Well, the concert was fantastic. By far the best performance from Trent Reznor I have seen, and this was my 3rd or 4th I have been to. A band called Autolux opened, and they were good, but as the band proclaimed that this was the biggest crowd they had ever performed for, it showed. They seemed to get swallowed by the enormity of the Rosegarden and it's crowd. Queens of the Stone Age played next, and played a damn impressive set, they sounded great live. And Josh the singer, is very much a drunk, and told everyone to get drunk and have sex, which I thought was funny. Some guy in the crowd threw something at Josh during the show, which many times will end the show, but Josh just pointed out the guy to the crowd and proceeded to tell everyone what a small dick the guy had. "Your dick must be so small that you piss on your own testicles." and "Why don't you go buy a hotdog and shove it up your ass, unless your buddy there is already doing that for ya."

Then NIN came on at about 10 minutes to 9pm, and played until 11:30pm. The lighting and special effects were bad ass, and they played video clips over a giant see thru screens that covered the stage on 3 sides during part of the show, and had huge LCD screens displaying various graphics and other impressive stuff. During the song "Right Where it belongs they played images of death caused by war and animals killing each other and then they showed a vid of a large row of track housing followed by George W. and his wife dancing during the line "What if all the world you think you know, Is an elaborate dream?". It got a huge cheer out of the crowd. They played 23 songs in all, but no encore. Here is the set list:

1.Pinion
2.Love Is Not Enough
3.Wish
4.Terrible Lie
5.The Line Begins To Blur
6.March of the Pigs
7.The Frail
8.The Wretched
9.Closer
10.Burn
11.Gave Up
12.Eraser
13.Right Where It Belongs
14.Beside You In Time
15.You Know What You Are?
16.Sin
17.Only
18.Deep
19.Down In It
20.Hurt
21.The Hand That Feeds
22.Starfuckers Inc
23.Head Like a Hole

They didn't play several of my favorite songs, and I would have like to have seen more from "The Fragile", but I guess if they did the show would have gone all night. I was however, excited that they played a couple of non album track like "Burn" and "Deep". "Deep" sounded amazing live and "Burn" was pretty good. There were only a few songs that I wasn't that impressed with: "Only" was not great live, and "The Hand That Feeds" was just OK.

Rob and I met up with Cory T. and his girlfriend before the show and had a beer at McMinnemans on Broadway. Then we all went down together. Rob and I got to our seats like not even 5 minutes before the lights went out. Then at the break between Autolux and QOTSA, I discovered we had been sitting in the wrong seats. Instead of Section 220 Row L Seat 1 & 2 we were in Section 120 Row L Seats 1 & 2. But we stayed thru QOTSA before some skanks and the usher came and told us to move. We went to our real seats (which was only a few rows down from the top at the far end of the stadium), NIN had just started by this point, and there were people sitting in our seats so we moved up a row, which was fine, since we were in the nosebleeds anyway. Then of course as soon as the music starts we had 4 lesbian dancers in front of us for the whole show, grinding and rubbing and all that crap which got old fast since they were constantly blocking my view, so Rob and I moved up another row where we sat for the rest of the show. There was the usual abundant smell of weed, and judging by the number of lighters during "Hurt" and "Right where it belongs" everyone but us was a smoker in one way or another. Some girl got up on someones shoulders directly in front of the screen that was showing a video, and took off her top and showed her breasts to the world, lit up by the projectors for all to see.

The overall mix of fans was pretty unique, there was just about every group of people you could imagine. Freaks to Daddies with their daughters (i wounder how dad explained Closer to his 12 year old daughter), from old people to babies (who will probably suffer permanent ear damage as a result of the concert). All in all, a great show with lots of energy and intensity, the seats were shit, and there will definately be no more presale tickets for me. Can't wait to do it again in another 5 years!
Here is a video clip of the Portland show from NIN's official page on myspace.com. It even has the Predator Drag Queen that we all saw at the end of the show before we left the Rosegarden. Very Scary! And I especially like the girl who bites the hand to get the drum stick...Nice!
Portland Show

Here are some pics from the Vancouver BC show on Monday, gives you an idea of the performance and the setup, very cool stuff.

You can get all but 2 (Deep & Down In It) of the tracks on iTunes.