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Friday night after work, I went to the nails show. Hell freakin yea. The whole issue with my ID and everything ended up working out. Me and my buddy I went to the show with, Jared, headed up to the Note after work. Again, no one was there, and their mail was still in the mailbox, so no one had been there at all that day. So I waited outside the place for like half an hour while I was on the phone with Ticketmaster trying to have the name of the person my tickets were being held at will call under to Jared’s name, so we could at least still get our tickets. But at 5:30p, someone came up to the place and started opening it up, so I got his attention, he remembered me from being there the previous night, and gave me my ID and credit card back. That was a hell of a relief, cause it put us in decent time to get there. Then we booked it on up to the congress, and I ended up spending like 45 minutes being one of ‘those guys’–walkin up and down the sidewalk asking ‘need a ticket? need a ticket?’–to get rid of the extra two tickets I had that Tolgar and Tina were initially supposed to take. But alas, I hocked them off, and met up with Jared back in the Congress a good 15 minutes before the show was supposed to start.

When the nails first came on, of course the crowd went crazy, everyone rushed the stage and we got caught in the standard wave of people at rock shows. But the sound was horrible, we couldn’t hear the vocals at all over the crowd noise, the drummer started playing, but we couldn’t hear jack. It was just really bad. After like 1 minute or two, Trent Reznor just stopped playing, said ‘something’s f—-ed up’ and walked off the stage. The stage cleared out, all the other band members left too, and white stage lights came on. It was a good twenty minutes of the crowd screaming obscenities before someone finally came on to say something. From what I hear, he said something to the effect of “we apologize, we’re having technical difficulties, we have every intention of putting the show on, we just need to fix a few things up.” I wouldn’t have known what he said at the time though, cause he was drowned out by all the ‘f—-you’s that were being screamed at him from the crowd around me. Lol. They started testing the left and right channels of the mics, testing hits in the drum set, and after 10 more minutes or so, the lights went back down and the band finally came on. They didn’t say a word, they just went right into Wish off Broken. Hell freakin yea, then they played March of the Pigs off Downward Spiral. HELL freakin YEA. They slammed just about every song I wanted to hear, and a few songs off their newest album. But mostly it was stuff off their first album, Broken, and Downward Spiral. Helllllll yea. Here’s a set list I found based off someone’s memory of the show, but I think its pretty accurate:

wish march of the pigs the line begins to blur (sorry for the fuckup, pigs!) piggy terrible lie burn with teeth closer home reptile big come down gave up the world went away suck hurt the hand that feeds head like a hole

And after Head Like a Hole, shows over, no encore or anything. Just one big set of pure nails, pure energy, it was was awesome. They had Trent on vocals, guitar, and random keyboard playing, a live drummer off to the right, a dude on keys and synths off to the left, a bassist, and another guitarist. I didn’t realize they use Les Pauls for their music. Crazy, the same guitar’s you’d see BB King play are pounding out the loudest, shit at a rock show. Ahhhh, gotta love the Les Pauls.

Their lights were awesome, too. They had these big 5×5’ cubes in a line behind the band that spanned the width of the whole stage. Each of them had their front covered in the these thin vertical lines of LED lights. So they’d make waves of blue or red pass across the whole stage, and staggered and liquid lines of white or green fall from top to bottom. It was just awesome, and a bunch of other random type stuff that all looked really cool. So all in all, it was a TIGHT freaking show. Well worth the 6 years it’s been.

Yesterday was mom’s day, so I chilled with the parents all day. We went to that outlet mall in Aurora and walked around a bit. Then we came back home, and I played a little sitar for my mom, just an alap-style jam in Raag Dharmavati, a south indian raag I learned when I was out in LA. Then we watched Mira Nair’s movie from last year, Vanity Fair. About halfway through the movie, me and my parents were asking each other what the hell that movie was ABOUT. It seemed senseless, and pointless. Basically, it was about a poor girl who’s really good at making herself LOOK rich, so she gets in good with well off family, after well-off family, picking up more STUFF along the way. So the movie shows her going from rich family to rich family, never really settling anywhere, and never really saying much of anything about her, or the characters she interacted with, other than they’re shallow, money-loving mongoloids, but where’s the fun in that? I could walk down the sidewalk on my lunch break to see that. So what was the point? I really didn’t see one. That’s two hours of my life wasted that I’ll never see again. Worthless.