Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (13 page)

We’re all waiting with baited breath for whatever may come with NIN, knowing that something will. While I may not be the super-fan I once was, I still get a charge out of knowing that soon enough I’ll get to hear what Trent is working on. Can’t say I have any expectations. But as long as he’s working, I’ll be waiting and listening.

The farms of Ohio had been replaced by shopping malls, and Muzak filled the air from Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls.

The Pretenders, “My City Was Gone”

They said a riot was going to break out. That’s why police and fire marshals sent home 20–25,000 mostly black music fans trying to get into the Moondog Coronation Ball at the 10,000-seat Cleveland Arena on March 21, 1952. Promoters DJ Alan Freed and record-store owner Leo Mintz had printed too many tickets, never thinking they’d sell out the place. The openers played only one song before the authorities arrived to find some 6,000 fans still in line that icy evening, along with a crushing crowd, broken window glass strewn about, doors forced open, and small fights erupting even as some thousands stood waiting to hear the evening’s bill of R&B, the music Mintz and Freed had called “rock ’n’ roll” to help it pass with white listeners. Although the kids went home that night, the story of the evening, and more
importantly the music of it, would go on to ignite riots not only in nightclubs, at dances, and in theaters but also at home, in school, and in church.

The story of rock ’n’ roll was that it then incited progressive social change. It was said to have ended segregation both on the radio and on the dance floor, and from those places it was said to have spread out into everyday life. But it wasn’t that simple, at least not in the place where the rock ’n’ roll riot started.

Take, for instance, one of Cleveland’s first rock stars, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a black conservatory-trained blues singer who wanted to be a serious concert vocalist like Paul Robeson. After a drunken session led him to record wild-man horror vocals on his 1956 R&B tune “I Put a Spell on You,” he found himself in the position of living out the gag for rock ’n’ roll audiences, with Alan Freed offering a hefty tip if he’d enter gigs in a coffin. Hawkins incorporated the so-called “cannibal,” a bone-through-the-nose gimmick, full on. The NAACP found the latter offense, and National Coffin Association the former: white fans, especially the Brits, loved the schtick. Hawkins hated it so much that he developed a drug problem to cope, especially with the coffin. This is the story of the first goth-rock stage show.

The fifties was the decade when Cleveland was its largest: 915,000 people, with some 42 percent working in manufacturing. The city’s shift from a settlement of seven in 1800 to being the seventh largest city in the country by 1900 occurred when Cleveland became a manufacturing hub for the north in the Civil War. That era saw the rise of neighborhoods like Hough, where local industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller built mansions from profits on Cleveland’s industries: steel, iron, oil, railroads, car manufacturing, and heavy machinery.

Immigrants and migrants came to Cleveland to find work. In the nineteenth century, they were largely Catholic Europeans, and the city’s Anglo-Saxon settlers demanded that the immigrants go through educational, health, and religious programming that would teach them the proper standards for being “white” Americans. While each group maintained aspects of its cultural identity in ethnic enclaves, the assimilation project was largely successful and complete by the early twentieth century. The next wave were black Americans who came to Cleveland as part of the first wave of the Great Migration (1910–40). While work was abundant, housing for black families was costly and scarce, and established Anglo-Saxon and ethnic Catholic European enclaves used law, intimidation, and violence to maintain the divisions. More than 150,000 black southerners arrived in the second wave of the Great Migration (1940–70). White Clevelanders responded by moving to the rapidly incorporating ring of suburbs accessed on new, federally built beltways, where they built homes using federally insured mortgages. A core of poverty began to form downtown as the suburbs flourished. Mall projects—Van Aken-Warrenville, Eastgate, Westgate, Southgate, Parmatown, Golden Gate—anchored these newly forming places in the fifties. With white flight from Cleveland went jobs of all types.

By the late fifties, the core of Cleveland was in desperation. Housing for 1,800 families, mostly black, was bulldozed for being “unsafe” during the city’s urban renewal program, but no developer stepped forward, and the land lost its value. One eventual use was the controversial 1972 Erieview Mall. A city planner said the project “could be viewed as the catalyst which pulled the downtown area out of an otherwise inevitable downward spiral,” but in the sixties, it was a drain on the city’s attention and resources.
⁵⁵
The HUD
displacement exacerbated the ongoing housing shortage for black Clevelanders, who were often unable to get mortgages due to redlining.

