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Henry Rollins.
"When I first went out on the road, in the Black Flag days, we were living meal to meal. We never thought of anything past the gig and the next meal. I never thought I'd even be able to pay my rent, much less see what I've seen and be where I've been."
Indeed, it's a long way from being hustled between gigs in the
back of a van to emerging as a seasoned traveller who can nonchalantly
name-drop continents. Yet Henry Rollins in many ways remains
the curious kid who climbed aboard with his favourite punk band
and hit the highways. The world is out there and he wants to
meet it. There's a line in the Rollins Band track Your Number
Is One which neatly captures his entire philosophy: "I wanna
know, therefore I go".
"You just have to work hard to keep finding interesting things and always leave yourself with the option to be amazed," he muses. "It's very easy to get burned out and say 'seen it all. Done it all. Screw you,' but the truth is you haven't done much and you haven't seen a great deal, even if you do ten times what you've done."
The main difference for Rollins this far down the track is that aside from near constant touring commitments with Rollins Band and spoken word performances, odd possibilities for exploration are always presenting themselves. Though an assiduous critic of George Dubya's over-reaching enthusiasm for war, Rollins leapt at the USO's offer to talk to U.S troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then in February he took the whole 'get away from it all' holiday notion to new extremes by sending himself to Siberia for a vacation.
"I have found the one single thing in my life that really makes me think, that really gets the juices flowing, is geographical displacement," he offers by way of explanation. "I did a week alone going across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Express. Rented my own little compartment and went from Moscow to Vladivostok. It was an awesome trip and I did that in the spirit of 'let's get out and see what the Trans-Siberian Express is all about'. Siberia is fairly bleak in February. I mean, it's a lot of snow. It's a lot of snow. It's so vast that you just look out into a pale sky and white ground and you take a nap and you look out the window and it's like you have not gone anywhere. There's not a lot of romantic notion to be had sitting alone in your metal box but it was certainly cool to be in motion for such a long period of time. It's fascinating to just be plunged into yourself that way."
This is the wonder of Henry Rollins' life on the move. The amount of travelling he does could either be liberating or isolating.
"Both at the same time," he quickly agrees. "I find a lot of liberation in isolation, 'cause for a moment you're not acting, you're not putting on your good face or your game face. You're not trying to cajole, compel or convince anyone. The only person you're confronting is yourself and you have to deal with yourself. The instructor is out of the car. The Co-Pilot has taken his hands off the stick. It's all you now. I really live for those moments. And the train ride was that on steroids. You wake up and you go 'okay, I am now doing time'. A few days in you really get a different sense of time. I read a lot. I wrote a lot and mostly I just did time. And by the third day you kind of forget to even look at your watch. You just kind of do time, like you hear a convict say. I never really understood what that meant and I have a little bit of an idea of it now."
All this talk of beautiful solitude underlines an aspect of Rollins' travels that's crucial to him, that the farther out there he goes the less burdened he is by whatever fame or familiarity has attached itself to him.
"In some parts of Europe, like Poland, the East, you can kind of get away with just being a white dude. Africa, you're just a tourist," he drawls with evident relief, "I got recognised in Kenya once by a woman, a travel agent who was sent out to scout these camp-grounds. She was from Minneapolis and she recognized me: 'oh my goodness you're that guy !' I'm like 'wow, I'm in Kichwa Tembo amongst the Masai and this woman is telling me how all her friends are fans."
It's something which is rarely spoken of in regard to Henry Rollins: while he contentedly talks up a storm on stage, in many ways he's actually quite shy and would prefer to be left alone. Having covered so many miles it's hard to avoid asking him what perspective it's given him on humanity.
"That it's best not to expect too much from humans," he offers bluntly, "because at the end of the day they are food-gathering, breeding organisms and they're gonna do what they gotta do to survive and so anything that you think immoral or petty for you is just someone trying to get through the day. Having seen what I've seen I've just kind of let humans off the hook and no longer rely on them to be exceptional, punctual, or even civil."
All of which would seem like grim misanthropy were it not for Rollins' ability to philosophically turn on a dime and in the next moment admit that diminished expectations have left him easily touched by unexpected kindness. "I refuse to be jaded," he insists. "I completely believe in the inherent goodness of people and their inherent generosity. I see it all around me all the time."
It's that seeming contradiction, familiar to anyone who's felt the Stockholm Syndrome-like spell of his epic spoken word performances, that keeps Henry Rollins an exhilarating performer. His definite language only serves to underscore his uncertainties. The hard, unsentimental front is helpmate to a greater sense of hope.
"Humans - we have a lot of work to do," he concludes "We're a work in progress"
With that he's off to the next task, the next interview, cheering as he goes, "I'll see you down the road!"
Brett Buttfield
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dB Magazine proudly presents Henry Rollins at Norwood Concert Hall on Sat 21 May.
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