The Stool Pigeon

I first met Henry Rollins in a west London hotel in 2001. When I arrived he was hunched over a laptop in the corridor, inputting his bid for a Gang of Four rarity on eBay. He wore a look of intense concentration as he completed this trivial act. “So this is the legendary work ethic in action, is it?” I asked impertinently. Laughter failed to fill the room.

Seven years later I’m sitting with Rollins in his dressing room at IndigO2, deep inside a futuristic strip mall in southeast London. He’s a more relaxed presence, but graver concerns preoccupy him. When he leans into his laptop, it’s to check out news on the war that’s raging in the Caucasus. He knows a bit about the strategic importance of the Caspian Sea, he reckons, following visits to Azerbaijan, Russia and Iran. Next year, he hits Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He’s a political animal these days.

What made him this way? The answer’s boringly obvious: George Bush. At one point today, during a discussion about literature, Rollins comments, “I don’t do much fiction anymore, thanks to Bush...” Hatred of Bush and his fellow “conservative douchebags” is Rollins’s driving passion, and anti-neocon rhetoric dominates the spoken-word show he performs a couple of hours after our interview.

The spoken-word shows - or ‘talking shows’, as Rollins terms them - are nothing new. He’s been doing them for 25 years now, having launched the sideline during his stint as frontman of LA hardcore legends Black Flag. Once upon a time his shows would find room for long routines about masturbation and fantasies about killing cops; today, the humour’s more sophisticated. A brilliant impression of Mancunian punk-poet John Cooper Clarke is the highlight of the IndigO2 show.

Endearingly, Rollins follows it with a self-deprecating parody of his own performance style, to illustrate the humiliation of having to follow Clarke at a Spanish festival. Self-deprecation is a constant theme with Rollins. At one point during his motormouth address to The Stool Pigeon - 12,000 words in 75 minutes - he suddenly voices a brutal truth. “I don’t have any talent,” he declares. “I can’t sing, I can’t write, I can’t do any of this stuff. But I hit it hard enough to where it kind of looks like talent.”

Rollins is 47 now, and he’s been hitting it hard for nearly three decades, having formed his first band, State of Alert, in 1980. The artist formerly known as Henry Garfield - Rollins is a stage name - is a native of DC, where he attended a military prep school and endured a strict upbringing at the hands of his father, who he depicts as a “major league asshole” prone to drunkenness and casual racism. Garfield Sr wanted his son to join the Navy. Instead, he became a punk.

Like his friend Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Rollins had embraced the Straight Edge lifestyle, forswearing drink and drugs. The quest for iron-man discipline intensified after he joined Black Flag as singer in 1981. The band toured relentlessly, and somewhat joylessly, until their split in 1986, by which time Rollins was a regular target of attacks by punters who considered him a sell-out. His tendency to respond violently caused a rift with the band’s founder Greg Ginn. The full story is relayed in stark, brutal fashion in Rollins’s book Get In The Van.

Black Flag came to an ugly end, but the work ethic stayed with Rollins. He has established multiple careers, as a writer, actor, raconteur, TV presenter, radio presenter, and, most recently, documentary filmmaker and travel journalist. He’s continued his involvement in music with the Rollins Band, which scored a mid-nineties hit with ‘Liar’, perhaps Rollins’s creative high-water mark. The band changed its line-up after a 1997 split, but the original members reformed for a US tour in 2006 - a dissatisfying experience documented in Rollins’s bleak recent book A Dull Roar.

What’s often more interesting than Rollins’s work is the process by which it’s produced. Indeed, the work sometimes exists only to illustrate the man’s fanatical commitment to productivity, exertion and asceticism. In A Dull Roar, a book of journal extracts, you can find entries documenting the process of editing A Dull Roar. It’s an enjoyable read, but it’s very self-referential and quite artlessly written too.

