The last great American male

THE FIRST and most surprising thing you notice about Henry Rollins as he emerges from a conference room in Fleet Street's Morgan Hotel, is an air of vulnerability. As the singer lingers in the more convivial lounge area, weak from the want of food, it's a softness in the eyes that startles. Sure, he's built like a brick shithouse, clad in trademark shorts, lace-up shoes and sweatshirt, his hairy, ham-like limbs blaring stark tattoos. But despite the man-and-superman jawline, buzzcut and talk-hard aura, there's something in the face that evokes a line from an old Stooges tune: "I've been hurt... and I don't care".

The adjective most commonly used to describe Rollins is "intense"—like, Taxi Driver intense—but he also betrays this almost wounded quality, as if all his guts are on the outside. Certainly, the man knows how to spill those guts, and fully understands how best to utilise the interview process. In fact, he seems incapable of repeating himself—over the course of his two 180-minute stand-up shows in Dublin, none of the material overlaps, and both sets completely bypass his most recent Think Tank spoken word album.

But despite the frantic schedule, Rollins is amicable, if businesslike, and is clearly delighted when road manager Rick mentions that Philomena Lynott will be dropping by later in the day. Mrs. Lynott has met many rockers, including Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, but Henry's her favourite—she refers to him as her "toy-boy". But this is hardly surprising: a graduate of the straight-edge DC scene that spawned Bad Brains, Fugazi and Black Flag, Rollins, with his habit of addressing elders as "sir" or "ma'am", has always gotten on well with people's parents.

Even if you've never bought any of his 11 books or eight solo albums, or attended the live shows, you probably know more about this "ageing alternative icon" (his own words) than your own GP. Therefore, we'll merely skim the case history; how Rollins—born Henry Garfield on 13 February 1961 in Washington DC—was a scrawny, troubled child, prescribed Ritalin (a psychiatric drug prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders) at the age of 12. How, as a teenager, he found salvation in financial and emotional self-sufficiency, lifting weights and working out to records by Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath and the MC5. How he witnessed his best friend Joe Cole being gunned down in Los Angeles in 1991, was subsequently held by the LAPD for 10 hours of questioning, and suffered repeated interrogations for months after, suspected of being a drug dealer. Or how, over the last decade, he has achieved a degree of celebrity far exceeding his record sales, appearing in Gap ads and movies like David Lynch's Lost Highway and Michael Mann's Heat (Oliver Stone once admitted that had he met Henry in time, the singer would've had the Woody Harrelson part in Natural Born Killers).

Love or loathe him, compared to the moral and intellectual cripples that populate the English indie and US underground scenes, Rollins is a raging bull in a china-white shop. But strangely enough, discounting the spoken word/jazz album Everything and the Black Flag canon, the man's back catalogue rarely reflects his excellent taste in music, from classic bebop and John Lee Hooker to Isaac Hayes and the Beastie Boys. Indeed, Rollins is far more effective as a writer, actor, archivist, publisher, performance artist and media manipulator than as a musician—one gets the impression the guy would rather be compared to rogue male existentialists like Miller, Céline and Hemingway than any of his contemporaries in rock 'n' roll.

Still, as he gets older, Rollins seems to be shedding some of the misanthropy that characterised earlier work—there are several moments on Think Tank where he exhibits a grudging respect for his fellow humans.

"Well, all the airplane raps on the first disc sound like I wanna kill everybody!" Rollins laughs, before considering the suggestion. "But I've always liked people, and I've always admired and dug the human struggle, cos I'm one of 'em and I'm in it. But in my own defence, for many years I was exposed to a really harsh element of people, in that you go on stage and have stuff thrown on your head, get spat on—not cos you're an enemy of the crowd, that's just how those gigs were. They like you when they're spitting on you, they're paying tribute to you by going 'Sieg heil! Sieg heil!'

"You go and starve on the road for over seven, eight years straight and live on nothing, get hassled by police, have guns put in your face, have drugs planted on your body, be held up at borders, have phones tapped...I'm not trying to say, 'Poor me', I'm just saying, you go through enough of that, and that's a lot of poking and prodding."

Rollins seems genuinely surprised when I ask him if it's harder to sustain the intensity of the full-on live shows as he gets older.

"Obviously I don't play as hard as I did maybe when I was 22, cos I'm 37 now, but what a lot of people in music and the world don't do is maintain their bodies as they grow older," he reasons, the words coming out rapid-fire in a Charlie Parker breath-length. "When you're 19 to 23 you don't have to do anything, you can sustain yourself on beer and string and sleep once a week and look good every day. But by the time I was 24 I went, 'Oh, okay, that's the drill. I'm not a rock 'n' roller, I'm an athlete'. Tours for me became seasons, and the gig became the game. So there's warm-up and there's preparation and then there's training in the off-season to maintain the body."

