A man walks out on stage. He sets down a bottle of water on the floor. Grabs the microphone, wrapping the cord around his hand a few times before clenching his fist around it. He then begins to speak, and continues to do so for almost three solid hours. Without a break, without even bending down to sip from the bottle of water he’d brought with him. And that’s a Henry Rollins spoken word show.

It’s a simple setup, and could be a mind-numbing chore in the hands of the wrong performer. One person talking for roughly the length of a Lord of the Rings film is a lot to ask of the average attention span, even under the best of circumstances. As Rollins himself once said during a performance a decade or so ago, “It is possible to have too much of a good thing, or way too much of a mediocre thing, or diabolically too much of a shitty thing.” Last night at the Birchmere, Rollins piled tangent upon tangent upon tangent as he worked through his usual blend of storytelling and commentary, yet there were still disappointed moans when he announced, well over two hours into the evening, that he was entering the final stretch.

Rollins makes it work through the sheer force of his personality, but that force isn’t necessarily the raw intensity usually associated with the man. There’s a boyish charm and a relentless drive to learn and discover that is the real engine for his talking shows. The former comes out in his stories of the puddle of fanboy he becomes when meeting the heroes of his youth. Which happens often enough to someone in his position to provide a fair amount of material. It also shows up in his self-deprecating raps about his difficulties with women. The thirst for discovery is manifest in his travelogues, as he collects stories about interactions with people in each new country the way some people collect passport stamps.