My War: Henry Rollins

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.”
And how has it been?
“It's been interesting. It's been good, but difficult, 'cos you see a lot of really intense things. The hospital visits have been the most difficult. You're standing over a guy who's in bed, he's half of your age and both his legs are gone, and part of his face is gone. And then you meet the mom, and she's doing her best to hang in there. It's just really tough to see up close what this war is putting real people through. It's as crappy as you wanna get. As awful an afternoon as you can imagine, well, there it is. “And 'cos I'm older than all of these people, I can't help but look at them and remember my 20s with all my limbs and everything working, and you look at these guys, and for the rest of their lives they're in diapers, they're gonna be hooked up to machines. A woman who's married this guy and now she's married to a baby-man who drools, who lives in the foetal position. I mean it's war. It's what an IED does to someone. “And so all this that strips you of any of the macho posturing you might want to affect, as many of us Americans are wont to do when we come barreling out of a Rambo film. This promptly removes that from you forever.”
One wonders how, after an afternoon like that, Henry can do a spoken word show largely based around observational humour?
“Well, you have to bounce back in order to really do justice to the information. You kinda have to put some bounce back into your step. And so, usually when I do the hospital visits in DC, I have a show that night or the next night and I talk about it, and it is kind of a bummer, but believe it or not, there are humourous aspects, not exactly a gallows humour, but some of the stories are so surreal, and some of these guys are very happy to tell you about how they got the injury.
“The people I met on the last visit a couple of weeks ago were all TBI, traumatic brain injury, so a lot of their brain matter was missing, sometimes most of the skull was missing, making the head very deformed. And they were unable to speak really, because they were going through brain surgery. But those who are missing arms and legs are quite lucid 'cos they're just on generic pain medication, whatever you give someone when an arm is torn from their body. And they'll tell you this insane story about how they watched the limb fly over some telephone lines, or how the guy walked over and picked up his own limb. You can't help but, not exactly laugh, but at least have a moment sitting in a room with this guy where you say, 'Oh, what the fuck?!! And he goes, 'I know man, it's crazy!' And so I try and bring that to the stage.”
Has Henry read Tim O' Brien's book of Vietnam stories The Things They Carried?
“No, I'll find it today though. I tend to find books like that interesting, considering what I'm learning.”
His stories are full of exactly that kind of black comic horror and surrealism.
“I think it's a coping mechanism. In hospitals I've found doctors to be, not amoral, but they cannot invest in your dying body, because they're not going to do you any good and they're not going to do the next guy any good. And so when they can no longer do anything for you, they literally just kind of throw their gloves in the trashcan and walk right out of the room. If all things are expended trying to bring you back to life and you are truly the doornail, next. 'Cos they can't sit around and have a breakdown.
“I was just at this hospital, and I was talking to all these marines who'd gotten new faces and a fake eye and bridgework, amazing scars, it all looks like you're in one of those nuclear explosion movies. And one of 'em said, 'Yeah, I was in a Humvee, y'know, we went over a pressure plate and the thing blew up, all my friends got smoked, I'm the only one who lived.' And that's how he said it: 'All my friends got smoked.' And he wasn't being tough about it, he just was so matter of fact, and that was the verb he used, and I was like, 'Okay, if that's how you talk about it…'
“I think it's just a way that these guys have to deal with something that will probably screw them up later on. No doubt they're gonna come home and there's gonna be some rough days for some of these guys as they try and readjust. That's the thing I'm gonna be dealing with a lot next year, maybe doing some fundraising for some of these men who are coming home.”
This subject was addressed rather forcefully last year on an episode of the Henry Rollins Show that featured an interview with Iraq war veterans First Lieutenant Paul Rieckhoff and Sgt Jason Lemieux. Of all the interviews with remarkable men and women Rollins has conducted on the show - Oliver Stone, Werner Herzog, Christopher Walkin, Marilyn Manson, Gore Vidal, Arianna Huffington, Samuel L Jackson - this was probably the most memorable. Key the words Iraq War Veterans Henry Rollins Show into the YouTube search engine and you'll be privy to insights into the occupation of Iraq that will never be broadcast on mainstream US news channels.
