story so I suggest you do it.

Mr. Reznor isn’t easing back into performing. Most bands play festivals with a bare-bones production, for quick setup on a shared stage. His is making a far more elaborate comeback. The show brings dizzying visual effects to an idea borrowed, Mr. Reznor freely admits, from the 1983 Talking Heads tour, filmed as “Stop Making Sense.” Mr. Reznor starts out onstage alone, and the band gradually assembles around him. From there, the visuals escalate. “We’re always pushing the envelope,” said Roy Bennett, the band’s longtime lighting and production designer. “We’ve always tried to make people think and keep them on edge and keep them wondering what’s going on.”

The trajectories of lights and video screens, pushed around by the road crew, are so complex that the tour has them choreographed — with time-code cues — to avoid collisions and tangled power cords. (But the band, Mr. Reznor pledged, has “no dance moves.”)

After the festival shows, Nine Inch Nails will mount an entirely different production with three weeks of rehearsals in September, to headline arenas through much of the next year. “The fact that we’re doing all this only for these few shows, and then we have to do it over again, throwing all this out to do a completely new thing, with new things that won’t work,” Mr. Reznor said, “that feels a little insane.”

But he was determined to make the return of Nine Inch Nails memorable. “O.K. is not acceptable,” he said. “Strangely, we’re bigger now than we were ever before. When we put the single out, and we put tickets on sale, the question mark was answered. This is the biggest it’s ever been. Maybe it’s scarcity or time away.”

(via NYT)

Nine Inch Nails fans (Brooklyn NY)

Los Angeles, 2016 (at Los Angeles, California)
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