DCist Interview: Henry Rollins

And that was clear right from the beginning, '83 or '84?

Yeah. All of it started when I would go with Chuck Dukowski to these shows he would perform at -- he was the bass player in Black Flag -- and he would do these group shows where they'd have a bunch of poets and performance artists, all different people. This guy Harvey Kubernik put them on. He'd get, like, five poets and three performance artists, D. Boone from the Minutemen, and everybody would get a moment to read their journal or speak or whatever. One night, Harvey said "You've got a big mouth. Why don't you get up there next week and do ten minutes?" I said, "What am I gonna do?" He said, "Well, we're paying ten bucks." I said, "I'll come up with something," because I needed the money.

So I got up there and told this crazy story about band practice a few days before. Some white-power fanatic had tried to run over our guitar player. People came up to me afterwards and said, "You should do that more often. That was really cool." And it felt cool. Harvey said, "That went down really well. You want to do it next week?" He's an agent for all these poets, so he has all these smaller shows where less people get more time. So he said, "Okay, you open for these two poets. You get 20 minutes." [Then it was] 30 minutes. Then these poets were opening for me, which they didn't like very much.

In the autumn of '85, when Black Flag's Loose Nut tour ended, I basically just turned right around in the same van and did a coast-to-cost talking tour in front of 12 to 40 or 50 people per night. It was in boardrooms in universities, meeting rooms. No P.A., just people sitting on the floor. [I slept] on the promoter's couch, or in a dorm or whatever.

It grew from there. It felt immediately like I could do this. It just felt way more natural to me than music, which never felt natural, though it was something I wanted to do. And as the years have gone on, it's turned into this thing. It travels very well: Me and a microphone and a road manager. It's not like you have to bring in a bunch of stuff. Give me some monitors, turn the microphone on, and away we go. This has allowed me to go all over the place with the talking shows: The United Arab Emirates, Russia, Israel, all over.

In some cities, by the end of Black Flag, I was out-drawing the band on my own. That created some tension, because it became lucrative -- "Wow, I can pay the rent." I was doing a lot of these little tours that I would book. I would call venues, or call the local record store and get the number for a venue. This is what I learned to do in Black Flag -- we would just scrounge for shows.

There's usually at least one point in a Rollins spoken-word show where you'll branch off from the narrative to tell a tangential story that might last 20 or 30 minutes. Then you return to the story you were telling originally, and the audience laughs and applauds because they'd forgotten you were in the middle of that first one. That always feels like a bit of a flourish, like the you just finished a great guitar solo or something. How do you keep the "setlist" straight in your head?

It's almost as if you can see it: You have these files, like you're looking through a screen: "So this got me to that, which got me to that." It's like opening folders that are in folders, or all the little Russian dictators that sit inside themselves in that thing you buy at the gift shop. (It's funny that Stalin is always the smallest.)

But I know where I'm going. It's not like I get up there and go on this tangent, like, "Whoops!" That's the fun thing about storytelling: The whole thing weaves together. And if it doesn't, you can sometimes B.S. your way [through it]; you can find some commonalities if you get stuck.

The other night in Liverpool, I got way out there, and due to exhaustion, I went, "Okay, I have no idea how I got here." A nice lady said, "You were on the treadmill!" And I said, "I was on the treadmill, and I was watching this video. Thank you!" And I got back into it.

She actually wrote me a day later and said, "I'm the one who rescued you from your tangent." Thanks, Lady!

It seems inevitable that that would happen at some point.

It happens about every other tour. Once! Due to repetition, exhaustion, and the fact that I keep the schedule so tight. There's not many days off. I don't like 'em, and I think that if you're out there working, you should be working. But it's a very innocent mistake. It reminds me of when I'd go see the Grateful Dead, and Jerry Garcia would make a mistake and everyone would applaud: "Yeah, nice one, Fat Boy!" It's a very friendly environment.

You developed your own style a long time ago, but when you were starting out as a spoken-word artist, did you look at the work of Spalding Gray or Bill Hicks or Richard Pryor to try to learn the craft? Or anybody else?

No. I've never seen Spalding Gray perform. One time I saw him walking out of one of my shows in New York, which I thought was kind of cool. I've never seen Swimming to Cambodia. And I know he's no longer with us, so I'll never have the chance to see him live.

