Michael Trent Reznor was born May 17, 1965 in New Castle and graduated from Mercer High School in 1983. Long before Pretty Hate Machine, Trent Reznor played Youngstown area bars like RJ's on 422 with The Urge. Not sure who was all in the band at the time, but I do remember Michael Baranski, Matt Carmichael and Steve Jaworski were members at one time or another. Trent graduated from Mercer High School in 1983 were he learned to play sax and tuba. He also played Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. We should do something in Mercer for Trent like we did for Dave Grohl in downtown Warren. In a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, Trent had this to say about growing up in Western PA. "I don't know why I want to do these things, other than my desire to escape from Small Town, U.S.A., to dismiss the boundaries, to explore. It isn't a bad place where I grew up, but there was nothing going on but the cornfields. My life experience came from watching movies, watching TV and reading books and looking at magazines. And when your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you." Below, Trent recalls buying his first synthesizer at New York Music in downtown Youngstown.