Henry Rollins (2005)
Interview Background
When AFI announced they were pulling out of the 2006 Big Day Out just a week before Christmas, BDO organisers Ken West and Viv Lees deputised an old friend to fill the hole in the timetable. Within a week of Henry Rollins being offered the slot, he’d not only signed up for the gig, he was also amiably making himself available to Australian media outlets for interviews. Despite his perma-scowl pretense, Rollins proved to be a teddy bear; show the guy some respect and ask intelligent questions and he gives the same level of commitment and intellect to the press as he does to his speaking gigs, music, radio shows, photography and writing. As you’d expect from a man whose spoken word tours see him speak eloquently for 90 unbroken minutes and nothing but a microphone for company, Rollins is a gifted orator and an excellent interviewee. Even if he felt some of my questions were trifling, Henry gave astute answers and quickly put me at ease about interviewing the iconic US punk.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, January 2006.
Henry Rollins - The Crowd Call Your Name
by Scott McLennan
Snarling heavy rock vocalist, challenging public speaker and underdog champion Henry Rollins was a last minute Big Day Out addition, but the scowling American was only too happy to join the bill after appearing at the inaugural event in 1992. Former ice cream store manager Henry Lawrence Garfield first came to public attention as frontman for seminal Los Angeles punk act Black Flag, but his success in the 1990s encompassed literary and filmic pursuits as well as musical output with Rollins Band.
Rollins’ subsequent development of a spoken word show not only gave the tightly wound muscle-bound artist an outlet for his contempt for social and political systems, it also proved immensely successful. Putting his new radio program on hold for the Big Day Out festival, Rollins noted that spoken word is just as hazardous as musical performance.
“It’s easier for it to go wrong,” Rollins says. “It’s harder for it to go right than anything. If you’ve got one drunk guy and he keeps talking, that will be all you remember. It’s not always easy. I did Ozzfest in England and I feared the worst, but people were really cool to me. So hopefully it turns out okay.”
With his involvement only 10 days old when Rip It Up spoke to him, Henry admitted his knowledge of the 2006 Big Day Out bill was limited.
“I know that The White Stripes, Sleater Kinney and The Stooges are playing,” he lists. “I haven’t seen the Stooges since they re-formed at all but I have some bootlegs and DVD-Rs of their shows.”
Rollins suggested Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop - a similarly confrontational and physical frontman - was a Black Flag icon.
“When I was in Black Flag one of the bands we had big respect for were The Stooges. We always really loved those records and Funhouse especially was a band favourite. Iggy has always been one of those big guys for me and someone I admire very much.”
Another Rollins idol is the late Johnny Cash, who Rollins has eulogised in two new documentaries produced in tandem with the Cash biopic Walk The Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
“I haven’t seen the film but I have been asked to comment on Johnny Cash in conjunction with the release of Walk The Line. I want to see it. One of the girls in my office saw it and she said that it was really good. I think Reese Witherspoon’s a really good actress. She does a lot of those big money cute movies, but underneath that I think she’s got the real stuff.
“I met Johnny Cash and I hung out with him, so I’m quite the fan,” Rollins continues. “I met June Carter-Cash as well, and that was a big moment for me to shake her hand. She was really nice to me and that went a long way with me. I’m a fairly shy person and I don’t introduce myself to people generally, but I saw her and walked right up to her and said, ‘Ma’am, how do you do. My name’s Henry.’ She said to me, ‘I know who you are honey, I’ve seen you on TV’. I said, ‘Well, I can only hope it was good’. She was really cool.”
Sometimes portrayed as a brooding, asexual loner, Henry remains a professional interviewee despite the constraints of media promotion.
“I’m not going to agree to do interviews and show up and be a pain in the ass,” he says. “I’m not going to disrespect the time you’re taking to interview me - I would never insult your time. I would rather not do interviews - I’d rather just ‘do’ than talk about ‘doing’ - but it’s part of it. It’s not necessarily an evil thing, it’s just one of the rigours of getting a show on the road.
“Often the person interviewing doesn’t care about you or is not interested. They basically take your press release and read it back at you putting a question mark after each sentence. ‘So, you were in Black Flag?’ Oh here we go - 30 minutes of intellectual incarceration…”
Recently described by a US critic as an amalgam of Tyler Durden and Bill Hicks when on stage, Rollins admits he’s actually a shy person away from the spotlight.