Rollins is an immensely competitive individual, driven by the desire to blow even his friends and heroes offstage. Later, at the second Vicar Street show in Dublin, he will relate the epic tale of his attempts to upstage Iggy Pop after the Godfather reduced the Rollins Band to rubble when he guested with them at a New Orleans show in the early '90s. Henry became so obsessed with redeeming himself in the eyes of Osterberg that he went into intensive training for a European festival rematch, lifting weights, running and uploading precise amounts of food and water at predetermined intervals in order to crank his body up to Terminator-pitch.

In the end, he still got creamed, but all the same, Rollins makes a formidable opponent: the guy is ruthless in his pursuit of that Herculean point of pure transcendence. For Henry, it's all about muscling into The Moment, the point of ultimate burn.

"That's how it is for me," he affirms. "There's a song on our last record (Come In And Burn) called 'On My Way To The Cage' and it's kind of about a guy on his way to lethal injection, when they go, 'Dead man walkin!', and he's like, 'Alright! Fuck it! Star time! I'm gonna hit stage and die!' That's how I feel before I go onstage, man, you almost get this ancient feeling, especially when you play the bigger places. You walk up the ramp, and this thing starts happening, you're seeing all these people around going, 'Raaaaargh!' and you're like (sucks in a Minotaur-sized breath), you kind of inhale all that energy, and all of a sudden your body kind of compresses, you feel this . . . pressure on your body. I know my body must physically change somehow, time kind of compacts, and...wooah!"

Intensities, as Ted said, in 10 cities. Or a hundred. Rollins' work ethic is legendary. He travels. He performs. He eats. He shits. He writes. Sometimes he even sleeps. But that's all he does, and mostly he does it alone, having constructed a design for living somewhere between a Zen monk, a samurai swordsman and a travelling salesman. But is this relentless programme merely a way of insulating himself from human bullshit?

"There's a lot of that," he admits. "I think we all do stuff to block out the mundanities and banalities of life, and I'm sure some of the work I do is to avoid what some might call real life or whatever. But what is real life? Oh, is that that shitty job I have to take? Is that where I'm gonna get real, when I hold the tray and say 'Yes sir, here's your sandwiches'. Well, I don't feel like running towards that."

Is he prey to depression when he's not working?

"I'm prey to depression seven days a week, working or not," he states flatly. "It's always been a struggle. And since I don't do the medication it just becomes your friend: 'Oh yeah, it's you again'. Around full moons it's really bad, two days up to, and a day after. It's always been part of my energy, y'know, some of my better writing comes when I'm depressed. At home I get depressed because you just kind of sit there in that place. I don't know many people, I don't have a lot of friends. I'm not trying to (say) 'Oh, poor me', I just don't hang out. Or I do hang out in 20 countries a year, I'm always jammin', so my relationship with most people is 'I'll see ya when I see ya'."

Has he been in therapy?

"No," he replies, shaking his head grimly. "It's like renting a hooker, a professional friend. No, I'd rather write, I'd rather work it out, it's that intense male thing in me: 'Must figure out the problem. It's logical . . . figure it out'. Cos you can always figure it out if you have the guts to go back to where a problem stems from. And y'know, for me, a lot of my depression...I just get lonely. I'm not immune to that. This is a very lonely business, entertainment, I mean, that's why it wrecks some people, that's why people drink and do drugs, cos there's a lot of downtime. There's this wild experience where, y'know, you're in front of all these people who really like you. And you really like them too. These guys, they talk to you and they can't help putting their hand on your arm cos they've wanted to talk to you for years, and they're like, 'Henry man, thank you so much'. It's real.

"And then you come home to your room. And you're just sitting there. And all those voices and all that applause is just ringing in your ears, and there you are alone, grinding your teeth. And it's a big up, and then you just hit the bottom, and you do that night after night, it's like being that buoy that gets smashed into the rocks every night, and if I said it didn't wear me down and have this effect on me, I'd be lying, y'know? I mean, I'm a pretty tough guy—I'm not like a hard man—but I've been touring for 17 years, so I can tell you all about being lonely, not touching a woman for seven months at a time and thinking about it every day. Or every once in a while you get a girlfriend and you end up really missing that person, my God man, it's excruciating. All performers will tell you that, some more than others because some live on the road more than others, but man, it puts you on the anvil and pounds your heart."