Rollins is a coiled spring of contradictions. He’s a misanthrope who devotes time and money to humanitarian causes; he’s a punk rock idealist who goes to Van Halen gigs; he’s fiercely anti-corporate, yet willing to act in any straight-to-DVD movie that will pay him enough; he’s a pillar of sobriety who reveres Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne; his lifestyle is almost fascistic in its discipline, but his politics are to the left of liberal; he claims to be happiest alone, but repeats that claim so many times during A Dull Roar you wonder if he’s actually the loneliest guy on Earth; he scorns co-dependent human relationships but seems - in the book and during our interview - to be in love with the actress Janeane Garofalo.

Yet for all the twists and turns, passion rages in everything Rollins does. In an entertainment industry riddled with laziness and complacency, he’s bracingly intense and committed. He’s fully aware of his flaws and foibles, and capable, now and then, of translating them into comic gold. His wit must qualify as his one true talent. Throughout his live show, you notice the odd slight failure of articulacy, moments of verbosity, a factual error here and there, but he cracks you up regularly enough for it not to matter.

Short, powerful and grey-haired, Rollins speaks in a tone that brooks no argument. Yet he’s more genial than he was seven years ago, and gives every impression of mellowing with age, even if his anger toward Bush and cronies is a thing of impressive ferocity. He recently travelled to Burma to front a documentary called Hunger, which he’s part-funding. As you join us, we’re talking about that...

SP: What was Burma like?

HR: It was beautiful and very sad. People: nice. Than Shwe and the junta: bad. Sanctions: bad. But the people... they fall over themselves to be nice to you. And they’re so broken; they’re just poor. A cavity could kill you, if you’re in the middle of nowhere, because there aren’t any roads to get you out.

SP: How did the opportunity to go there come up?

HR: I was doing a documentary, with a team in Thailand... We didn’t need Thailand for the actual content; we found a cheap production space in Chang Mai so we took it. I love Thailand. I don’t go for the reasons most single white men go for. I take photos of animals at the zoo. If you’re a white male alone they think you want the chick, the 15-year-old hairless girl. Really. You walk down the street and guys give you the notebook: ‘Heeeyyyy...’ I’m like, ‘NO!’ They think you’re just being shy... Anyway, the director guy said, ‘You want to go into Burma and shoot some footage in there?’ I said, ‘I’ve wanted to go to Burma for many years.’ So a five-man team, all of us with cameras, went to Burma and rented a van.

SP: It must have been difficult to shoot footage in Burma...

HR: Very difficult. We didn’t know which house was [pro-democracy campaigner] Aung San Suu Kyi, and our driver didn’t know - or said he didn’t know - and we were asking the locals which one belonged to her, and they were like, ‘Ummmm....’ To help a journalist, which we would have been seen as, is a 20-year sentence.

SP: When you were in Iran and Syria and the other places you’ve visited, did you ever fall afoul of the local authorities or get in any scrapes?

HR: A couple of times. I got in a little hot water in Syria once for taking a photograph... Now, I know: don’t ever take a photo of any government building in any country anywhere, because it’s illegal.

I travel in a very low-key way. This thing in Burma was me and four other people - looked very conspicuous - but otherwise I travel alone. I just go by myself to places. As a single white guy people look at you weird, but when you’re in a weird place, you have to be very careful how you carry yourself. I don’t look like anybody. I got the low-key clothes on; I’m not trying to be anybody...

I learned a lot by travelling - not so much European travel as much as travelling alone to Africa at different times.... No matter which country you’re travelling in, in Africa - and I’ve been to many - it’s dicey. You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to have your wits about you.

In Nairobi, as a white guy, you’ve got to be careful. I’m not making a racist statement. You’re a foreigner, and you’re up for grabs. And there are some very poor people there. And quite often African poverty displays itself in, ‘Give me that fucking watch.’ It’s intense. Where as poverty in southeast Asia, or in India, is, ‘Help me please.’ It’s not taking the arm to get the watch.

SP: Did you have to hand it over a few times in Africa?

HR: No, I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to see what looks like trouble and avoid it. Having spent enough time in New York City... you get radar, you know when you’re getting gamed. Someone’s trying to talk you into a doorway. ‘Pal, I’m not walking into a darkened hallway with you. C’mon!’ The last thing you want to do is get serious, so you keep it real light: ‘Oh, my friend, not today, not today.’ That just keeps it open-ended, so you can make the end of the movie yourself, but when you come down hard...

