Rollins Redux:
Irate Looks at Fifty
From Black Flag leader to moral compass follower, Henry Rollins braces for a big birthday—and another go at the global stage.
by PATRICK FLANARY
The owners pleaded with the local punks to not show up early.
Yet it was now up to the Tampa club to steer this collision course of a schedule, one that paired a theatrical production with a hardcore show on the same stage on the same night. Eight o'clock: #The Diary of Anne Frank#. Eleven o'clock: West Coast punk band Black Flag. All is well until the tension finally shatters halfway through the group's third song, when a fan strikes the band's roadie with a hammer.
The 25-year-old singer, eager to quell the excitement, dives into the mob of rioters and returns the gesture with a fist. "Doesn't that concrete feel #good# on your head," Henry Rollins heckles as he returns to the stage. The meeting of mohawks and mosh pits that unseasonably cold Florida night in 1986 would set in motion the end of the reign for underground punk kings Black Flag. The tour would be their last.
Decades and worlds apart from his days as a bloodthirsty youth, Rollins remains robust and, at 49, bloodthirsty as ever. He's just a bit more forgiving now. When Rollins reaches out to touch someone, it's usually with a helping hand in a foreign land. Rollins trots the globe, photographing corpses on the streets of New Delhi, camping in the Sahara and watching New Year's fireworks explode over Senegal. "What I'm after is perspective," he says. Perspective reveals itself to Rollins in chilling forms—it's meant searching for a bottle of clean water in Africa. Other times it's involved roaming entire cities devoid of traffic lights.
"In Bangladesh, anywhere you go everything seems to be destroyed," says Rollins. "I stood at this intersection and—#whoa#—way too close for comfort. You say, 'I'm really glad I wasn't in #that# taxi.' The walking is whatever the oncoming vehicle will afford you. After a few days, just give me a sidewalk, man," he laughs.
Back in his familiar world of concrete, pollution and L.A. traffic following a month overseas, Henry Rollins returns to his habitat: the American stage. He'll perform his first domestic spoken word show of the #Frequent Flyer# tour Feb. 17 in Solana Beach.
He may have the ear of the coffee house crowd now, but he still bucks the man better than anyone. Facing 50, Rollins realizes his post-Black Flag years of writing poetry and selling it from a van has earned him the right to host abrasively intimate fireside chats on whatever the hell bothers him. And while he's shed much of the brawn he packed on as hardcore's tattooed frontman, Rollins' song remains the same: Fuck Authority. "What Henry does is present a natural emotional response to the demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in," says Jesse Michaels, leader of defunct punk band Operation Ivy.
In 1981 Henry Rollins mirrored a feral Johnny Rotten, a tiger free from his cage and loose in the recording studio where the thrashing shirtless beefcake often emerged from the #Damaged# sessions bloodied and bruised. It was Henry's high: no booze, no needles, just the regular, self-inflicted overdose of self-confrontation. Says Devo cofounder Gerald Casale, "Henry looked like he could murder you, but he was in fact a visionary gentle giant."
In 2010 Rollins admits he can't quit the stage, but guarantees he left his music career behind in the last millennium.
"I don't wanna. I don't wanna do the thing all over again," says Rollins of making music. "It's something I've done so many times. I don't know what else I can do with peanuts. Artistically, it's a checked swing. You're not risking too much."
The singer made an exception last year when he slipped into a studio and lent his throaty voiceover to a friend's project: the Flaming Lips' recreation of Pink Floyd's #The Dark Side of the Moon#. Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne remembers how an early-'80s Black Flag show impacted the Grammy-winning psychedelic group.
"We saw him in the flesh confront that idea of, 'I'm going to do my trip and I'm going to force you to accept it,'" says Coyne. "And seeing him do it, it changed us. I will always owe that to Henry Rollins."
Still the physical performer he always was, Rollins keeps his audience at ease by keeping his feet on the stage at all times. "I've learned my knees don't have the same get-up-and-go," he says as he considers his fiftieth birthday, less than a year away.
"Hey, it's what happens after you turn 49. I live in Hollywood. I'm surrounded by men my age who don't want to believe that."
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