So has the work consistently wrecked his personal life?

"What personal life?" he snaps. "It's hard to get across to women, definitely. Am I being me or am I being That Guy? Am I gettin' out from behind...I'm not saying what I do is shtick but...

"David Lee Roth once said to me: 'Sometimes I don't wanna go to these parties, I get invited all the time, and I end up with all these people around me going, "Hey Dave!" And all of a sudden I become That Guy, I start performing. But I don't wanna do The Dave Thing, I just wanna be...Dave!'

"And so I always wonder if I'm being real. Currently, me and this girl are trying to see if we can work something out, and it's really weird, cos we're both adults, y'know? We've both been through the wringer, we're both standing in front of each other going, 'Can we do this or are we just bullshitting ourselves? Okay, maybe we shouldn't do this, because maybe six weeks from now it'll be really catastrophic, and you're cool and I'm cool and we like each other, but we don't wanna put each other through this because we've been around enough times to know the ramifications, the potential of what this whole thing can do'."

Is he reckless in those situations?

"No," he smiles. "My tendency is to wimp out and just go, 'Okay, yeah, you're right'. Cos I've got an aeroplane to catch the next day, and I've got this schedule and, besides all that, I've got that bastard ambition. Y'know, my thirst is so unquenched it's not true. The more I think about it the more pissed off I get. Not like, 'I-wanna-hurt-somebody' pissed off, but like, 'Oh, you think I can't do 20 shows in the next two weeks? Make it 22. Fuck you'.

"So, there's that, and how do you slow down and give someone the time of day? That is the test. And I'm old enough to know when I'm bullshittin' and when I'm being real, and sometimes you meet someone you like enough to not wanna let 'em into the hell, the intensity that is your life. I don't know anyone who lives like I do. I'm not saying, 'Oh, I'm the best'. I just don't know anyone who's so tragically into being out there, doing it. I come home to...no cats, no dogs, no animals, no plants, nothing. I come home to my Solo Man Place, and no one calls me."

Such is the loneliness of the long distance road warrior. Henry's ruminations on ennui are interrupted by his record company host, who arrives with the menu from a nearby eatery. He orders a hamburger medium with cheese, no fries, then we discuss the subject of Henry's outing (there were rumours that the decidedly heterosexual Rollins was going to come out of the closet, as it were, at a press conference on CNN in Chicago several years ago), deconstructed to rather hilarious effect in "The Gay Thing" on Think Tank.

"If I was into men, knowing how men are, I'd be getting laid all the time," he chuckles. "I'd be jamming! I wouldn't be in any closet. But when that happened, I was like, 'Wow, malicious, thought out...someone's having a go at me. I'd like to meet that guy!' It was infuriating, cos like, they don't come out of the bushes to go, 'It was me!', they just throw a stone from behind the tree-line. And I do not respond very well to threats. You can tease me, you can badmouth me, and I'll sit there and have to take it, it's part of the deal.

"But if you threaten me, I lose my shit—I'll pick up the bluntest, handiest thing and try to get your brains to come out of your nose. I just have a thing about it. I've been shot at. I've been stabbed at. I've had guns pulled on me. And that stuff rubs me the wrongest way; when someone tries to roll up on me like that, then my genetic imperative is to put you in the hospital, and when you get out, put you in again and again until you understand, 'I am someone you should not do that with', cos one of the most unenviable aspects of my nature is this horrible capacity for violence without feeling any remorse, any regret. Pfffft. I don't care. I never put no one's brains out of their heads, but cheekbones, noses, jaws, teeth out, hurt some guy, (he) had to get facial surgery, I've done all that stuff. Do I feel bad about it? Not one bit. Dug it. Liked feeling the cheek break under the fist. Aimed so it didn't break the nose. Tried to get the teeth out without cutting my knuckles up. Have two teeth at home from a guy I took 'em out of in Australia. No problem."

What was the last tangle he was involved in?

"I punched out a stalker on my property, cos I promised him I would after the fifth time," he recounts. "I go, 'Look, you come back again, I'm gonna punch you out, do you believe me?' He went, 'Yeah'. So I said, 'So don't come back anymore, man. You want me to go in and get a T-shirt or a record and sign it? Can't I just see you at the show? Be cool man. You gotta go'. But he came back. And I gotta keep my promise. And so I brought out my staff, and I said, 'Okay, here's that guy I was telling you about'. And I just took him out in front of 'em. Which really blew my staff's minds, it ruined their day, they're all back at their desks like this (affects shocked expression). I'm like, 'What's the problem?', and they're like, 'Man, Henry, I wanna go home early'. Everybody was really bummed. And I was back at my desk in five minutes going, 'Okay. One less motherfucker like that'.

