March 2012, 40 Watt, Athens, Ga.
Henry Rollins needs your approval and he craves your attention. If he doesn’t have it bad things can happen — like having to spend an afternoon buying a ladder at Costco.
In front of a standing room only crowd at the 40 Watt, Rollins delighted the audience for three hours of spoken word power, touching on topics including Abraham Lincoln, Tibet, male prostitutes and eating rats. He dotted the night with snippets from historical speeches among rich one-liners noting at one point “I am not a history professor and Newt Gingrich will never be the president of the United States. These two things I know for sure.”
Rollins, who turned 51 that year, has become somewhat of a punk rock treasure, a lasting example of an ’80s icon who turned his onstage rage as leader of Black Flag into something else. This is not lost on him, as he made the revelation recently that after 30 years of this, he can safely say he has found his career. “I no longer wonder what I will be when I grow up,” he said.
The highlights:
- One of his new gigs, when not DJing at KRCW or penning columns for LA Weekly or writing books or touring on spoken word shows, is filming travel documentaries for Nat Geo. In one particular tale, he went to the rice fields of India to go snake hunting with the Irulas, a tribe which works to rid the fields of dangerous reptiles so people can work without fear of death. After a day of pulling cobras and rat snakes out of holes, he set out with the tribe at night to pull the rats out of the fields as well. After filling a bag of dozens of dead rats, a fire was built and dinner was served. Let’s just say Henry’s rat liver limit is three.
- A trip to Costco while on break from touring included stories of 100-pound bags of Chip A-Hoys, watching crowds of people feed at the disgusting food court, and reading passages of George W. Bush’s autobiography Decision Points, in W’s voice (which Rollins has down pretty good), to people who are not amused by his antics. “I love when people are getting uncomfortable,” he added. “My name is Henry Lawrence Rollins but my middle name should be confrontation.”
- Playing shows in New York City with Black Flag, when too often something odd would happen. On one such night, a rather large, stage-diving man landed atop a smaller woman who was lost under the man’s girth. The band stopped playing after the dive, unsure if the young woman survived such a blow. But she survived, much to the band’s relief, then took off after she was able to gather herself. Months later the band returned to New York, and while warming up for a show, the same woman showed up to talk with the band. “You can’t really see it, but this eye is now glass,” she told Rollins, a byproduct of the stage dive. “Older people always say you need to be careful or you could lose an eye,” Rollins said. “Turns out, if you go to a Black Flag show, you could lose an eye.”
- The one-liners:
“I don’t believe in karma because Dick Cheney’s still walking around,” and;
“My fitness is just like my anger — I work on them every day.”
I saw Rollins years before this show, and while he was good, he was not nearly as good as he is now. An impressive storyteller, he is one of the great minds of our time.