“Well put it this way, and this might strike you as slightly psychotic, but if you said, ‘Henry, walk over and introduce yourself to that girl across the room’ I’d go, ‘No - you do it’. But if someone said to me, ‘That guy over there just called you an asshole’ you’d only smell the rubber from my tennis shoes burning as I ran over to take one of his ears off.
“I like confrontation,” Rollins admits. “I reply to hate mail - especially if it’s political. If someone says, ‘You’re a pussy because you don’t like the President’ or they’re factually incorrect and they go at me, I can’t wait. Though I’m shy insofar as going over to meet somebody, I run towards confrontation or the fray eagerly. That’s kind of weird - I don’t know what’s in me to do that.”
Henry’s anger once reared itself in Australia when he programmed Rage, prefacing a Morrissey video with a zealous attack on The Smiths frontman.
“Oh, it was very tongue-in-cheek,” Rollins chuckles. “I think he’s very brilliant, but the pose [in the November Spawned A Monster video] was just so overwrought to me and the fans were all crying. It was like, ‘oh come on! Cheer up, dear, we’re going to be fine.’ It was hilarious. I don’t have any Morrissey or Smiths records but I am quite sure of his brilliance.
“I don’t hate him like I hate Joseph Stalin or the guy who mangles and abducts children! I don’t hate Morrissey at all. I don’t hate any musician - I like to prioritise my hate. I hate Dick Cheney, the vice president of the United States. I hate Donald Rumsfeld, because I think he’s getting young men and women killed. I have a lot of aggression towards those people, but poor old Morrissey, well I’m sure he and I would get along just fine. He can have half my sandwich any day.”
Unpublished Interview Material
Did the Big Day Out initially contact you with a musical slot in mind or was it always the spoken word you were keen on performing?
“This idea is about 10 days old. They just called up and said, ‘Hey, would you do this?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that’. I believe a band had dropped out - so it wasn’t like I was their first choice – but someone came up with the idea and they called my manager. They’ve given me 45 minutes [on stage] so I’m figuring out how to best make it effective. I’m going to be thinking about that all the while up until I walk on stage.”
You mentioned you performed spoken word at Ozzfest - do you enjoy checking out other acts or chatting to fellow musicians when you are on a festival bill such as this or do you keep to yourself?
“Quite honestly, Ozzfest was the first time I did a talking show at a band event and unfortunately I had another show hours later and had to take a train from Ozzfest down to Liverpool for an 8pm show. I basically had to split and couldn’t stick around to see anything. System Of A Down were going to play and I really wanted to see them, but I had to go. I’m usually moving to the next gig of my own and don’t have many nights off. Bands come and go and I have all their records but I never see them live.”
Will you be continuing your work with armed forces serving overseas in 2006?
“Yeah, well I hope they have a budget to send me somewhere. The USO is kinda low on budget at the moment, but if they want me to do more stuff I’m ready to go.”
Do you ever find you come up against learned opponents who give you a good run for your money when you're debating with haters?
“Not on the topic of Iraq. On the topic of Democratic versus Republican ideals, yeah – you can meet a fiscal Republican who can defend his or her points very well on ideas such as taxation and where money goes. I can debate both sides for a lot of those arguments as I can see where they are coming from. If you try and tell me that America is a safer place because we invaded Iraq, then so far in my mind no one has sold me that argument yet. That dog has not yet hunted for me.”
I’ve always felt that the Rollins Band video for Disconnect was ripped off by The Verve for their hit Bittersweet Symphony, where the lead singer Richard Ashcroft is walking down the street bumping into people.
“Where I’m walking against the streets of New York? I can’t think that is the most original shot ever made, so I don’t think the members of that band or the director know who I am. I don’t think they ripped me off, but I do remember Bittersweet Symphony copying The Rolling Stones’ music and the Stones suing and winning royalties. I don’t think the band or the video director was going, ‘Ha ha! We’ll copy that’ about my video – I doubt if they ever saw it. If I was a judge I’d say, ‘Throw it out of court!’.”
I hear Alexisonfire have a new song called Charlie Sheen Vs Henry Rollins – I’m wondering A) if you’ve heard it and B) whether that’s a fair fight?
“Charlie’s a pal of mine and I did a movie with him [The Chase], so I don’t know where the beef would be. I’m sure he’s more well-trained in ass-whupping than I’ll ever be as he’s a big dude. Charlie and I have always been cool and I have no beef with the guy at all.”