I was certainly aware of Richard Pryor, having grown up with That Nigger's Crazy and the other record, the two real famous ones from the Sunset Strip live show. I saw that performance film [Richard Pryor Live in Concert] when I was 14 or 15, and I laughed so hard I was sore walking out of the theater. Me and Ian MacKaye went and saw that together, and walked out of there weak, because it was so funny.

I always just went on stage and read something I had written, or told a story in between shuffling pages of paper. Over the years, the paper kind of went away, and I just went up there and talked. But there was no real [influential] person, and I was not aware of Bill Hicks until the 90s.

I assume that like everybody, famous or not, you have a private persona that's different from the one you wear in public. But you definitely have a stage persona you've developed that's been consistent over the years, of the guy who cries after masturbating and worries that he's trading in his masculinity if he goes to the store to buy plates and tableware or whatever. How much would you say that you "amplify" yourself onstage?

Well, hyperbole is where it's at. That's how you get the point across. But what you see onstage is not all that different from me.

You'll find this with a lot of people. I've met a few famous people, and the stage persona -- especially in the comedy realm -- is always nicer than the pathetic hole they live in when they're not onstage. Bill Hicks described it very well [in his monologue] "Clam Lappers and Sonic Hedgehog."

I'm a workaholic. When I'm not on stage, I'm working on the next book. This weekend, I have three radio shows that I have to work on; one live and two pre-tapes. I have to hurry a manuscript to completion, and I'm working on another book. I guarantee you I'm not really doing anything much but standing in front of one computer, working in iTunes trying to put a show or two together, or sitting in front of a different computer, trying to swat typos or transcribing from a notebook. If I can fight my torpitude and laziness, I might venture out the grocery store this afternoon and make sure I have enough provisions so I don't have to move my ass over the weekend.

I was going to ask you to describe a typical work day, if there is such a thing for you, but you're already kind of doing it.

Well, I usually get up around four in the morning during the week. I'm at my desk by 4:40 or 5, depending on the workload. I work here at the office all day, then I safety-up the hard drive and go back to the house, where I have a bunch of gym gear in the garage. I do my workout, then it's time for the second shift.

I work with about four computers in different locations. I go out and do the radio show every Tuesday night. I don't really go out on dates or anything. But a lot of the time, I'm on the road. I'm 92 shows into the year. Post-show on the bus, I'm usually on the laptop on the Internet, getting some work done, answering mail. I get a lot of mail, and I answer it.

I don't want some person writing me and not getting an answer. Don't turn into my pen pal, but yeah, I'll answer your letter. Sometimes you get these 3,000-word e-mails back, now that we're such good buddies, and I have to explain -- gently -- that my hair is on fire trying to get everything done. I've got time to write, like, three lines, and then you've really got to turn me loose. But you don't want to hurt someone's feelings, because they're only coming from complete sincerity. You have to just say, "Thank you, but I'm crazy up against it here."

I've learned to be very, very careful of other people's feelings, because there's a lot of vulnerability when you tell someone you like what they do. And people open up to me: I get these intense letters from everybody from guys in Iraq to people with addiction problems.

Well, about that: You've been telling a story for the last few years about a guy you met after a show here in D.C. at Lisner Auditorium in, I think, 2004. This was a young guy who suffered from a horrible birth defect called Spina bifida, which prevents him from working. He was living off of public assistance and hating it. And he asked you for job, which you couldn't give him, but he refused your offer to loan him $40 just so he could get himself home safely on this very cold winter night.

Does that happen a lot, people asking you for things that are just impossible?

Absolutely, sure. I so am not the guy to help you with advice. I'm barely able to get my own life together. I'm not "Dear Abby," nor am I a doctor, nor am I a psychiatrist or an analyst. But I write back as best I can. I'm always really honest.

You've been very critical of the Bush Administration, and they deserve it, but prior to the last eight years, you didn't discuss politics much. You've been clear about why you've started talking about them: Because our country is embroiled in massive, and probably preventable, crises both foreign and domestic, and that angers you. But when you decided to go there, did you worry that you might become more like a traditional pundit or satirist? Many of your topics over the years have been fairly unique to Henry Rollins, but not politics, obviously.

Yeah, but [politics] affects my personal life. I'm living in this country; I'm seeing it. I meet more people than George W. Bush does. I've met more Americans and seen more of American than he ever will, because of the nature of my business. When I see things change so incredibly, I can't not comment.

