NINE INCH NAILS: WITH TEETH 2005-2006
LONDON, UK [THE ASTORIA]
3.30.05
By Calliope
Zowie. Where to begin... The venue, that'll do.
The Venue.
This will mean nothing to those unfamiliar with the following Los Angeles locations, but for those who are familiar with them, the Astoria was very much like someone did his best to fit the Wiltern into the Troubadour. I would not bet the rent on it, but I don't believe that Nine Inch Nails has EVER played a space so small. When they opened for Mary Chain in '89, they were playing places the likes of the Universal Amphitheatre, and the following year they were part of the first Lollapalooza tour, which, granted, was of somewhat more reasonable proportions than the seething beast into which it developed, but even then it was big enough to fill what was at the time called Irvine Meadows (now Verizon Wireless). It's been amphitheatres and Enormodomes ever since. It is impossible to overstress the utter surreality of attending to Trent & Co. in a room smaller than the Ventura Theatre. They left the candelabra side-lighting at home, and I would not be surprised if it was because there wasn't the space available for it (the superswank vertical backdrop lighting was in effect, however).
The Dresden Dolls.
They were hot. Seriously hot. I rather expected to be annoyed by them, for which I apologize profusely. How two people -- seated, no less -- can be so completely entertaining and generate so much noise defies all reason. And their cover of "War Pigs" RULED. If someone can explain to me how you produce a note-for-note version of a song played by four male Brits while substituting a keyboard for guitar and bass and with a female singer from Boston, I will reward you with, well, probably with kind words and not much else, since I haven't a lot in the way of fabulous prizes lying round. Anyway, if you can find their opening song, "Good Day," to download, do so immediately and then go buy their CD. Had they been warming up for just about anyone other than Nine Inch Nails *cough*for example*cough*Manson*cough*cough*, they would have stolen the show outright. But they *were* warming up for Nine Inch Nails, and even if the 30th was nothing to the 31st, it was still *all* about Nine Inch Nails.
The Setlist.
I'll do the best I can without referring to other messageboards, as from what I've heard here, I'd as soon not bother reading about how inferior the first night was to the second or how Jeordie "just stood there". However much those in attendance may be complaining after the fact, trust me, on the evening in question, they were screaming their bloody heads off, singing along even to the songs they weren't supposed to have heard yet, shoving to get as close to the front as possible, and just generally acting as though God himself had suggested that they would have to be more enthusiastic if they wanted to get into Heaven. As to the setlist, from the bits I'm sure of, I think it was probably the same as the Fresno show, which is as well, as I would be certain to miff the order (call me crazy, but I like to pay attention to the band at a concert, not to note-taking).
All the Love in the World
You Know What You (Fucking) Are (amazing how quickly you learn the chorus of this one)
March of the Pigs
The Line Begins to Blur
Piggy
Terrible Lie
The Collector
Closer
Home
Burn
Gave Up
With Teeth
Even Deeper
Hurt
Wish
The Hand that Feeds
Starfuckers
Head Like a Hole
The Gory Details.
I started out on the floor at the left of the house, pretty much in front of the PA and back far enough to get a fair view of the whole stage over the heads of the obligatorily-taller-than-me crowd. Things progressively began to compact between sets, and I was grafted into a crew of very pretty twenty-something long-haired London boys, who declared we could, with solidarity, maintain our position.
As soon as Nine Inch Nails came on stage, we were mashed together so closely that in certain countries I would surely be required by law to marry them all without delay. As soon as the second song began, there was an enormous crowd surge in which I was quite literally ripped away from them, carried off, and deposited about ten feet away, directly in front of Jeordie and a person and a half behind the barricade, where I clung for dear life to the shoulder of the very large gentleman just ahead of me for the rest of the show. Fair enough, as various folk were clinging to *me* throughout the night (and I am not the most substantial girl you ever saw), including one about three people back who had a death-grip on my hair the whole night. I have not been in a pit like that since...since...um...since...probably since Jane's Addiction circa Nothing's Shocking at the Palace (where the pit would manage to be deadly for Barry Manilow, although, truth to tell, having experienced the joy of holding the aisles at a BM New Year's Eve show back in my hired-thug days, I can state with some authority that his fans are more bacchanal and more desperate to touch him than Trent's or even dear MM's, and also that they are all bigger than me). A girl near my left shoulder as well kept taking hanks of my hair with her every time she put her hand in the air (someone on my right was doing this, too), and eventually offered me an elastic as an apology, which was very sweet of her, I thought. I still have it, although I never got to use it, as I was never able to move my arms enough to put my hair into a ponytail (not to mention that whoever it was three people back never let go; I am so Rapunzel...).