“Yeah, good guys,” says Rollins, “and not atypical, their stories.
You should have seen the hate mail I got from that interview. Unbelievable. 'Get out of America, I hate you, I'm gonna do everything I can to stop your show from getting another season, you're a treasonist.' Sincere hatred. For me it was the most substantive of all the stuff we've done. I mean, it's an honour to interview Gore Vidal or Werner Herzog sure, but having these guys come in, especially Paul, who is a bit of a talking head, he's on TV about three days a week, and as you can see, he's one of those guys who'll get up from the barstool and have a word with you, and he has no fear and he is quick, and that's why he's never on Fox, cos if Bill O'Reilly calls him something, he'll come over there. He's a door with a head on it, this big dude, and he knows his stuff.
“But these are brave guys, did the right thing and got their buddies back and are having a tough time dealing with things, I think Jason more than Paul. I think Paul did one tour, I don't think he had to endure what Jason did. You see Jason in the interview doing his best to protect me, and therefore you, the viewer, from the horror that he saw. You see him trying to blunt everything: 'Well, I saw some things that no one should see…' He's basically closing the door and going, 'You go to bed pumpkin, daddy will take care of the dragon.'
“What he didn't describe was probably some experience where human body matter was sprayed all over him as his friends died screaming for god and their mothers. And that's what these guys come back with. And then their wives go, 'Honey, the roof is leaking.' And they're like, 'Aw, I don't give a fuck about you and your fuckin' roof.' They're having a problem, and the Veterans Affairs either has its hands tied or does not have the funds to help, and then we got worry. It's not that the VA hates the troops, not at all, it's just that they've got only so much money, 'cos this President is not interested in finishing what he started.”
Lieutenant Rieckhoff boiled it down to essentials when he said sometimes it's just a matter of having a beer with an army buddy who's going through a divorce as a result of what he's experienced.
“Sometimes some of the funding is needed just for a room with some fluorescent lights, some folding chairs, a coffee percolator and some ashtrays, like an AA meeting, just so ten guys can sit in a room and go, 'Okay, we're not alone. I've got these horror stories: you tell one, I'll tell one. Oh, I'm not the only guy in Ohio flailing my arms, seeing eyeballs in my soup. He's seeing them too. Okay.' You can't go home to your wife and say, 'Remember that time…' She's like, 'Honey, I don't know what to say.' Like, the kids are gonna understand? Your new boss is gonna understand?
“So these people come back speaking a new language that is not understood by anyone but a few. And I've been through a couple of traumatic experiences myself (Rollins's friend Joe Cole was shot in front of him when the two were attacked in December 1991), so I identify to a certain degree with what these guys go through, having been close up on a homicide and been shot at and all of that. People would ask me to explain it and I would blunt it and go, 'Oh, y'know, it was pretty bad,' and basically never return to the topic again.
“Like after my friend was killed, I got a lot of letters from people going, 'Here's what you're going through, here's what you're gonna go through, and here's my address.' And you find out very quickly… I mean, I should've kept the letters, they were very miserable though, very sad. But so many people wrote me and said, 'My brother got shot in the face standing next to me.' Or, 'My wife got killed in a liquor store hold up.' Or people described incidents almost exactly like mine: 'Hold up, my friend's got killed, I didn't, I feel weird about it.' And those letters were very good for me, 'cos you're so mad.
“So when you consider the scale - what was the number Rieckoff quoted? - 1.3 million people going through this war thing, and we're never leaving Iraq, that's the news, Nostradamus has spoken: we're never leaving Iraq. And the locals are never gonna stop saying, 'Get out.' So all these pressure-plated IEDs, EFPs and other acronyms that are gonna keep tearing arms off people, this will not stop. And other countries will keep dumping their freedom fighters into Iraq as long as there's an American troop presence. And so, what America has to budget itself for is a multi billion dollar long-term care machine, and I want to be part of that here in America, 'cos it's going to be a very needed thing. We're working on a benefit we'll be doing for the IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America), Paul's outfit, next year up in San Francisco, so it's an interesting time to be a conscientious American. I've done a lot of travelling this year, I was in Iran and Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Israel, which easily has me on someone's shitlist, but all these trips were very substantive and informative.”