For me, politics always comes from a personal place. I don't think I can say anything that you couldn't find more adroitly written on Media Matters or All Story or anywhere else. These people are brilliant, and I'm not. I'm a high school graduate with a mediocre grasp on all this stuff. But one thing I do is travel. I go to Iran, and Syria, and Lebanon. I've been a lot of places with the USO: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kurdistan. It doesn't make me an expert, but it definitely gives me a vantage point to say, "Well, when I was in Kabul, I . . ." And I might be one of the only people in the building that night who can say that.

That's why I've been weighing in: I've been watching the destruction of my country.

Did you deliberately book your upcoming Birchmere gig for the night before Election Day?

Of course!

What's that going to feel like, playing right across the Potomac from the White House, 12 hours before -- I'm an optimist -- we all go vote?

Well, I'm voting absentee, so I have half a day off on Election Day. I'm going to take my camera out and see what I can go see. I'll probably hang out with Ian [MacKaye] and go with him wherever he goes to vote.

I think John McCain will be elected president. And I don't have any "Ding-dong, the witch is dead!" celebration in mind for when Bush steps down. The swath of destruction that he and his cronies have left after eight years -- it's not like you wake up the next day and everything is gleaming and all the legs have somehow been rejoined to the bodies.

With McCain, you can almost be assured that, yeah, of course we'll go into Iran, if nothing else to get a pipeline out of Azerbaijan and Turkemenistan down to the Persian Gulf. So there'll be more death. And Sarah Palin? I'm still trying to get my head around what's the strategy there, because Republicans are anything but dumb. Or is [McCain believed to be] so to the center that she's the balance; the anti-abortion creationist that'll get Arkansas to vote? I don't know.

I want to be wrong. I'm voting for Barack Obama.

The guy who introduced me to your spoken-word work in college identified himself as a libertarian. He told me that you embody the things he believes in: hard work and self-reliance. And of course, these are values that conservative Republicans always claim that they're about.

This is a picture of Henry Rollins smiling. Photo by Ben Swinnerton.

A lot of them are. They've got that hurly-burly man-thing going; the perceived Alpha-male version of themselves. Like my father: Staunch conservative, Ph.D. I haven't seen him since the Carter Administration. He's too mean to die. I'm sure he's around somewhere. But there's an 18-hour-a-day guy. He can do it, in his starched Brooks Brothers suit. A very intense, intelligent guy; hard-working like a motherfucker. And I'm sure he loves Fox News. I have no idea where the guy lives, but I'm sure he's digging Rush Limbaugh right now.

A lot of those guys preach the hard-work ethic, yet they're incredibly insensitive and cold. It's always those guys in the American flag lapel-pins -- they're so un-American. They treat America like an ATM. They don't give a fuck when the jobs go overseas. If you disagree, you're a communist, or a Taliban sympathizer. When those conservatives [say] that whole bootstraps thing, I'm like, "You know, if you put bootstraps in the ghetto, all those people would pull themselves up, too, and you'd have way more competition."

That's why American schools are so appalling. They don't want everyone having the information. They know they would have to give up a slice of their pie to this wretched thing called equality.

Well, this is a tough segue after a topic as depressing as that, but I want to ask you about your show on the Independent Film Channel. You've had a great, eclectic mix of guests; from Werner Herzhog to Larry Flynt to William Shatner. Do you choose them all yourself?

Yeah. Herzhog is a hero of mine. I found out he lives down the street from where I'm sitting right now. He just drove over. That was fairly stunning. When he walked into our building, I was like, "Woah that's Werner Herzhog!" I said, "Hey, Mr. Herzhog!" And he said [German accent] "Call me Werner." I went, "Oh, I'll try!"

Gore Vidal was huge, to have him in the studio. He lives in L.A. now. He moved back after his partner died.

Larry Flynt to me is a fascinating guy. I haven't looked at Hustler magazine since I was 15, but to me he's much more than that. [Jerry] Falwell had just died [when Flynt appeared on the show], so it was interesting for him to talk about that.

Yeah, they're all people I picked. I'm interested in a lot of people so we have a huge list, -- thankfully, because we got, like, one-millionth of the people we requested. There're all kinds of ways to hear the word "no," we found out: "No, our client is busy." "No, we've never heard of you." "No, our client hates your talent's guts." Gary Oldman's manager was like, "They gave Henry Rollins at TV show? Blasphemy!" Apparently that manager hates me. I've talked to Gary before; he's cool. But his manager said, "No, I'm not letting Gary near that show." But mostly it was like, "Who?" [Laughs.] They couldn't be bothered.