I did that in Burma. I got in a guy’s face in Burma a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably not the smartest idea. But we were getting surveiled. We’d been followed for seven hours by two guys on a motorbike. And I went, ‘Man, you know what? That’s it. I’ve had it. It’s been a long day.’ I just got right in their face. I was stepping on one guy’s feet, banging my forehead into his baseball cap. And physicality, in that part of the world... It’s a Buddhist country, so if you get in someone’s grill it’s like, ‘Argh!’ And they weren’t cops, they were friends of cops... and they fairly wilted. And I got back to the table and it was like, ‘Nice going Henry! Because they’re going to go to their cop friends, and we’re going to jail...’ But we didn’t, so who knows.

SP: It must have been like the final days of Black Flag when the other guys used to get on your case for responding to violence with violence...

HR: Well, yeah, Greg Ginn would often say [sarcastically], ‘Way to go!’ ‘Greg, the guy put a cigarette out on my leg!’ Greg was cool, he just didn’t always see what I was seeing because he was too busy playing... One time in London, ’83, we were playing some dismal place and he looks down and sees that I’m taking a guy by his Mohawk and bouncing his face against the floor, and security eventually pulls me off this poor bastard and Greg’s like, ‘Way to go. Nice being a jock?’ What he didn’t know is the guy was trying to hit Greg. And I tackled the guy and took him out, because Greg was busy playing. And I was like, okay, and I didn’t even bother to tell him. I was like, ‘Fine. Whatever, man. I’ll just be an asshole. Fine.’

SP: There was a Gallup poll earlier this week that put John McCain in the lead in the presidential election. Do you think he’ll win?

HR: Yes. I’ve said so since ’06.

SP: Do you think things will degenerate or improve? He seems more palatable than Bush, at least...

HR: It’ll be more of the same. He’s a bit more palatable than Bush, but it would be more palatable than Bush if Liza Minnelli were president.

With McCain, we’ll stay in Iraq, perhaps push into Iran, and healthcare will stand still, American education will stand still, and our presence in the world will further erode our relationships, because if America stands still all we will do is erode our relationships. We have to really beat back against what Bush has done. If Barack Obama wins, I would advise him that he reconnect our country back to NATO, back to the EU, back to the UN, and sit down with people he doesn’t agree with; sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hu Jintao, or Bashar Assad. Let’s reconnect. But the neocons don’t like that because there’s more money in the disagreement. There’s more money in demonising these countries so that we can throw bombs at them, scare other countries and sell bombs to them...

We just sold a bunch of arms to Saudi Arabia and to Egypt; we sold them joint directed attack munitions, J-DAMS, for the first time in American history. We’ve sold them to Saudi Arabia, who flew planes into American buildings, and to the Egyptians, who don’t really like us that much - and neither of them likes Israel, so the Israelis are a little hot under the collar, but Condoleezza Rice and [Robert] Gates assured them, ‘Don’t worry, those missiles won’t reach Israel.’ So I’m sure the Israelis are like, ‘Oh, no problem, everything’s peachy.’

That just shows you how badly we need money. And we’ll sell to anybody. We don’t care.

SP: The Rollins Band reformed two years ago, then split up again. Have you felt a drift towards the talking shows and away from music?

HR: Good question. Here’s the drift: I went out in ’06 with the old guys, the tour was well received - we’re old pros, we can play those songs very well - no new material, it was a honeymoon tour... Basically, we wanted to go out and see if there was any sparks, to see if we wanted to write any new songs and go on, and there wasn’t. And about three or four shows in, it’s like the dinner date with the ex-girlfriend. Before the drinks come you’re like, ‘Oh. Oh God. Get me out of this.’ And so we played very well, but after about a week in everyone went, ‘Okay, playing is fun; it’s good to talk to you again; but that thing that we had is a decade gone. We did break up for a reason.’

