Nine Inch Nails – Toronto, Ontario – April 28, 2000
During spring break, I got tickets to the Nine Inch Nails show in Toronto. The Thursday before the show, Eric came and picked me up to stay overnight in his apartment at RIT. Friday, I spent a few hours in the RIT library, yay, and then around 4:30 me, Eric, Mary, Karl, Dan and their friend who’s name I can’t remember left for Toronto. After a quick stop at Karl’s house and Wendy’s we hit the road for Toronto. I had told my friend Carolyn to meet us at this Taco Bell near Maple Leaf gardens at 6 or 6:30…but since we didn’t leave until 4:30 we were about 2 hours late HAHA. So anyway, we get into Canada, and are on our way…we hit a bit of traffic, nothing bad.
We get into the city, find a parking lot and go get Carolyn at Taco Bell, who was ready to just go home. So we went into MLG and got padded down, pink wrist bands, and headed out to the floor. As soon as we got onto the floor Carolyn and I lost the rest of them (actually, their no name friend had a seat by himself, and we all had floor tix) but found a spot in the crowd until we could find them again. We missed half of A Perfect Circle’s opening set, but from what I saw they were pretty good. So they finished, and we walked around the back of the crowd as people left before NIN came on. We found them, and rejoined them. At 9:30, the show started. There was a black curtain around the stage, and they “opened” with “pinion” which went into “terrible lie” as the curtain opened. This is the complete
setlist:
Pinion
Terrible Lie
Sin
March of the Pigs
Piggy
The Frail
The Wretched
Gave Up La Mer
The Great Below
The Mark Has Been Made
Wish
Complication
Suck
Get Down Make Love
Closer
Head Like a Hole
E N C O R E :
TDTWWA
Just Like You Imagined
Starfuckers, Inc.
Hurt
They played for an hour and a half. At one point Trent talked to the crowd about how it had been a long time since they had been there, and he thanked us because they were really looking forward to playing for us, and how we made him happy and that was a rare event. The show was beautiful. The stage was pretty small, smaller than what I expected. They had 3 LCD things (dunno what u would call them), that they used for lighting instead of just pictures (like jumbotrons)..they moved down from above them pointing down, to behind them and they moved front and back, and it was a really cool effect. During some of the instrumentals they did use them for natureish pictures of water, and a field of tulips, and it was gorgeous.
After the first 3 or 4 songs, like when they played Piggy, the crowd mellowed out, and were amazing. The beginning was nuts of course, and we got thrown around a bit (That’s when Karl got hurt), but after Piggy, it was great. I had a perfect view of the stage the entire time, we were about mid stage mid ice. I had no problem with people around me, and I didn’t need to get my spleen removed afterwards haha. Before the encore Trent was like “you put me in a good mood, and that’s a rare thing, thanks.” What else..god it was just so incredible…The best show I’ve ever been to…Ok, so NIN closed with “hurt” the LCD screens were behind Trent and light just shown on him and it was so great. Um…I guess that’s it…so after the show we went out to find Karl, and got in line for shirts, which was worse pushing than the crowd during the show was.
After we got our shirts we still hadn’t found Karl, so Dan, Carolyn and I went out front, no name guy and Eric went out back and that’s where he was, near the parking lot. So I said goodbye to Carolyn, and we headed out of Toronto. By then it was about 12, and when we finally got to the QEW, we ended up losing no name guy who Dan was driving with, because they went a wrong way, then made an illegal turn back into the right way, but then we got stopped at a red light, and lost them. Since no name guy drove so slow, we caught up to them, passed them but they didn’t realize it. And so we lost them again….we pulled over to the side of the road until they passed us again, then we ran over a box which got stuck under the car for the entire way home haha.
Then in Oakville we got stuck in traffic cuz of construction, that was about 5 feet…but they merged 4 lanes into 1 without any signs or anything. We were there for a half hour…so that ended, and we rode back to North Tonawanda. Got home at quarter after two, drank a bottle of water and went to bed. On Saturday I got up around 12, took a shower and stuff and Eric, Dan and Karl and some girl, Kelly I think, came to my house to go to the Our Lady Peace show…which I wasn’t going to go to because I had so much work to do, but I did anyway. We went to UB (university of buffalo) to find out about it, doors opened at 4 so we went to the mall and then back to UB. We found out that OLP wasn’t going to go on until 9pm, so we decided not to go, and go back to school. So we went and got my stuff from home, and then to Eric’s house where his parents made us dinner, and drove back to RIT. After a quick stop there, Eric drove me back to Geneseo, and this boring life.
One last thing, Trent is the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my entire life. He is amazing.