We put the reach out to everybody from Al Gore to Bob Dylan. Might as well. And a lot of these people I knew: Shatner is a pal of mine. Chuck D., I've known for many years. David Fincher is a pal of mine. Jeff Bridges I did a movie with, so he was kind of easy [to book].

With some of them, we were just very lucky; they happened to be fans of mine. Stephen Gaghan -- he made Syriana -- we were reading an interview with him where he said, "One of my heroes is Henry Rollins." We were like, "Holy shit! Get him on the phone!" So we were lucky to get who we got, but it's a lot of hard work, too. A lot of producers calling and calling and calling. I would hate that job.

The letter you read to Ann Coulter on the show was hilarious, and the clip of you reading it circulated on the Web quite a bit. Did you ever hear anything back from her camp?

No. People like Ann never are going to go on a show like mine, because they're going to get caught out there. Even with, like, Bill Maher, there are enough people on the show, and enough of a comedy bent to it, that Bill's just going to say, "Come on, Ann, you just make this shit up!" And everyone laughs and applauds, so Ann gets a pass.

On my show, I would be a bit more caustic, so these people wisely stay away. You're never going to get Sean Hannity out of his element. Watch him never be a guest on anybody's show. They know. They're not that dumb; they know what happens when they get put in the real world. Find Sean Hannity on the streets of New York without personal security. No way. Because he knows that in New York City, someone's going to walk up to him and slap that wig off his head.

I want to ask you for a reading list. What are three books you think everyone should read before we all go vote?

I think people should read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. That was the best read of last year for me.

Paul Roberts, I think his name is -- a book called The End of Food. It's a downer. It's rough, but I think it's essential information. It's about famine, and food systems in the world, NAFTA. Malthusian theory, bascially: How humans are just going to starve to death. I co-financed a hunger documentary this year, where all the profits are going to go to the World Food Program, so famine has been on my mind.

I'm reading The Wrecking Crew right now, by [Thomas Frank] the same fellow who wrote What's the Matter with Kansas? That was the first book I opened up when I got back from Europe the other day. It's not a lot you don't know, if you follow this stuff. It's just interesting to see how hard-core the Abramoffs of the world are. I had no idea that they're that fanatical. They're terrifying. They're just so single-minded. They do not sleep.

Those three books by Chalmers Johnson, I think, are really worth checking out: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis. You learn a lot about our military presence in the world from those books, and what we do to everything from the environment to the locals at bars: You know, there's rape and stuff. There's no country that's allowed to have a military presence in our country. We wouldn't tolerate it for a nanosecond. But we're in 153 countries, then there're all the black bases, where you don't know where we are. Chalmers Johnson is one of those good, clear writers in the Morris Berman-Gore Vidal mode. I applaud those books; I learned so much from them.

You get back to D.C. pretty much every year, so you've probably noticed that it doesn't much resemble the D.C. you grew up in. What do you think of how it's changed?

I see the changes, yeah. I like to walk around the old neighborhood. Glover Park was the last neighborhood I was living in before I moved out. It's just turned into a place where white people breed. D.C. looks like it's kind of hard to live there, just in terms of being able to afford it. There are a lot more stop signs than there used to be.

I've been told that the rich Democrats move more towards Maryland and the rich Republicans make a move to Virginia.

Senator Obama's prospects in Virginia are looking better and better. And it's even more likely that both of Virginia's senators will be Democrats after this election.

I've been saying it's gonna be McCain since '06. I was talking to Janeane Garofalo yesterday — I learn a lot from her; she's a very smart person — and she said, "You have to stop saying that right now." I said, "But that's what I think!" And she said, "People listen to you. Just stop saying that. By saying it, you're going to help make it true." She was so mad.

Well, not that you asked me, but I agree with her. You have an audience, some of whom, at least, probably haven't voted before, and they do listen to you. You said yourself that you get requests for advice all the time.

Yeah, but I don't think by saying that I'm going to make anyone vote for McCain! Maybe I should stop volunteering it. But when someone asks me, I say I think it will be McCain. What am I going to do, lie? Or say, "I'm not going to tell you?" In interview mode, you spout!

Henry Rollins will speak at the Birchmere Monday, November 3rd, at 7:30 p.m. Sold out; perhaps your Uncle Craig can help.