Tell us about your first NIN show

[elevenism]

FTDS tour-October 29th, 1994, at the Fair Park Coliseum in Dallas, which i thought was funny because it's the dedicated building for the Dog Show during the state fair. The seats face each other instead of the stage. I had wanted SO bad to see NIN in May of that year, but that show was at The Bomb Factory, a club, and i wasn't old enough to get in.
The crowd was unlike anything i've seen, before or since-a sea of black clothing, steel jewelry, and palpable teen angst. These were the original NIN fans-at this point, in terms of LPs, there was PHM and the brand new TDS.
The opening acts were the Jim Rose Circus (which was like a touring circus freak show for the stage,) and a not-yet-famous Marilyn Manson. I assumed she was maybe like a dark folk singer. That show was my introduction.
They played pinion with some sort of cloth thing covering the stage, which trent eventually tore through and then broke into Mr Self Destruct. At this point, about half the crowd jumped from the seats down to the floor, en masse.
The rest of the setlist was Sin, MOTP, Piggy, Reptile, Gave Up, HiS, Eraser, Hurt, TDS, Wish, Suck, Ruiner, DII, Closer, Dead Souls, and SICNH.
The stage was again covered with a screen for Eraser, Hurt, and TDS i think. I'm pretty sure that the Hurt projections were the same ones used in the video, but another thing that really sticks out for me is these kind of shadowy steel grey and black moving landscape type of images projected during Eraser.
The lighting was unlike anything i had seen before. At that age, i had seen some pretty incredible lights at, for instance, a Rush show, but this was a relatively small venue, a band that was just hitting its stride, and furthermore, what they were doing with the lights was just different.
The sound was mind blowing. The band was supernaturally tight, even as they smashed into each other and whatnot. You could tell they spent a lot of time rehearsing.
Seeing NIN touring to promote The Downward Spiral is an experience i can't really describe. There was an air of danger about Nine Inch Nails back then that was gone by the time The Fragile era rolled around, and may or may not have existed on the PHM tour.
The whole thing was bleak, cathartic, chaotic, frightening, unapologetically masturbatory, thrilling, unifying, vindicating.
@TheBang , the crowd ripped up the floor in dallas at my second NIN show in 95 and threw it at the Melvins