Dresden Dolls Impaled on Nine Inch Nails: A Visceral Concert Review

“I’m drunk,” I said to my buddy Ross. “Oh, yeah, this is going to be a great show,” he said.

When you’re on Colfax in Denver at 8 o’clock at night, you know you’re going to have a story to tell, or at least get drunk. I was shooting for both. And two hours before Trent Reznor took the stage, the crowd off of Colfax already had proven itself an important, explosive element to the show’s energy and to this story.

On Wednesday, May 4, 2005, Nine Inch Nails performed their second show in a row of the “With Teeth Tour” at the Fillmore Auditorium. Just walking into this sold-out auditorium felt like walking into a classic rock concert, but I placed all of my expectations for the upcoming show on my first Nine Inch Nails concert experience.

I first thrashed to a NIN concert in 1994. On that particular tour, a band of attractively pornographic freaks I had never heard of named Marilyn Manson opened the show. For their first stage act, they freely distributed religious material: the Lord’s good word in the form of pocket-sized Gideon’s stamped with 666 and other satanic verses.

The Jim Rose Circus quickly followed with their circus-show of mayhem and masochism. All of this went down in the buckle of the Bible Belt: Norman, Oklahoma. It was a great, grisly middle finger to the religious conservatives who had tried to smother our youth. Eleven years later, I wondered if tonight’s show could possibly be as entertaining, or vengefully sweet.

            Promptly at 8 o’clock, after coming to the realization that I was drunk, The Dresden Dolls took the opening stage. Simultaneously, the auditorium filled with eerie purple light and  . . . the musk of cloves? I turned to Ross and said, “Ugh, cloves.” That’s not what I was expecting. “Goths,” he stated, and shrugged. Thankfully, a sweeter, mellower smoke eventually overpowered the stench of cloves.

And who the hell was this band? I found their name elusive. I kept thinking of their name as a possible allusion to the scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house Five where Nazis execute an American POW for stealing porcelain dolls he picked from the rubble of the aftermath of Dresden’s firebombing. At that moment, I decided I liked their name, but I had no idea that I was about to fall in love.

In front of us, Amanda Palmer, the lead singer and keyboardist for The Dresden Dolls, dove into a sensual mutilation of her Kurzweil synth wearing an erotic, black tank-top. The band’s Buster Keatonesque drummer, Brian Viglione, purposefully flailed in a violent silent-film of percussion. I stared in shocked fascination.

As Amanda mimed a frantic sideshow during Brian’s early drum solo, I grabbed Ross and screamed, “This band is awesome!” The audience even hailed them as if they were the headlining band. Then a suddenly animatronic Amanda ticked out their best-known song, “Coin Operated Boy,” bathed in a purple light and a sing-along crowd. Unexpectedly I knew this song, remembered it from some hazy house party.

Before the excitement of their “hit” song faded, a forest of hands sprang up to a guitar riff I didn’t immediately recognize. But then I recognized it, and I found myself singing along to a gratifying cover of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. The crowd’s singing-in-their-car voices nearly drowned out the band. Then the wicked, white-faced drummer and the beautiful voxgician finished us off with a sweeping lullaby about Amsterdam, and some convivial dancing. Everyone seemed to agree that we were sad to see them go.

I immediately felt the alcohol wearing off and headed for the bathroom. “Earth, Wind, and Fire,” said a man pissing in the sink next to me. “Excuse me?” I said. “Earth, Wind, and Fire, man!” he repeated. “Oh, yeah!” I said, before we headed off to wash our hands in the toilet. Was I at the right show? I couldn’t decide. Afterward, I was relieved to discover that the beer queue was shorter than the bathroom’s, so I was plenty drunk again but the time I swam my way through the crowd back to Ross.

