Rebels and Underdogs by Garin Pirnia

Author:Garin Pirnia [Pirnia, Garin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Lightning Books
Published: 2018-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

FILTER // NINE INCH NAILS

There was this ’tude coming from so much of Cleveland at this time. Maybe I was a little hard on people, too. I just remember thinking to myself, fuck this.

—Richard Patrick

Cleveland did not invent industrial music—you can thank England’s Throbbing Gristle for being an early progenitor—but in the eighties and nineties, Clevelanders Richard Patrick and Trent Reznor helped give the city one of its most distinguishing sounds. Richard Patrick was born in Massachusetts but moved to Bay Village, Ohio, in 1976, at the age of eight. (His older brother is Robert Patrick, who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.) Trent Reznor also grew up on the East Coast, in Pennsylvania, and moved to Cleveland after a year in college in the mid-eighties. In high school Patrick had a band called the AKT, which, much to his chagrin, sounded like U2. “A record company had wrote [me] back and said, ‘We’re not into this. We like the singer’s voice but you sound too much like U2.’ I had this scorned teenage boy overreaction,” Patrick recalls. “I removed my U2 posters off the wall.” While hanging out at a record store, a friend walked in and told Patrick his music reminded him of Chicago band Ministry’s 1988 industrial record The Land of Rape and Honey. “And I’m like, holy fuck,” Patrick says. “Overnight I realized how different it was to take synthesizers and samplers and something used by Depeche Mode and Information Society. That’s what the Exotic Birds were doing with synthesizers, but wimpy.”

Once in the mid-eighties the AKT opened for the Exotic Birds, a synth-pop group in which Reznor played keyboards. (He also played keys for Slam Bamboo, the antithesis of what NIN would be.) So when Patrick and Reznor ran into each other at local audio store Pi Keyboards and Audio, Reznor remembered him. The two started hanging out, right around the time Reznor was shaping Nine Inch Nails’ debut record, Pretty Hate Machine. Patrick had been influenced by Ministry and also by the Canadian hard-core group Skinny Puppy. “Skinny Puppy was unbelievable,” Patrick says. “They were the most unvarnished, terrifying, avant-garde crazy shit we had ever heard.” He told Reznor how much he loved industrial music, “and Trent goes, ‘I got signed to a record company and I want [you] to go on tour [with me].’” TVT Records released the platinum-selling Pretty Hate Machine in 1989. “Trent, he didn’t want to be as heavy as Skinny Puppy or as light as Depeche Mode. I wanted to be somewhere between Depeche Mode and Skinny Puppy, and that was what he sent to me when he was playing me Pretty Hate Machine.” Unfortunately for Patrick, Reznor bought him a pink guitar to play on tour, because pink is in the album’s record cover. “I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to have pink on my body,’” Patrick says. “So I took the guitar home and Sharpee’d the whole thing black. I showed up the next day.

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