Even the dogs in the street know that Henry Rollins can talk. Aside from his multiple dayjobs as elder statesman of US hardcore, Rollins Band frontman, host of The Henry Rollins Show on the Independent Film Channel for the past two seasons and the Harmony In My Head radio programme every Tuesday on LA indie station 103FM, actor (Lost Highway, Heat), publisher (the 2.13.61 imprint, which has published Henry Miller, Iggy Pop and Nick Cave), author of 18 books (including the hair raising Black Flag memoir Get In The Van) and voiceover artist, the 46-year-old DC native turned LA resident has also distinguished himself as a tireless spoken word performer. Rollins's forthcoming European tour, which stops off in Vicar St on January 29th, marks his 25th year as a motormouth-for-hire. Typically, he has total recall of his debut engagement in an LA club in 1983.
“There was a bunch of poets and performance-type people on stage and everyone got five or ten minutes,” he remembers. “These shows were put on by a promoter in town, and I would go to watch, 'cos I knew people who were up there, Chuck Dukowski who was in Black Flag, I would go and watch him do his thing. And one time the guy said, 'You've got a big mouth, you'd be perfect for this. And also we're paying ten bucks.' And I was like, 'I'm in.' 'Cos y'know, I was very broke. And so I went up there and read a couple of things that I had written, but mainly I told this story about being at band practice the day before, where some white power enthusiast tried to run over our guitar player.”
Uh, come again?
“We practised in a pretty tough part of town, and we always had the door of the practice place open, 'cos it's their neighbourhood, so you don't want to shut a door in some guy's face. So the Sons of Samoa, a local Long Beach gang, would come and hang out. Nice guys, they'd show us their guns, it was all very wonderful, but the local white power guys didn't like the fact that we were race traitors because we hung out with the non-whites, so they tried to run over Greg (Ginn) and he had to jump up on a front lawn. This, for us, was just another day in the life. But for the audience it was like, 'What the fuck? Tell another one!' So the promoter went, 'How bout next week, twenty bucks? And I said, 'I'm in.' And then by '85 I did my first coast-to-coast tour, hoping to one day break 50 people attendance, and it went from there. And here we are now.”
And where we are now means Rollins can sell out theatres almost anywhere in the world. More remarkably, he has completed seven USO tours of duty in the past two years, performing for American troops in Afghanistan, Qatar, and Kyrgystan in late 2003; Iraq and Kuwait in May, 2004; Honduras in August, 2004; Afghanistan in December, 2004, the South Pacific in June 2005, and in Egypt last August.
“Yeah, those guys contacted me and said, 'Hey what do you think of the USO?' he explains. “And I said, 'Well, I don't, I haven't thought of you guys ever.' So they said, 'Well, whaddya think?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'll do stuff with you guys.' 'Cos like a lot of people in America, we don't like the war but we don't have a beef with the troops.”
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Peter Murphy 