In the sixties and seventies, inner-city schools were overcrowded and underfunded. Prior to the court-mandated desegregation of Cleveland schools in 1976, the city began busing students in overcrowded areas to surrounding neighborhoods. At the Murray Hill School in Little Italy, black students bused from Glenville were barred from using the swimming pool and cafeteria, and could use the gym and restrooms only at certain times. A civil rights group, the United Freedom Movement, decided to picket the school on January 30, 1964, but its plan was met with a mob of 1,500 neighbors who kicked, spat at, and punched the protesters.
⁵⁶
Meanwhile, an increasingly desperate situation was developing in the formerly affluent Hough, now two square miles of mansions hastily subdivided and run by slumlords, where 70,000 residents, mostly black, lived in poor conditions amid exploitative businesses.

A riot broke out in Hough on July 16, 1966. The bar where the chaos began—where a white bartender refused to serve a black patron a free glass of water with his pint of wine—was burned, as was the local HUD office and businesses known to exploit their neighbors. The National Guard was called in at the request of the mayor. Fires raged across the neighborhood for days. An observer told
Time
magazine that it was “instant urban renewal.”
⁵⁷
After the rioting stopped, four black Clevelanders were dead, one shot miles from the riots in Little Italy, and 46 were injured. The once decent community of small shopkeepers fled, and Hough became even rougher, as the post-riot neighborhood was patrolled by a now incensed police force.

Hough was after the Watts riots, but before many riots
that would occur in black neighborhoods in the mid to late sixties, a symptom of the long-standing injustices that had not been resolved for these communities. It was proof that the civil rights movement still had much to do to ensure that equal rights would be enacted in everyday life. Rather than rebuild the Hough community and address its problems of discrimination that underpinned the city’s problems, Cleveland politicians looked to punish those who’d begun the riot, putting blame on the Communist Party and black militant groups, which the NAACP and the Urban League countered to little avail. From this point on, the tenuous unity of Cleveland was split: white and black, rich and poor, suburban and urban.

In Cleveland in the sixties, the biggest local band to arise was the O’Jays, named after their mentor, the respected local black radio DJ, Eddie O’Jay. They’d been kicking around the R&B scene for a decade when pioneering producers Gamble and Huff finally helped make them stars with socially conscious spin on their Philadephia soul style. Their “For the Love of Money,” from the 1973 album
Ship Ahoy
, could even be heard as the more faith-based polemical funk precursor to “Head Like a Hole.”

In the suburbs, the Beatles became the big thing, and the mods went downtown only to pick up their imported Melody Makers. The mods supported local garage bands Cyrus Erie and the Choir, who became the power-pop band the Raspberries in the seventies. At that time, Cleveland was the launch pad for British rockers hoping to break-in in the States, with local radio playing the Kinks and Small Faces as if those bands were their own. Cleveland was also brewing the James Gang, that blend of heavy with mellow, southern rock with western, which helped to form the AOR template.

In the seventies, Cleveland was known as the barometer for American rock-music taste, but it was also a textbook illustration of the impact of white flight and industrial disinvestment. Whole city neighborhoods were abandoned, with 20,000 people leaving for the suburbs each year, for a net loss of 24 percent of the population in one decade. Manufacturers left multi-story inner-city factories for single-story plants near their employees in the suburbs, or went to nonunion areas in the south. In 1978, Cleveland became the first major U.S. city to default on its loans since the Depression.

In this environment, Cleveland’s punks could claim to be in an apocalypse for which they were merely reporters. Cleveland-to-New York City transplants the Dead Boys sharpened Iggy Pop’s confrontations into early hardcore-punk fury, while Pere Ubu sought not a cure but a “final solution” through desperate post-punk skronks and synths that were so grim, they conjured the flames on the Cuyahoga River more than they carried a tune. Before punk became a cliché, these were its danger sounds, elements cherished by the local scene that would come again when Nine Inch Nails played early Cleveland gigs. And then there was the Michael Stanley Band, which toiled as the region’s heartland rock contender, selling out many local arenas but never really getting out of town.