When AFI announced they were pulling out of the 2006 Big Day Out just a week before Christmas, BDO organisers Ken West and Viv Lees deputised an old friend to fill the hole in the timetable. Within a week of Henry Rollins being offered the slot, he’d not only signed up for the gig, he was also amiably making himself available to Australian media outlets for interviews. Despite his perma-scowl pretense, Rollins proved to be a teddy bear; show the guy some respect and ask intelligent questions and he gives the same level of commitment and intellect to the press as he does to his speaking gigs, music, radio shows, photography and writing. As you’d expect from a man whose spoken word tours see him speak eloquently for 90 unbroken minutes and nothing but a microphone for company, Rollins is a gifted orator and an excellent interviewee. Even if he felt some of my questions were trifling, Henry gave astute answers and quickly put me at ease about interviewing the iconic US punk.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, January 2006.
Henry Rollins - The Crowd Call Your Name
by Scott McLennan
Snarling heavy rock vocalist, challenging public speaker and underdog champion Henry Rollins was a last minute Big Day Out addition, but the scowling American was only too happy to join the bill after appearing at the inaugural event in 1992. Former ice cream store manager Henry Lawrence Garfield first came to public attention as frontman for seminal Los Angeles punk act Black Flag, but his success in the 1990s encompassed literary and filmic pursuits as well as musical output with Rollins Band.
Rollins’ subsequent development of a spoken word show not only gave the tightly wound muscle-bound artist an outlet for his contempt for social and political systems, it also proved immensely successful. Putting his new radio program on hold for the Big Day Out festival, Rollins noted that spoken word is just as hazardous as musical performance.
“It’s easier for it to go wrong,” Rollins says. “It’s harder for it to go right than anything. If you’ve got one drunk guy and he keeps talking, that will be all you remember. It’s not always easy. I did Ozzfest in England and I feared the worst, but people were really cool to me. So hopefully it turns out okay.”
With his involvement only 10 days old when Rip It Up spoke to him, Henry admitted his knowledge of the 2006 Big Day Out bill was limited.
“I know that The White Stripes, Sleater Kinney and The Stooges are playing,” he lists. “I haven’t seen the Stooges since they re-formed at all but I have some bootlegs and DVD-Rs of their shows.”
Rollins suggested Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop - a similarly confrontational and physical frontman - was a Black Flag icon.
“When I was in Black Flag one of the bands we had big respect for were The Stooges. We always really loved those records and Funhouse especially was a band favourite. Iggy has always been one of those big guys for me and someone I admire very much.”
Another Rollins idol is the late Johnny Cash, who Rollins has eulogised in two new documentaries produced in tandem with the Cash biopic Walk The Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
“I haven’t seen the film but I have been asked to comment on Johnny Cash in conjunction with the release of Walk The Line. I want to see it. One of the girls in my office saw it and she said that it was really good. I think Reese Witherspoon’s a really good actress. She does a lot of those big money cute movies, but underneath that I think she’s got the real stuff.
“I met Johnny Cash and I hung out with him, so I’m quite the fan,” Rollins continues. “I met June Carter-Cash as well, and that was a big moment for me to shake her hand. She was really nice to me and that went a long way with me. I’m a fairly shy person and I don’t introduce myself to people generally, but I saw her and walked right up to her and said, ‘Ma’am, how do you do. My name’s Henry.’ She said to me, ‘I know who you are honey, I’ve seen you on TV’. I said, ‘Well, I can only hope it was good’. She was really cool.”
Sometimes portrayed as a brooding, asexual loner, Henry remains a professional interviewee despite the constraints of media promotion.
“I’m not going to agree to do interviews and show up and be a pain in the ass,” he says. “I’m not going to disrespect the time you’re taking to interview me - I would never insult your time. I would rather not do interviews - I’d rather just ‘do’ than talk about ‘doing’ - but it’s part of it. It’s not necessarily an evil thing, it’s just one of the rigours of getting a show on the road.
“Often the person interviewing doesn’t care about you or is not interested. They basically take your press release and read it back at you putting a question mark after each sentence. ‘So, you were in Black Flag?’ Oh here we go - 30 minutes of intellectual incarceration…”
Recently described by a US critic as an amalgam of Tyler Durden and Bill Hicks when on stage, Rollins admits he’s actually a shy person away from the spotlight.