I found Ross excitedly talking to a young couple, anticipating NIN. “It’s hot,” I yelled at them, drinking my beer. “I know,” said the girl, “I almost can’t take it!” I told her, “This crowd’s a sea of writhing flesh like drunken maggots on fresh road kill!” That statement evidently caught the attention of the obligatory nine-foot-tall-guy that always stands beside you at concerts. He said, “You’d better finish that beer before you spill it on me.” “You finish it!” I joked. But then he grabbed my beer, chugged it, the lights blacked out, we sardined with a deafening roar, and Ross vanished.

Nine Inch Nails arose on stage to a background of elongated violet fluorescents and a gut-wrenching boom. The crowd churned and surged forward as hands flew into the air. Trent tore into the first song with nihilistic teeth. I could not think of a word to describe this initial moment of the show, so I had to coin a new one: sedatious. It was totally sedatious. It felt like the discipline of fire and desire. The crowd lost all coherence, melting into an ocean of sweaty emotion.

After the initial introduction by a few songs off the new album, Trent quietly loitered on stage like a cloned emo kid, he himself the godfather of emo. He didn’t introduce his band, which included Alessandro Cortini of Italy’s Modwheelmood, the now veteran NIN drummer Jerome Dillon, the newly added guitarist Aaron North, and A Perfect Circle’s Jeordie White, a.k.a. Twiggy Ramirez of Marilyn Manson. Trent’s only words to the crowd came during this moment. He took pause to listen to the cheers inflating the auditorium, and reflected out loud, “All you fuckin’ people.” I couldn’t decide if that third word was intended as an adjective or a verb. Both meanings felt appropriate.

Even in my drunkenness, I sensed something different about this new NIN. No longer did Trent and company play with an earsplitting, crushing crash. There wasn’t the angst and the anger that once pushed the band to unbearable decibels and rampages of onstage destruction. Their sound seethed with the maturity of adulthood, as if Trent now only pondered his condition in life, rather than raged about it.

I recognized this metamorphosis of identity. The new song Everyday Is Exactly The Same portrayed a philosophy that had shifted from obsessing over emotions to one of acceptance and tolerance. Because of this, I found myself still relating to the music of NIN. While remaining provocative, the music now embraced more self-evaluation than self-loathing. We all had matured together from longhaired high-school groaners to shorthaired corporate moaners. Is NIN edging into the realm of classic rock? Am I getting philosophical at a rock concert? Maybe these things aren’t bad.

But this doesn’t mean the show lacked emotion. Bathed in a single white light, Trent cried a soothing rendition of Something I Can Never Have followed by the mosh-pittiness of Terrible Lie during which I helped pick up my fair share of fallen comrades while indulging in the rampage a bit myself.

The recent radio repeater “The Hand That Feeds” flooded over the crowd like a warm bath of blood. I kept thinking, “Our generation doesn’t bite the hand that feeds; it bites it off!” Then Trent probed the crowd with Closer as everyone leapt as one huge monster. Bodies and water bottles took flight at the same time, which perfectly fed into March Of The Pigs. The crowd’s energy simply prevailed throughout the entire show. But no single song highlighted this indulgence more than Hurt, the musical apex of the concert.

The performance itself was half as good as the show in ‘94. It was in need of more thrashing, crashing, and smashing, but the obvious maturity of the band made this impossible. They didn’t destroy a single instrument on stage and Trent looked like an emo’d G.I. Joe with his ripped biceps and shirt-stretching chest. He’s obviously destroyed his rage in the gym rather than in the studio. And even though this show didn’t produce the “up-yours” to society as it did a decade ago, it still reflected a grim shadow of our still desperate lives.

When the lights came up, everyone mingled in the well-trained expectation of an encore. An encore that never came. I collapsed in exhaustion.

After the show ended, and Ross found me in a drunken, withered haze on the floor, I was left with one more, trite philosophical thought inspired by Trent’s lucid lyrics: “Don’t draw a line between what’s yours and what’s mine. In due time we will all experience the sublime, whether it’s by wine or by your hand or by mine.”

Moan. It was time to get off Colfax and go home.

 Aaron Souders

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