All The Pigs, All Lined Up

It’s 5:45am. We bike down 5th avenue, cutting through the intersection at Van Buren once the two mid-90s chevy half-cabs have passed by. They’re both beat to shit.

“Do we cut over one here?” Brittany asks.

I look ahead, seeing the clump of people standing awkwardly at the corner of Washington.

“Not anymore”, I yell my shoulder. Damn. how are there already this many people here? I can’t believe it. But that’s fine. Because the biggest theme of your 20s is that you slowly believe the unbelievable, forever. And that’s enough nihilism for a 5:45am line for a physical ticket release to see Nine Inch Nails. I pedal faster.

Brittany holds the spot, while I park the bikes. Cartel opens at 6 downtown, even on Saturday, which feels like a miracle right now as I rub the sleep out of my eyes. I walk in and hear “Infinity Guitars” by Sleigh Bells tear into my skull. Somehow that song always makes me feel hungover, even when I’m not.

“You know they’re coming here, right?” I try to humbly make amends for my early morning interruption. “They’re opening for Weezer and the Pixies.”

That sentence sounds like a joke from a parallel universe of alt-rock mashups. I don’t think she believes me. I wouldn’t.

Coffee burns my tongue. I walk back past the front of Comerica, where a few bulbs have burnt out of the LED sign. “Cold and Black and Infinite. North America 2018. Sep 13 + 14  - Phoenix / AZ. Comerica Theater. No lineups before 8am.” Directly below, there are sleeping bags and camping chairs for those who have been here since 4. One guy claims he’s been here all night. He wears a volunteer t-shirt from the Wave Goodbye tour and he has a boombox. “Piggy” starts playing. A groan rises from the half-asleep line.

Can’t you be a little more creative?

I hand coffee to Brittany. She folds a page in Chuck Klosterman’s X. 

“Anything interesting?” she asks.

“I saw a guy in a Brett Easton Ellis t-shirt talking to this other dude who looked like Chuck Palahniuk about Survivor. He couldn’t remember if it was the plane crash one or the car crash one.”

She grimaces. “Brett Easton Ellis has t-shirts? What do they look like?”

“They just say Brett Easton Ellis. On the back.”

There are better t-shirts. Plenty of them. Type-O Negative to TacocaT. Plenty of Nine Inch Nails shirts, of course. One nervous looking guy who brought a red foldable chair with a side table has the Add Violence pre-order shirt, staying up with the times. Others celebrate recent festival appearances like Riot Fest or Aftershock. The rest, like mine, are reprints. A call back to a time before my own. Why? Because I deserve it, damn it. I have every right to it, just like all these other bodies out of time. That’s what the internet does. It gives free reign to the latest customer, with the user granted full backwards compatibility to the greatest hits of human history. 

But it’s all a facade, of course. The oldest shirt here belongs to man in his mid forties towards the front of the line. It’s a faded dark blue castaway from Live: With Teeth. The graphic placement and the font put it square in the center of the aughts, out of trend, far from evergreen. He’s the realest one of all of us, but we rewrite the rules to the game. Maybe that’s why Trent wants us all here. In the physical world. Where the song remains the same.

By 7am, the sun has broken the skyline and the queue has wrapped around Adams, where the hesitantly patient wipe sweat from their brow. Street parking has packed out along 5th avenue, with hurried steps walking to and from the parking meters, keeping up on their time and hurrying back, like there’s a chance that mob justice will boot them from their place. Someone has left “Into the Void” playing from their car stereo. I can’t tell if its on purpose.

It’s no mystery that Brittany and I are among the younger of the early crowd, but I still wonder what that means. The biggest Nine Inch Nails fan I’ve ever met is younger than me by a year. We met at Pemberton in 2014, the only two people at the festival who skipped the Kendrick Lamar set at the Mount Currie stage to stake out in the front row of the main. We talked as the sound techs switched gear over from Soundgarden’s armada.