“Well put it this way, and this might strike you as slightly psychotic, but if you said, ‘Henry, walk over and introduce yourself to that girl across the room’ I’d go, ‘No - you do it’. But if someone said to me, ‘That guy over there just called you an asshole’ you’d only smell the rubber from my tennis shoes burning as I ran over to take one of his ears off.
“I like confrontation,” Rollins admits. “I reply to hate mail - especially if it’s political. If someone says, ‘You’re a pussy because you don’t like the President’ or they’re factually incorrect and they go at me, I can’t wait. Though I’m shy insofar as going over to meet somebody, I run towards confrontation or the fray eagerly. That’s kind of weird - I don’t know what’s in me to do that.”
Henry’s anger once reared itself in Australia when he programmed Rage, prefacing a Morrissey video with a zealous attack on The Smiths frontman.
“Oh, it was very tongue-in-cheek,” Rollins chuckles. “I think he’s very brilliant, but the pose [in the November Spawned A Monster video] was just so overwrought to me and the fans were all crying. It was like, ‘oh come on! Cheer up, dear, we’re going to be fine.’ It was hilarious. I don’t have any Morrissey or Smiths records but I am quite sure of his brilliance.
“I don’t hate him like I hate Joseph Stalin or the guy who mangles and abducts children! I don’t hate Morrissey at all. I don’t hate any musician - I like to prioritise my hate. I hate Dick Cheney, the vice president of the United States. I hate Donald Rumsfeld, because I think he’s getting young men and women killed. I have a lot of aggression towards those people, but poor old Morrissey, well I’m sure he and I would get along just fine. He can have half my sandwich any day.”
Unpublished Interview Material
Did the Big Day Out initially contact you with a musical slot in mind or was it always the spoken word you were keen on performing?
“This idea is about 10 days old. They just called up and said, ‘Hey, would you do this?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that’. I believe a band had dropped out - so it wasn’t like I was their first choice – but someone came up with the idea and they called my manager. They’ve given me 45 minutes [on stage] so I’m figuring out how to best make it effective. I’m going to be thinking about that all the while up until I walk on stage.”
You mentioned you performed spoken word at Ozzfest - do you enjoy checking out other acts or chatting to fellow musicians when you are on a festival bill such as this or do you keep to yourself?
“Quite honestly, Ozzfest was the first time I did a talking show at a band event and unfortunately I had another show hours later and had to take a train from Ozzfest down to Liverpool for an 8pm show. I basically had to split and couldn’t stick around to see anything. System Of A Down were going to play and I really wanted to see them, but I had to go. I’m usually moving to the next gig of my own and don’t have many nights off. Bands come and go and I have all their records but I never see them live.”
Will you be continuing your work with armed forces serving overseas in 2006?
“Yeah, well I hope they have a budget to send me somewhere. The USO is kinda low on budget at the moment, but if they want me to do more stuff I’m ready to go.”
Do you ever find you come up against learned opponents who give you a good run for your money when you're debating with haters?
“Not on the topic of Iraq. On the topic of Democratic versus Republican ideals, yeah – you can meet a fiscal Republican who can defend his or her points very well on ideas such as taxation and where money goes. I can debate both sides for a lot of those arguments as I can see where they are coming from. If you try and tell me that America is a safer place because we invaded Iraq, then so far in my mind no one has sold me that argument yet. That dog has not yet hunted for me.”
I’ve always felt that the Rollins Band video for Disconnect was ripped off by The Verve for their hit Bittersweet Symphony, where the lead singer Richard Ashcroft is walking down the street bumping into people.
“Where I’m walking against the streets of New York? I can’t think that is the most original shot ever made, so I don’t think the members of that band or the director know who I am. I don’t think they ripped me off, but I do remember Bittersweet Symphony copying The Rolling Stones’ music and the Stones suing and winning royalties. I don’t think the band or the video director was going, ‘Ha ha! We’ll copy that’ about my video – I doubt if they ever saw it. If I was a judge I’d say, ‘Throw it out of court!’.”
I hear Alexisonfire have a new song called Charlie Sheen Vs Henry Rollins – I’m wondering A) if you’ve heard it and B) whether that’s a fair fight?
“Charlie’s a pal of mine and I did a movie with him [The Chase], so I don’t know where the beef would be. I’m sure he’s more well-trained in ass-whupping than I’ll ever be as he’s a big dude. Charlie and I have always been cool and I have no beef with the guy at all.”
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