Rise Above

How do you define Henry Rollins? Hardcore legend? Actor? Poet? Activist? Ventriloquist? Well apart from the latter all are applicable. The man has constantly been in the public eye since the early 1980s, although just out of sight, quietly hating the world around him. Yet it seems age has mellowed Rollins, no longer as averse to fighting his fans on stage but rather relying on his dry wit to throw shit at the events that shape his everyday life.

BLHB caught up with Rollins just before the start of his latest spoken word tour, but with that going from strength-to-strength, have we seen the last of Henry Rollins, the musician? Rollins was abjectly blunt on the matter “Well I am not feeling any music at this time. I can only do what is really compelling me to do so. I wouldn’t want to go out and do music if I wasn’t 110% into it. I am just not interested in going out and doing the same old thing again. Life is too short for that. Too many people in music stick around too long.”

With several influential bands under his belt and a ‘re-emergence’ as a spoken word artist, Henry Rollins has been commenting on the shape and decay of America and the World as a whole for close to 30 years now, and it seems that a busy schedule and a tendency to push himself to the edge won’t stop him now. “Lets see, I put out two books last year, wrapped out of ‘The Sons of Anarchy’ show a couple of weeks ago and now I am leaving to travel all over until about the first show of next year. It will be a real test.” Rollins spoken word tours have now became the main focus of a career which also includes stints of acting and even chat show hosting “It’s just work I take between tours. I did television all last year, it was great but it was a job I took because I still work for a living. I had a good time but I am not really an actor. I thought I hung in there pretty well, though.”

So what’s the agenda for Rollins’ latest tour, the aptly titled ‘Frequent Flyer tour’? “I will just be talking about all the places I have been and the things I have done since I was last here, that will keep me busy onstage for quite some time.” The latest tour also brings Rollins a change of focus in the form of one Barack Obama and, more importantly, whether white America has woken up “There are some people in America who are acting very stupidly since they found out they have a black president. It’s been a very ugly and frustrating time for me in America for the last several months.” During his last shows in Britain Rollins stated he couldn’t fathom the general American public anymore, before Obama’s inauguration there was an air of hope and change, now this has been replaced with impatientness and old skool fear-mongering. Musicians world-wide have been seemingly eager to praise their new president through song, but is it falling on deaf ears? “Hard to say. I don’t really think what happens in the music world affects politics in any meaningful way. If it did, Marley and Dylan’s music would have stopped all wars. The President doesn’t always do things that I agree with. Afghanistan for instance, what a nightmare and we keep walking deeper into it.”

With his spoken word commitments taking over his life Rollins rectifies his dislike for reunions and, it seems, the music distribution model as a whole. “I would never do music for the money. Black Flag is not mine to re-form anyway and again, doing old stuff, I don’t want to at this point. It’s not all that brave in my opinion. I would rather fail elsewhere.” A Black Flag reunion would indeed be very welcome, despite his protests as hardcore punk as such has seen a revival in the past few years. It would be forgivable in marketing Black Flag like a consumerist powerhouse, similar to Glen Danzig’s Misfits business-model (Misfits wall clock anyone?) “That’s the way of all things that stick around for awhile, they become marketable as society makes room and then the thing that had teeth and terrified the Middle-West now purrs on the couch. It’s what happens to almost anything in a consumer culture.”

You can’t deny it though, even if music is behind him, Henry Rollins continues to provoke reactions, and it couldn’t suit him more, even if his work-load is somewhat heavy even for him. “My workload? Its eating. Me. Alive.”