ELMO KEEP

The Importance Of Being Henry



Rollins on travelling. Rollins on vacations, or the lack thereof. Rollins on Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rollins on why John McCain will be the next President of the United States. Rollins on choosing Mark Twain over Miles Davis. Rollins on deracination, getting older, why cynicism is a waste of time, and why U2 can’t play. “One should be hard on oneself,” he says. “I should be hard on myself. But you do what you like. But that’s how I should be.”

Press junkets have got to suck. Douglas Coupland for one person, has said as much. On his sadly now defunct New York Times blog, in August 2006 (Things I’ve Learned from Touring) he wrote of suffering through interviews:

People will walk up to you with an X-ray of their skull and say, “I don’t have a brain. See? Here’s my evidence.” And it turns out they really don’t have one. It happens, apparently; instead of brains they have a thin tissue lining their skull’s interior that is, it would seem, all one really needs to get along in the world.

I’m really hoping that Henry Rollins, famed for his disinclination to suffer a fool, will not think this of me.

Even for someone who makes a living talking, three full days of back to back commitments gabbering with journalists will take it out of you. Doubly so if you are jetlagged. We meet Rollins at the crack of the second day, in the lobby of a Sydney hotel. Outside, it is glorious. A brisk autumn morning, brilliant with sunshine. Rollins for most of the day, will be inside.

He is smallish. He is unerringly polite. His hair is gray. His eyes are brown, though they meet ours rarely. He is wearing a faded military green t-shirt, with two pens clipped at the neck, to the inside. He looks fit and healthy, if not a little short on sleep. Still, Rollins is on message. He is extremely considered in his answers. This is his job and he takes it very seriously. You wouldn’t describe his demeanor as warm, especially. There is horrible musak floating over the lobby.

It is the antithesis of punk rock.

He approaches the sofas on which you will be sitting, while over the course of a conversation a bell-hop will rattle a tray covered in breakfasts past us several times, loudly. You shake hands and begin.

Hi Henry. How are you?

I’m fine thankyou. I’m a little jetlagged. So I’m porpoising. I was in Europe. I came from Barcelona, via Singapore, so I was on European time. I was getting used to that, so it’ll take me a couple of days. It’s hard for me, it’s hard when I get to a place and it’s later.

We’ll go easy.

On no, you don’t have to do that. I travel a lot, I’m used to feeling under slept almost all the time. I just deal with it.

How does it affect the way you think about things?

It’s like being a functioning alcoholic. I know people who drink so they can drive. Or people who are like, without pot, you know, they need some pot. Without a certain amount of stress and you know, that thing, I don’t know what to do with myself.

Do you take holidays, ever?

No. Well around Christmas time last year I went to Pakistan, which you can’t really term as a holiday, cause there’s really no pleasant things to see. Whenever I have time, I’ll go a place like that. It’s more like a high caloric burn, where you learn a thing or two. Last time off I had I went to Syrian, Iran, Paskistan. As soon as I get done with this, I’m going to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I’ll be real busy, I’ve got things I want to see every day I’m there.

Relaxation or vacation for me, down time, or a way to disconnect, I just hang out by myself.

You were saying you don’t really know what to do with yourself (in quieter times). Do you know what’s driving you to keep working like you do? You’re obviously someone who’s happy that way.

I’ve thought a lot about it, why I work at the pace I do. I’ve really got nothing else going on. Most things bore me. I’m kind of in the end zone of my life, just kind of waiting for it to end. So I just do stuff, otherwise sometimes I have to push life along; like taking a riding crop to its hindquarter, because it doesn’t move fast enough for me.

It’s why I travel to the places I do. As soon as George W. Bush says, “that’s an evil place”, I book a ticket and I go. So I can come back and go, “oh, they were great! Fuck you. Fuck you and you’re stupid hatred.” I get no real joy out of this stuff. I do it because just really honestly I’ve got nothing else going on whatsoever.

Yeah. Other than you know, a radio show, a television show, performing…

Oh oh. That’s tasks. That’s all fun. No, it’s good! I feel lucky to have the work. Of all the stuff I do, the funnest is the radio show, you know. It’s low impact. I don’t have to be seen by anybody. You can play great music. I enjoy that. You can brag on your show, “hey, I got a great radio show!” But I didn’t write that Duke Ellington song. So I can say I got a great radio show because I got a great record collection. Because I can buy good records, there’s no skill involved.

I like being onstage, I enjoy that. It’s just very difficult to go out there with all you’ve got is what you’ve got with you.

How does the preparation for your show work? Is there much riffing?