This was all the guitar player’s idea, really. And wishful thinking from me. And I don’t know what the other two were into. Pay cheque, I don’t know. But we showed up and put on our Rollins Band caps and played very well, and I was going for it - I don’t ever dial it in - and we gave it the big one, as they say, and everyone went, ‘Yay,’ and bought a t-shirt, and cosmetically it looked fine. But at the last show in Los Angeles I basically had my mighty Subaru in the parking lot, grabbed my gear after the show and my gig box, threw it in the back of the car, met some punters in the parking lot, shook some hands... Never saw those guys again. And it wasn’t a fuck you. I have no feelings like that towards them - I love those guys, they’re great. But we just kind of put an animatronic device into a corpse and it went across America. Singing those old songs again ... I don’t want to be in the way-back machine.

And then I went out on tour last year and saw, on a night off, Van Halen. Men in their fifties playing 30-year-old music. And they were good - it passed muster, for the most part. But it was like, wow, a moving museum. And I don’t want to do that. And when I look at Mick Jagger, and believe me I’m a fan of Mick Jagger, I’m a fan of Ozzy Osbourne big-time, and I’m a fan of Van Halen, but it kind of smacks of: don’t you have anything better to do?

I don’t want to go and do ‘Liar’ again, because I can do it very well. I can probably sing it better now than when I wrote it. You’re better at it when you get old, in a way. You get grey and then you actually get good. But what would that say about me?

The braver thing to do is that which makes me unsure. With the talking shows, well, it’s very logical to say, ‘You’ve been doing the talking shows since 1983 - why not can those too?’ Well, because the talking shows are really difficult. And the material changes on a dime. I don’t have to write a new song. I can talk about Georgia and Ossetia tonight and not have to write out a lyric.

When you see those photos of the grey-haired men who look like me onstage, in Mojo, they’re rocking? No they’re not! Ew! C’mon! Let the kids have their fun. Stop horning in on the young person’s action.

Iggy Pop is the king of rock’n’roll - undisputed heavyweight champion - and I’ve seen The Stooges six or seven times, since they got back together, and loved it, but then they go and they do a new album, so we get to see what The Stooges are like in 2007. And that record... I’ll go on record saying it does not blow me away. I wanted to like it but... meh. To me it was really disposable. Had I been their producer and they’d handed me that record as a demo I would have said, ‘Start again. Keep working on a couple of those lyrics, but tune-wise, are you kidding? Start again. Be The Stooges. Do something awesome, or don’t put out a record.’ Because guys like me are going to buy it, and we’re going to be nonplussed.

It sounds corny, but I spend hours agonising over what is the bravest thing I can do. The talking shows are continually challenging, travelling to all these countries is continually challenging, the amount of money that I put into this Hungry documentary - which I did in Chang Mai - is a lot of money. But I believe in it: I believe in the atrocity of world hunger and the possibility that we can fix this. And so by putting up the money and putting my name on it, I’m saying I’m about something. And I think that it’s how you bring the punk rock when you’ve got grey hair. I’m continually looking at ways to stick it to the man. That sounds corny, but I love that term.

I look at people I admire who are older than me: how did they get into their fifties and sixties and still remain angry and active and about something. A guy like George Carlin, who was very nice to me when I hung out with him; he remained angry and committed and connected until his last breath... Age doesn’t really mean much.

I was in Northern Ireland earlier this year doing a documentary and I met [political activist and journalist] Eamonn McCann. Amazing guy, amazing. He’s, what, 60-something? More energy than three of me! Just so switched on, and bristling. Spends two months of the year sleeping on roofs in the Lebanon because he’s there doing humanitarian work and there’s no place to live... He’s more on fire than ever. And when you meet people like that, you realise that this never has to be over, and you can always get up in the morning and go, ‘Alright you motherfuckers...’

SP: Do you still get a lot of hate mail? It’s mentioned a lot in A Dull Roar.

HR: Sure, yeah. Every once in a while when the Fuel Network will rerun the TV show [The Henry Rollins Show] I’ll get the same kind of angry mail... The Gene Simmons interview: ‘Why didn’t you punch that guy’s lights out? What a dick!’ I write back, ‘Really? He’s more Borscht Belt humorous than anything else. Believe me, he’s laughing at the shit he’s saying, and he’s not dropping white phosphorous on kids, so how mad can I get at him?