In 1980, there were 574,000 Clevelanders, and the ratio of black residents had increased 44 percent, from 16 percent in 1950, as white flight continued. In 1987, unemployment was 11.4 percent overall, and even higher for young, black Clevelanders. With 86,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than there had been two decades prior, the city was shifting to a service economy, which meant lower wages and less traditionally masculine forms of labor. Former factory workers generally would not take service jobs out of pride and
memory for better times. Always gritty, Cleveland became a cliché of urban decay, with abandoned mills, empty commercial structures, and grimy waterfronts.

As the underground music scene of the eighties moved from punk to new wave, it was full of great bands like the Generators, the band Paul Schrader followed for his
Light of Day
script. He could have followed any number at the time: the Wild Giraffes, Easter Monkeys, the Clocks, Human Switchboard, Lucky Pierre, the Adult, Boy Wonder/Slam Bam Boo. All had huge local followings, but none managed to succeed beyond the region. One band did make it, by punk standards: Death of Samantha, goofy local college-rockers signed to Homestead Records. They had Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins opening for them before they broke up in 1990, and later reemerged as Cobra Verde. But more often there were bands like System 56, the solo bedroom project of Steve Simenic, who in 1984 was the first local artist to sell out Lakewood’s Phantasy Nite Club. Two shows later, he quit playing music.

His bassist for the three gigs was Tom Lash, who that year became the roommate of teenage college dropout and aspiring new-wave keyboardist Trent Reznor, a self-proclaimed hick from western Pennsylvania who sought his musical fortune in the big city. Lash, a longtime player in the local scene, credits Trent’s decision to think beyond Cleveland as an early part of his success. “The local scene was a road to nowhere,” Lash says. “Instead, NIN got a publicist and tried to represent themselves as a regional band or bigger, and tried to get out and get opening gigs for Skinny Puppy, and play out of town.”
⁵⁸

Indeed, to be a rock band in Cleveland in the eighties meant you weren’t going far, but the city’s black pop-music scene found more national exposure, starting with the 1982
success of the Dazz Band, whose “Let It Whip,” a Devo-like bedroom command that was equal parts new wave and funk, an electro, post-disco, boogie track with a killer bassline, Kraftwerkian drum machine, and eerie Minimoog. Later in the decade, LeVert, a group formed by two sons of the O’Jays’ Eddie Levert, found pop success with the New Jack Swing–style drum machine, warbling synth bass, and soulful vocals of “Casanova.” Gerald LeVert, one year older than Trent Reznor (who helped LeVert-related sessions during his time at Right Track), wrote songs for the era’s R&B giants and brought other local acts like the Rude Boys into the black pop spotlight while staying firmly rooted in the city.
⁵⁹

As important as these musicians were to black American pop, white Clevelanders knew little about them. When Gerald died, in 2006, the coverage of his memorial in the
Plain Dealer
angered some readers, prompting the paper’s ombudsman to write, “It is always dangerous to generalize about race, but it is impossible not to note the reaction separated along racial lines: Black readers were complimentary and grateful that the paper acknowledged LeVert’s passing with such sensitive and vigorous coverage. White readers were puzzled—some even stunned—at the fuss over somebody many of them had never heard of.”
⁶⁰
John Soeder, the reporter-critic who led the coverage, said, “For me, the surprise underscored the notion that there really are two Americas.”

In this context, the movement from the demos heard on
Purest Feeling
to
Pretty Hate Machine
was away from the musical restrictions of Cleveland’s white new-wave scene and toward the black pop scene Reznor heard in the studio and on the radio with Prince and Public Enemy.
Pretty Hate Machine
’s use of sampling, drum sounds, and new synth technologies make NIN as materially kin to eighties black
pop music as much as it makes Trent’s music industrial; the album’s near-raps, funk vocal flourishes, frank discussions of sex, and sparse, electro production tie
PHM
to larger trends in the era’s black music culture. Its relentlessly melodic vocals place it solidly within both black and white new waves. That the album is remembered for the shards of harsh guitar and growled vocals that point to industrial rock is itself an erasure. To subsequently hear
PHM
as rock, one is aided by the facts that Reznor spent the nineties surrounded by a coterie of misanthropic white men like himself, that NIN was contextualized into alt. rock, and that the band moved toward dissonant textures and away from funky, dark, and danceable beats.