“Have you seen them?” he asks.

“Yeah. Tension. Last year.”

“Rad. Saw that one too” he nods, “I’ve seen them five times”.

“Five?” I turn, looking him up and down, doing the math in my head. They’ve only been back touring for a year. That means at least three of those were Wave Goodbye and back.

“Yeah”, he continues. “The only band I’ve seen more is Metallica.”

From there, he talks about Metallica for a solid hour. No one joins us. I hear the booming bass of “Backseat Freestyle” across the valley field. “Martin had a dream!” the crowd yells. I’d seen Kendrick twice the previous year, once at Bumbershoot, and once opening for Kanye on Yeezus. I was happy for them, but happier for us.

I didn’t buy tickets to Pemberton or Bumbershoot or Yeezus. I got comp tickets through the radio station I wrote for in Seattle. I didn’t buy tickets for Tension either. That one was a present.

“Are you fucking serious?!” I gasped, one month out from the Key Arena date in November. Brittany nods with a smile. It was a surprise. I wouldn’t let myself get the tickets earlier that year - not saving enough. Always the reason. But she knew I was lying to myself. Senseless deprivation. Guilt as useless emotion.

There’s something incredibly special and beautiful and fun about buying tickets far in advance of a concert. It’s a celebration before the celebration you paid for. I like to think beyond the opaque, undefined fees and charges, there is a built in premium for this experience - the fees get bigger with the feeling of victory. It’s something that doesn’t feel nearly as special when you show up last minute with your friends, already two drinks into the night, starting to get careless with your wallet.

On May 10, scrolling through emails at the beginning of a 9am meeting, I saw it. Nine Inch Nails announces In The Physical World, a physical only pre-sale. And in the infinite suspension of jaded disbelief, I hoped it would be a celebration not unlike the one I’d always celebrated privately behind the blue light of a screen.

The doors at Comerica open at 8am. The first 300 people are organized into queue lines inside the lobby. Instantly, the mood changes. No longer is a collection of awkward bodies hunched over phones on the side of the road in a moderately continuous fashion. Now, it’s an event.

Music booms over the lobby speakers. NIN and the JAMC are joined by The Cure, Soft Cell, and Joy Division. I think I heard Adam Ant’s “Physical” in there somewhere too, which, if I did, was a noteworthy and relevant touch. 98.3 KUPD have a booth up but I don’t believe they’re DJing, as they try to raffle off a Rob Zombie tour poster. I squint out the window. They also have a Mackie set up in a 4x4 blasting across 4th ave to hit the line wrapping around the block onto Adams. It’s going to be a long day for them.

There’s a merch booth where you can get a t shirt that says you went to a ticket sale. There’s a table of donuts and energy drink samples but they’re all double chocolate lest anyone lose their goth cred. Zia Records has a booth and a pre-order for Bad Witch. There’s a NIN light box photo op in the corner.

Here, Trent presents us with all the elements of a party, and a good one at that. But the funny thing is, here In The Physical World, we all realize a great truth, as if any one of us needed a reminder: that we are a vast sea of those who come to the party late to play off existing energy and blend gracefully into shadowy wallpaper.

Brittany and I look around at the blacked out windows with NIN posters inhaling the natural light of the early summer morning.

“This is cool”, she says.

“Yeah”, I respond.

We return to our books.

Time passes mercifully. HEALTH comes on over the speakers: “We Are Water”.

“You know they recorded Get Color at Trent’s house?” I say. I read that somewhere. I couldn’t remember if it was true.

“Woah”, Brittany responds, “We should break out DISCO again”.

The guy in front of us turns. He’s one of the few without a band shirt. It’s Hurley or something else vaguely Pac Sun circa 2007, back when it seemed like a good grown up option to the Industrial Ride Shop or Journeys. There’s a baffled expression on his face. “Disco? Hell no, man, that shit is terrible.”

Brittany and I look to each other, lost.

“DISCO? The Health album?”