Does he get a lot of questions when customs officials look through his passport and see all those visa stamps?
“Well, the Syria visa stamp got me detained. They didn't care about Lebanon so much, Iran they didn't say anything about, it was, 'Syria? Come with us.' They took me down the hall at San Francisco International Airport, I flew from Beirut to San Francisco 'cos Grinderman was playing two nights and there's no way I'm missing that, and that was totally worth it, but they had a big problem with Syria. And I said, 'Well, it's a legal visa, I didn't do anything illegal.' They were very angry that my take on Syria did not match up with the Presidential daily briefing. They said, 'Well what were they like?' and I said, 'Really friendly.'
“I walked all over Damascus by myself with a smile. And I've done that all over the world. And I'm sure it can go south on you very quickly one bad day, but so far it's been really amazing. People think you're from Canada at first, cos there's no British or Scottish accent, and I go, 'No I'm from America' and they're like, 'What are you doing here?!! And I go, 'I'm here to meet you, just checking it out.' Next question is, 'Are you here alone?' And I put my hand out and go, 'Yeah, I'm Henry.' And they go, 'Oh, this is my family, come on in!' And I was eating food in houses in Lebanon, people invited me in: 'Sit down, meet the family, have some coffee.' And this is just 'cos I made friends with a cab driver! He was fascinated that I was there by myself with no other purpose than to check it out.
“There is that six foot spear through the head of America you have to ignore,” Rollins continues. “You've been to America, it is a really good place full of really nice people. I mean, most Americans, even if they did vote for some idiot, would more often than not give you the shirt off their back. But we're so poorly led at the moment, and so horribly misinformed, disinformed, uninformed, that it's very easy, very, very quickly, in a climate of fear, to… Well, as I've been saying for many years, when the going gets rough, the average get conservative. And so when you scare the hell out of people enough, they'll cave in, they'll go, 'I'm no racist, but you gotta admit man, those black bastards…' Where a year before that you would've gone, 'Are you high? What did you just say?' And so America has been duly spooked. And that's why I went to these countries this year. I think Iran was the funnest just 'cos it's a twofer, it's on the President's Axis of Evil and Condaleeza Rice's Outpost of Tyranny, so I got a two-for-one on that one. And of all the places I went, as far as kindness from strangers, Iran wins.
“Y'know, Bush is probably not the worst guy by a stretch, it's the people around him. I bet if you hung out with him there'd be some rich-boy, child-of-privilege stuff that you have to endure, but if you really got him away from everyone and said, 'What do you think about men getting married to men?' he'd probably go, 'Ah, I don't give a damn, who cares.' He's probably not all that homophobic or racist or all that into killing all these people, but the people around him, you can't underestimate the sheer intensity and ferocity coming from your Wolfowitzes and Cheneys and the like.”
All of whom have given Rollins no end of fodder for his spoken word shows.
“I've been trying to kind of flip this thing on American audiences,” he says. “I think my country suffers from millions of people not doing any kind of critical thinking. Some refuse. Like, they will not put the shoe on the other foot. And I said, 'Okay, what if some other country looked at America and went, 'My god, they're under the thumb of a ruthless dictator, they have weapons of mass destruction, they have used them, Hiroshima, Nagasaki… They need to be liberated.' So I've been throwing this thing at these people: What if the Belgians invaded America to liberate America from Bush and the neo-conservatives. What if they came in and gave everyone a million dollars to start, so everyone's cool, but then after two weeks what would you be doing with Belgians? You'd be killing them. You would resist any occupation no matter how benevolent or well meaning it was. You'd be seeing little old ladies taking out soldiers with crocheting needles to get them out of their country. We'd kill anyone even eating Belgian frites. We would resist so wholeheartedly down to the last… Infants would be throwing things at Belgian soldiers.
“And if you think you're gonna go in anywhere and get any other reaction and be surprised when it does not cease and people are willing to strap themselves with explosives and blowing themselves up… You'd have to quit calling them terrorists and start calling them patriots at some point. They're the locals. And guess what: they want you to leave.”

Henry Rollins brings his spoken word show to Vicar Street on January 29.