It was a sauna in there. It was stifling, it was smoky, and it was sticky. Besides Trent throwing water bottles, the guards behind the barricade were steadily handing out cups of water (some of which, unfortunately, some dorkwit kept launching at Jeordie). Following Trent's lead (with the water bottles), at times they just showered the contents of the cups over us, which was not exactly a bad thing. Jeordie contributed as well, although he sprayed the water through his mouth more than he did from any plastic container, and I think rather more for his own benefit than ours (it must have been ridiculously hot on stage as well; everyone on it was drenched in record time). When I got back to my hotel that night, about a fifteen-minute walk from the Astoria past the British Museum in the cold, I was still soaked through to the skin with my own sweat, the sweat of the people around me, some sweat from Trent's hair, and water from the various sources mentioned above, which included much of Jeordie's saliva (bow down before me, o lowly Nü-Mansonite Kindergoths unable to get past the 16-and-up age limit).
The view from these quarters was pretty much restricted to Back Of Head, Jeordie, Alessandro, Back of Head, Occasional Glimpse of Trent. It was, nevertheless, near enough to see the Tortex logos on Jeordie's picks (yellow for bass, blue for guitar) and the green tag of the tea-sachet hanging from Trent's cup (and the steam rising from it). You could see the crescents in Jeordie's fingernails and the crinkles in his chin when he grimaced. He grimaced quite a lot. And he paced. Particularly he was pacing from the sidefill to a spot upstage between the drum and keyboard risers. It looked like he was having some sort of trouble with the monitor mix, as he tended to do this especially between backing vocals. But whatever it was that was troubling him, it was not the music. He was playing as comfortably, both on bass and guitar (for the record, a black Stingray, black and white Fender P-Basses, and a black Gibson Les Paul), as if this music came to him instinctively, which it probably does at this point. And he was singing along when away from the mike, above and beyond his own duties in front of it. In any case, he was hardly stationary, and did his share of jumping about and stalking around, and if it was an off night, he's all the same got more stage presence than most musicians ten years his junior. Trent did not draft Jeordie into this far-less-kind, far-less-gentle NIN line-up out of charity. We all know what a perfectionist our Mr. Reznor is. His music and stage right are in the hands they should be in, period.
And so is stage left. If I have one regret (besides that I couldn't go the second night), it's that I could not see much of Aaron North, save when he came over to visit, and when he climbed on top of his sidefill (although I did see bits of his guitar flying when he smashed it). Aaron is a wild-eyed slavering fucking madman. He's *brilliant*.
I should have liked to see rather more of Trent, as well, the only man on the planet who can play a tambourine and look hopelessly cool at the same time. I did not see him dive into the crowd during "Piggy", but I saw his feet as he was handed back to the stage (incidentally, the crowd had quite a lot of practice handing people over the barricade into the safety of No Man's Land; at least three people were passed to the guards before Trent).
I was not in what anyone would call an aural sweet spot, and at times the sound was downright mushy. At other times, you could feel it through the floor. At all times, the music was nothing short of mindboggling. Even "Starfuckers, Inc." was outrageously good, and I don't actually like that song. I wish we could have had "The Wretched", but I do like "Even Deeper," and have no complaints about the setlist, which was a pretty democratic mix of old and new. As for the new (with which, Trent said, because it had "been a long fucking time," they were going to punish us), "The Line Begins to Blur" is just unbelievable and "With Teeth" is perhaps the best song Trent's ever written. And that's saying something.
It was staggering. I was, as Trent promised I would be, destroyed. Entirely.