And then you have the one where I do the letter about creationism and how corny that is, and you get guys going, ‘I will debate you on this Darwin guy any time, man.’ I write back, ‘Okay, bring the pumpkin and the tooth fairy with you and the three of you can gang up on me.’ But whenever they rerun the ‘Live in Israel’ thing [a 90-minute special shot at a show in Tel Aviv], every once in a while someone will go, ‘Well you Americans don’t get it because you guys are just fascists - you don’t understand Palestine’s point of view...’ I write back and go, ‘Well, if you listen to what I said that night onstage, it was more pointed provocatively at Israelis.’ I said, ‘If you guys don’t stop this, it won’t get stopped. You’re the ones with the American backing, the weapons, the technology, the money, the know-how, the power. What are you going to do? Build another wall? Build it higher? And if you don’t stop this you’re going to hand this war on to your kids, and what are you going to say to your kids when they’re suiting up and locking and loading their rifles?’

What’s the answer? Fuck, I don’t know, man. That argument is generations away from getting solved - until a smart bomb actually wipes out Jerusalem, which actually might be kind of the way to do it. Just level the whole place and say, ‘Okay, everyone bring home a little piece of indescribable rubble - it could have been the mosque, it could have been the Western Wall, take it home, eBay it...’ You know what I mean? That might be a way of doing it. But I don’t want it bombed.

SP: You went to a military school. Did it ever occur to you to join the military?

HR: No. My dad wanted me follow my step-brother’s steps into the Navy and I said, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ It never, ever appealed to me. Hang out with a bunch of men in a uniform? I did that from sixth grade to graduation. There was no way I was running anywhere towards that. Guns terrify me. War? No. It never once occurred to me.

SP: You’re a disciplined person, though...

HR: Well, that was part of the schooling; that’s the way my father raised me and it’s a great way to get a lot of things done. It’s a great way to go like a hot knife through butter in the entertainment industry when everyone else is waking up at two in the afternoon, and you can get up at 0600 and get all your work done. And that was funny in the eighties, being in Black Flag and someone saying, ‘You’re the singer in Black Flag?’ [Military tone] ‘Yes I am. Good afternoon.’ ‘You’re a narc...’ ‘No I’m not.’ ‘You’re very polite for a guy in a band.’ ‘Thank you.’ It’s how I was raised!

Discipline has been very advantageous for me, and you don’t always see a lot of it in music. But with the really good bands, that’s where you find it. Like of all bands, The Stooges - if you ever heard any of the practise tapes of The Stooges, it’s brutal. They do a song, he goes, ‘Alright, one more time, here we go.’ The guys go, ‘Come on...’ He goes, ‘Shut up!’ Drill drill drill.

That was Black Flag. Black Flag was brutal. We would do entire nights of band practice where we would do the set or the album, the next album, the entire length through, at half speed. It was called trudging. Why would we do that? So the bass player could understand how the drums were locking up with the bass, and the singer could understand where the rhythm was coming from and the guitar player could understand where to get more power coming off the snare and kick. And our drummer Bill came up with ‘trudging’! It was Greg Ginn’s idea and Bill’s nickname and my cross to bear, because it was so boring, but when you would go back to play it at normal speed you really understood the component parts of the song, and we got to the point where we wouldn’t even count in...

I have to get up earlier than everyone else because I’m not artful, I’m clumsy, so I’m usually up at 4am, when I’m not on tour, and I’m usually at my desk at 0440, 0500. By the time my staff comes in at nine, I have almost wrapped up all my work for the day. When they come in, I’m like, ‘Okay - what do you want me to do?’

I’ll come back from this tour with beautiful European jetlag, which is worth its weight in gold to me in LA because it gets me up at between one and three in the morning, and I’ll hold on to that for that as long as I can. I’ll stay getting up at that crazy hour, fully rested.