"But don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say I'm a hard guy. You see these hard bastards and I'm not one of those guys, I was just raised with enough brutality in my life, as a little kid living in Washington DC, to where if you have transgressed some boundary, I feel no problem if the response is very brutal, that doesn't trouble me. And then, by the same token, I would never do something to mess with you without fully expecting you to come with a baseball bat and take me out. Not even like writing a mean thing on the wall about you."

Carpe Jugulum. The phrase could've been coined by Rollins. When I ask him if he was intimidated squaring up to Al Pacino in Michael Mann's multi-million dollar production Heat, he rationalises it thus:

"All of a sudden you're sitting down having lunch with Al Pacino, fuckin' Scarface man. And in my head I'm like, 'You can't do it. What are you doin?'. But that's where you face yourself and either you say, 'Oh no thanks', and you go home, or you go, 'Check this out. I'm gonna bust a move right here. There's greatness calling. There's the gauntlet being thrown down and I can either do it or don't. Life is short'.

"And you get up on the yellow tape and they roll the film, and you get it on and go, 'You motherfucker!' and they go, 'That was great', and you say, 'Whaaat?'. And all of a sudden you're acting your ass off. That's fun. To me, it's not do or die, it's do or don't. And you can always go home early, you can always live less. It's the difference between the guy who wanted to be Chuck Yeager, the Right Stuff guy who broke the sound barrier—I like him cos we were born on the same day—and the guy who settled for the bank job when he wanted to be Chuck Yeager.

"But that to me is what it's all about: rising to the occasion and delivering the goods, and that's why I like touring. I get about 20 minutes of satisfaction after the show, I sit in a chair and I can smell my sweat turn into ammonia, you get to gloat for a few minutes, and then the slate is wiped clean. And like, tonight, I've never done a show, I have to prove it all over again. The campsite was wiped out by an incredible storm last night, and now I have to go build it again. And I go out with a genuine love of performance and a great affection for the crowd. You gotta go out there and just burn rubber every night. And I love it."

That night in Vicar Street, Henry puts himself to the test once again, delivering another marathon pitbull-session to a rapt but rowdy audience, disarming hecklers, spinning yarns, reaffirming his credo, cracking jokes. Amidst all the detritus of the age, the media saturation, the corporate overkill, the information and disinformation overload, this is shockingly simple: one man and his mouth, telling his truth, testifying against a welter of bullshit. The righteous stuff.

ROLLINS ON
Mick Jagger

"Look at Jagger. He might not be makin' records as good as Exile On Main Street anymore, but the guy's like, 54 or something? Look at him onstage. Try and find a second where he's not moving. Whew! I mean the guy works, he runs seven miles a day, he maintains it, y'know? And now he sings like a motherfucker, out there. It gives you some inspiration."

U2 (of course!)

"U2 are just like the most bogus Exxon Death Star of music. I was standing next to The Edge watching Jane's Addiction, and he was watching Dave Navarro. I just wanted to say to him, 'Hey, prick. There's a real guitar player. There's a guy who can actually play his instrument, not that chikky-chikky-chikky horseshit you do, treated by Brian Eno so it sounds interesting'. And you could tell, he was gettin' a lesson, cos Navarro was just like, fuckin' lightin' shit on fire with his guitar. But I've never threatened them, I don't wanna fight them or anything, I just hate their music."

John Lee Hooker

"I've interviewed him twice, he's got this amazing handshake, his hands are like kid gloves, so soft, utterly supple—it's like suede or something. He just kind of places his hand in yours. His hands are fascinating, like old tools from another age."

John Cale

"He's such a stormy guy, intense all the time. The last time I saw him, it was at a poetry festival and he went up there and played 90 minutes and it was the best set I've ever seen him do. When he did 'Heartbreak Hotel' it sounded like Thelonious Monk melting, he's just devolving the song. Everyone was just sitting there, like, Woooh!"

James Parker (author of Turned On: A Biography Of Henry Rollins)

"He doesn't seem like the worst guy, I mean I know people who've read it, and they said, 'Yeah, he likes you, he's not trying to beat you up or anything'. He wanted me to help him with it, and I'm like, 'Why? How dare you write a book about me? (a), I'm not dead, (b) I'm not infamous, and (c) I'm writing that book'. I was like, 'Get outta my life. Go do your own book about you! Go do a book about Hemingway, some legendary dead guy, not me'. But you buy the land, the Indians come with it."

— Think Tank is out now on Universal Records.