“Oh”, he backpedals, “I don’t know”. And therein lie the only words spoken between us.

I wonder about this interaction. I wonder what disco did to this man, to wound him so much that he could forget that Nine Inch Nails worked extensively with the great David Bowie, who gave us disco all-timers like “Golden Years” and “John, I’m Only Dancing”. I wondered how he’d forgotten “I’m Afraid of Americans” and the 1995 tour where Nine Inch Nails and Bowie together ended a set of Downward Spiral material with “Under Pressure”.

Wasn’t it disco that influenced Throbbing Gristle to make “Hot on the Heels of Love”, changing industrial music forever? Wasn’t it disco that gave Iggy Pop the vibe for “Nightclubbing”, where Trent would eventually take his samples for “Closer”? What the hell is wrong with disco?

But I kept all of this inside, as I turned back to the final chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale, a long overdue reading of Brittany’s favorite author. I thought about “Heresy” and how well it would soundtrack this show. Then I thought about that scene in The Walking Dead that used “Somewhat Damaged” and how goofy it was. Then I thought about the video for “Deep” with the green goop which is exactly where my mind spirals whenever I get to thinking about Nine Inch Nails pop culture. All these insular thoughts, spiraling in my mind, keeping me further from physical occupation. A woman moves past me in the line, trying to get to the merch. I apologize for existing.

With Teeth was the third NIN record I listened to. I acquired it at the library, popping it into my car stereo on the way home from school, making it through “The Collector” before pulling into my driveway. And it was there, in that moment, after weeks of thinking through Pretty Hate Machine and the Downward Spiral, that I realized why Trent’s visions felt so different to me than other bands I was into. It is the strict juxtaposition of two competing bodies, both all consuming in their relative gravity, both starved and out for blood, both begging for more. These, of course, are “I” and “you”. Trent’s songs were confessions of struggle between two objects. But while Pretty Hate Machine had made me feel like these two were two different people, I was coming to see now on With Teeth that these were simply two sides of the self, competing, vying for control. 

Even here, even now, in a sea of familiars, where echoes of “Hey, nice shirt!” resound like a group mantra, we find ways to be singular. To convince ourselves we are the only one. Finding comfort in the singular struggle. Wrestling with the terrible lie. Thinking we used to have purpose. Hurting ourselves to see if we feel. Wishing there was something real and something true.

But the funny thing is, that truth is all around us, right here, in the weaving lines in front and behind, if only we choose to see it. There’s probably another version, sure, but why complicate things? This one, where I am in a room full of people I don’t hate, simply by the same simple values we share… this one seems pretty damn good.

Hours pass, and I walk away from the queue victorious. The envelope in my hand feels heavy with conquest. I stop ever so briefly under an oddly placed tarp. A box with headphones running out of it sits protected from the sun. But a security guard ushers me past.

“We can’t have a crowd building up here.”

So much build to a cascade of silence. I wouldn’t find out it was a listening station until that afternoon.

A week passes. Thursday, ticket sales resumed. At 10am, I jumped on from my cubicle, just to see what was left. Turns out, Thursday still had plenty of pit spots left. Friday, the pit was gone, but rows 15 back still had pairs of seats available in the center sections.

I sat back, equally stunned and amused. My four and a half hours of line time were, to the person that will be standing next to me against the rail on September 13, four and a half hours of peaceful, unbroken rest. Another version of me, the one from high school, the unquenchable zealot, would bend over and vomit into the waste bin. But now, in my late 20s, that’s not hard to believe at all.

That’s another lesson. Value what you value. And whatever quantitative assignment someone else slaps on your experience, remember how painful and sad it is to watch people guess how much a washing machine costs on The Price is Right. It’s all a simulation, not the actual events, and everyone seems to be asleep. But at 5:45am, everyone was wide awake, standing in line, politely nodding at each other’s Gojira and Godsmack t shirts, waiting for a celebration.

So what are you waiting for?