What happens is, I have to do my radio show at 10pm and I start going to bed later and later and it starts screwing up my earlier-getting-up thing. But discipline and focus have been a huge part of me and my life - the workouts and doing one of these shows every night... Believe me. You try it. Don’t. It’s super-hard. And when you look at your schedule, you’re like, ‘I can’t do this. How am I going to do this?’ And you end up doing it anyway. You figure it out.

I do want to get onstage, I’m just afraid I’m going to fail the audience, and so as we get closer to the hour I get more revved up to where I can’t wait to get out there. This is London and it’s not a London show like my Hammersmith Odeon show - this is kind of like the PS - the after-the-fact London show. I’ve been told by my agent that the people who usually go to my London show at Hammersmith aren’t going to be at this one because it’s a different train system, so these are the hardcores and people from the suburbs. I wouldn’t want to do two shows in one city in one year because this says to the people, ‘I’m going for your wallet.’ And I’m really not. I don’t want them to think that, that I’m gouging them. I want them to come see me 15 years from now. I’m going very long-range... Because I don’t want their money as much as I want their attention.

The only thing that gets me through these shows, in my mind - it could all be bullshit - is that I have things that they really need to know. I am thoroughly convinced that I’ve got stuff for them. And it’s not like me teacher, them student, or I know of great things and they’re intellectual pedestrians, because I’m the dumbest guy in the room any night. But I’m like the dog wagging the tail who knocks the teapot over. I’m so excited to tell them these stories I have got.

When I go to Burma and sweat my ass off and do 1,200 miles in a van with bad roads, I earned those stories. When I go against every bit of good judgement I have and go to Islamabad, Pakistan, and leave the hotel and see things burning in the street the day after Bhutto’s assassination, I earned the calories burned on that story, and I do think that’s valid to take that up onstage...

My life needs purpose, otherwise I get into that Jean-Paul Sartre nightmare: ‘Why even breathe? Why do anything?’ I go flat-line depresso. I have to find reasons to get up in the morning. I have to keep finding new summits, new things to climb, and that became a problem with the music, when I realised I was no longer in breaking-new-ground mode.

My manager would probably love it if I went out every summer and did 30 Black Flag songs to the screaming delight of a bunch of punters who would go out and buy my product and buy that T-shirt, and he’d get 15 per cent of that action. And it’d probably be nice action, but I can’t fold that money. A few years ago I did a tour of all Black Flag music, gave all the money to these three kids, the West Memphis Three [Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley - three men controversially convicted of a triple murder in 1994, following allegations of satanic ritual abuse]. That’s the only way I could justify doing those songs.

SP: Don’t they have a hearing later in the year?

HR: They have a hearing next month [in September]. Lori just wrote me - Damien’s wife - she just wrote me and said, ‘Hey, we’re getting ready for this, and thank you so much for everything...’ Because I keep contributing money. And I call a lot of cool people I know... I call Mike Patton - he’s always good for some money. He’s a good guy.

SP: He’s curating a festival here in England in December [ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas].

HR: As he should, because there’s a guy who knows a thing or two. And he’s so talented. There’s nothing he can’t do. I called him up, he kicked me a bunch of money. I called Janeane Garofalo: ‘How much do you want?’ Cheque next day. She’s always cool like that.

SP: Is she a friend of yours?

HR: Yeah. I don’t have many friends. I’m not outgoing, trying to have friends... I don’t want my phone ringing. But she’s one of the only people who I will actually call her when I get to LA and go, ‘Hey, I’m back - let’s get together.’ Because I actually love being with her, because she’s so smart, she’s so funny - she’s hysterical. She knows a lot, and all her friends are smart. She’s like, Boston University... She’s one of those wise-asses. She’s read every book. So I like hearing her take on everything. We’ll just go someone and she’ll give me the two-hour disquisition... She’s wicked. And so I get a lot of reading tips from her, we buy each other books... We have been ‘romantically linked’ because we’re seen together in LA, but we’re not. We’re just pals, and have been for years. By and large I live alone, I work alone. I prefer it. It just makes more sense. I like getting work done more than anything else.

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