Oh, no no, I go out there very prepared. No audience deserves to see you get it together in front of them. If that works for you, there’s going to be a night it doesn’t work for you. And that’s really not fair on the audience. It’s the time they’ve invested. They’ve given you their evening. They trusted you with their Thursday night, and you have to deliver. He took three hours of my life! Fuck that guy. And that’s why you have to deliver, so I’m very prepared. I’m frontloaded. Like a catapult loaded, waiting to shoot it out through the diameter of a straw. I recount and tell stories. Things are very eventful right now where I come from.

In America every once in a while, they whip out the sacred talking points: Dick Cheney didn’t go to Vietnam, five deferrals with other priorities. Kenneth Starr had an itchy scalp. Pat Buchanan didn’t go – another right-wing douchebag – he has arthritis in the knee. And everyone’s, “what a coward! Awful man.” But you knew that. You knew these men were intellectual and moral cowards. The fact they didn’t go is probably one reason why more people weren’t killed in that war. Because these guys get you killed. And you see what they do in office, you see what they do to other people. So you imagine them in a really stressful situation. So I come on stage with stuff like that. Take an idea and skew it another way. I try and burn tissue on stage. I keeps me honest. That’s the concept. It’s an attempt to stay honest.

How do feel about which way the Democratic nomination might go?

Barack and Hillary? I think it’ll be Obama. I think Clinton needs to — she’s not going to go gently. And should. One of them should just go, “let stop fighting, and let’s go get McCain.” Because McCain is going to be the next President. I’ve been saying that since 2006 and I want to be wrong. I’ll be behind whoever it is that goes up against him.

You don’t think there’s so much bad feeling towards Bush, enough to get rid of the Republican party?

I think if you fill the population with enough fear, people do stupid things. And when the going gets tough, the average get conservative. That’s the story of John McCain. So all the Bush Administration have to do before they leave is to get going in Iran. They’ve been spoiling for that fight a long time. Because Iran is the key to a much bigger thing. The next big picture is the Caspian oil reserves, the Caspian sea and all the countries around it. How do you get to Turkmenistan? Though Iran. What do you get out of being in Iran? A warm water port. So it’s why we’re trying to get through southern Afghanistan to get the pipeline through. Even the Clinton administration couldn’t do it, they couldn’t buy off the Taliban. So that’s where it’s going, everyone’s vying for position. If they can get a thing going in Iran, I think they want to bomb Theran. So come September if you can get a war going, you can say, “you think this 47 year old guy called Barack Obama can save you? You want a military guy, you want a Republican. We’re tough on terror and we got the only guy to get you through.”

I wanted to ask you about your writing. You told Mother Jones a while back that sometimes writing to you, has been more moving than music. Which writers have been the biggest influence on your own work?

Well, Henry Miller. He gave me a lot of inspiration when I was younger. Made me want to be a writer. I’m not really a writer, but I’ve written a lot, I have a publishing company. When I read Black Spring, I loved it. It was hard to sleep reading it. This is what I wanted a writer to say to me. I never knew a writer could put all that on the page. “How dare you say that to me!” I read all his books one after another and became quite taken with him. Where punk rock made you feel you could be a musician, Henry Miller made me think I could write and make it have meaning.

Being a solitary person writing immediately appealed to me, you could be introspective and observant. Not necessarily have to dance. That was the huge influence to me. He seemed like such a guy. And then I heard his voice, on this folkways recording. You read his writing and he’s so out there, you think you know what he’ll be, and you hear him and it’s this gutteral Brooklyn.

In my life I’ve read a lot of books. Not as many as a lot of people. But other writers became more important to me as time went on. As I developed more of an ability to grab more subtly off the page. Miller’s not subtle, it’s big brushes. But then you read someone like Camus or Fitzgerald. my all time favourite writer. He’s such an architect of words, just beautiful paragraphs and beautiful sentences. There’s moments in Great Gatsby where you can smell the air in the night, the sea. He really takes you there.

I went to the place he died in. It’;s a few blocks away from where I work. And I went there with a girl who was interning in my office. She was researching, she said, “the place is open, it’s being painted.” The door was open, we got there, we just walked in. We took photos of the mantelpiece right where he had a heart attack. It was pretty cool.

Which is your favourite of his novels?

The last one — not the unfinished one, what’s it called?

Tender is the Night.

Yeah, Tender is the Night. Took him nine years to write it, like “here’s my big book.” And it tanked. And now it’s seen as a huge, massive, advancement of the idea of the novel, which was a very young idea at the time. And guys like Hemingway, all those lost generation guys really bitch slapped the concept of the novel. I’m fascinated by Hemingway to a certain extent. The more you know about Hemingway the more you know he was a horrible person, fucked his wives up, fucked his kids up. Turned on everyone who was nice to him. All his friends, he dissed them. The first half of his stuff is awesome, but what a prick.

How much do we really want to know about the people who’s work we love?

