Sat 10/5 @ 7PM
The genesis of Nine Inch Nails can be traced back to Cleveland.
Band founder/leader Trent Reznor conceptualized the band while living in Cleveland in the mid ’80s. It was in Cleveland that he put together the band’s atom bomb of a debut, the staggeringly influential Pretty Hate Machine.
It came to slow boil as the band toured relentlessly, and pretty soon, half the bands out here wanted to be NIN, with a multitude imitating the album’s inspired confluence of goth, industrial, techno, pop, and hard rock.
And legions of gloomy, self-absorbed musicians wanted to emulate Reznor’s model of forming a shell of a band around one person’s angst, misery, and self-loathing, as well as his charismatic presence.
Musicians have come and gone from NIN over the years, always merely agents for Reznor’s vision. The band itself has come and gone, as Reznor has moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans and back to L.A., and dealt with drug issues and, more happily, his marriage and birth of his children during his 2009-2013 hiatus.
Last month, he put out his first album in five years, Hesitation Marks. While his music range, which was enormous from the beginning, allows him to tinker with his sound and still sound familiar, it shows that some things never change: he’s still the patron saint of kids who wear a lot of black and romanticize suicide.
Now he’s back on tour and he’ll be at the Wolstein Center — only blocks from where he recorded Pretty Hate Machine at the former Right Track Recording at 21st and Payne. Explosions in the Sky opens.