Well, yeah. Fitzgerald, all those guys are racist, anti-semite, homophobic,

… misogynist,

Misogynist, oh man. I’ve read I think, almost every biography and critical biography of F Scott, I’ll buy any book on him, I want the power of reference. I often have more books about the writer than the books the writer wrote. Like Thomas Wolfe. He said something in his second novel I’d been waiting to read all my life. Finally someone put it into words. I got pretty obsessed with Thomas Wolfe. I put money into his mother’s house, which was burned. It’s protected by the state, you can go visit it now. It’s like a museum. F Scott used to stay there when he visited his wife. All these people tied together at a very interesting time. They all had World War one in common. So, I’m very taken by all of that. All those writers as I got older became more and more interesting to me, because I saw parallels in their lives and mine.

The idea of deracination. To come back and feel uprooted to what is familiar to you. And when I left Washington DC as very young guy and joined Black Flag and got out in the world, I would come back and visit my friends in my hometown and feel very much like you can’t go home again. I felt not at home there, not at home in LA, not at home anywhere. Uprooted like I could never put the plant back down again.

I don’t feel at home at any of these places I’m supposed to feel at home at. I try. I can approximate. But I can’t feel it. So all those writers, mean more to me than musicians. Like, there’s a dinner table, you would you have at it? “Oh I’d have Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane”. That’d be cool. But for me it’d be Camus, F Scott, Thomas Wolfe, Rimbald. That’s what interests me more than hanging out with, you know, Miles Davis — whose music I love. It’s just the writers who really obsess me. Writers make you see how impossible it is to write anything good, at all. However effortlessly, or full of effort it was to do, you read something someone else has written, and you just go, it’s so what I needed right now. And you look at your own stuff and go, “who am I fooling? Noone. This sucks.” Like when you hear some great music, you go, how did Lou Reed write “Sweet Jane” so good?

What have you found are the things that change the most as you get older?

[Long pause.] Everything past 40 for me, I’m 47, has been a kind of humbling experience. And it has stripped me of my cynicism. That’s what’s happened to me, the more I go round and round, the more I see that cynicism is a way of dummying up and really not seeing things. You know, “he has a mullet, he’s the mullet guy. Fuck that guy.” All lawyers are bastards, all cops suck. It’s an intellectual laziness and I can’t afford that. That’s been for me, having the courage to taking the time, taking the time to really see stuff for what it is, or for what I think it is. Or let it be what it is, and be ok with it. Or not be ok with it, but let it be what it is, and not project what I think it should be on it. Which is how you lose the girl, in the relationship. Kind of project what you want her to be, all over until finally she goes, “you know what? I’m out of here.” And if you’re stupid enough to keep wondering why.

Have you softened your stance on how much you rag on Bono, as you’ve gotten older?

Well I like Bono’s humanitarian efforts, because when some people go, “oh, he doesn’t mean it. He’s just doing a photo op,” I disagree. I think he’s very sincere. I just think the music, you know, knowing what I know about music, and being in any line up I’ve ever had, musicians I play with could hand U2 their heads. And knowing that. Bands make so much fun of U2. Ask any band on the bandstand, say U2 and the band starts laughing. Because the drummer can’t play. Bass player plods along. The guitar player, if he didn’t have Brian Eno, he wouldn’t have a guitar sound. It’s basically a Brian Eno guitar sound played by guy who’s got one trick. That’s why there’s no leads, because the guys got nothing in there. And lyrically, I mean, whatever. You like God, you go ahead with that. That melts your butter you for it. To me those records are for people who’ve lost the will to fight.

Oh dear.

What?

Changing your mind would be a long conversation. But yes, tell me more.

Well, I think what Bono does to relieve third world debt and to press leaders to give up for money for AIDS, like he went to George W Bush and said (taps knee in “give it up” gesture) and he fronted up. All that stuff that Bono does it very sincere and very beneficial. I just don’t like the music.

Anger really fuels a lot of creativity. Do you wonder that if you ever wanted to really make peace with that, that you might not be creative anymore?

I’m not a creative person. I’m reactive.

You really don’t think you’re creative?

Poke me and I’ll react. I don’t sit there and go, “I’m going to create a landscape of sound and image.” I don’t have that, though I admire people who do. Like a guy who looks at a blank easel and goes, “;check this out, I’m Frida Kahlo. BAM!” I don’t have that. I don’t where it comes from. I think I’m just a kind of by product of that and I’ve learned to ink out a racket out of just being pissed off. It’s nothing that I try and find things to be angry about – I try and find things to learn about. But it’s been my anger that has been a directive force for me.

In a very productive way.

But I’m not a creative person. I’ve been around them, but I can’t pick up a guitar and play. I can’t play any instrument.

Maybe you’re being a bit harsh?

I think it’s something very important to retain a high level of harshness.

Harshness at all times.

One should be hard on oneself. I should be hard on myself. But you do what you like. But that’s how I should be.

Originally published here.