Hank of America

Punk’s musclebound man of letters, Henry
Rollins, on his first-hand foreign policy

PUNK WITH A PASSPORT: Henry Rollins

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Since his days leading the charge as the singer of Black Flag and the Rollins Band, Henry Rollins has hardly had a wink of sleep through the majority of his adult life. These days, the self-proclaimed “workaholic” continues his long and indefinite hiatus from music and has become equally known for his work as a spoken-word performer, which is what will bring him to Montreal on his Frequent Flyer tour. When he’s not spinning yarns for up to three hours a night, he also busies himself as a publisher, author, actor, political blogger, activist and radio and television host. The Mirror tore this enigmatic performer away from his exhaustive work regimen to talk to him over the phone during a tour stop.

Mirror: You’re an insatiable reader but you prefer to get on a plane and check places out for yourself, as opposed to just reading about them. Does the media seem full of misinformation when you see these places with your own eyes?

Henry Rollins: Absolutely, and that happens pretty often—Iran and Pakistan spring to mind. When I went to Iran, my own president told me to be afraid, that these people hate my freedom and I should be very scared, but I can’t live like that. I’m not saying I’m an expert but if you keep heaping fear onto people, that fear starts turning into hatred and that’s something I want no part of. When I went to Iran, people thanked me for coming to their country and were really incredible. When I met Iranian people, they would ask me why I would go there and I just told them, “I’m here to meet you.” I’m not a tough guy and I don’t want to be afraid of the world—that’s what keeps wars going, and we don’t have to live that way. I’m just trying to get information from these places and I don’t know how to do that correctly other than going to these places and walking through them.

Different worlds

M: Your travels are hardly trivial strolls. In particular, I’m thinking of the episode of your IFC show Uncut where you went to a South African AIDS clinic.

HR: When you see teenage prostitutes walk in with their kids to get treatment, it’s going to affect you. These people are HIV positive, they’re 16 and they’re forced to sell their bodies so they can feed their kids, and that’s the only way to do it. As people of the Western world, we have problems, but when you go to these places and see children in advanced stages of malnutrition and see real hunger on the face of a child, that’s what is really wrong with the world.

M: What kind of perspective on your own country do these travels give you?

HR: It’s interesting, learning about your country when you leave it because you see what globalization looks like somewhere else and you see what America is doing when Americans aren’t looking. It makes me more aware politically but all of this travelling also makes me like people more and realize just how good I have it, living in America.

No encores

M: You’ve seen punk rock from its early beginnings. Your radio show, Harmony in My Head, seems to me to perfectly capture the spirit and essence of punk rock without playing into the stereotype. Where do you see pockets of that original spirit of punk rock right now?

HR: I see it in a lot of noise bands and a lot of stuff like cassette labels out of the Midwest. I believe wholeheartedly in what these people, like the label American Tapes and others, are doing. Actually, I really dig AIDS Wolf from Montreal and play them all the time on my show. On my radio show, I really only play stuff I like and so far I’ve been really lucky because I’ve gotten a really great audience that like to be challenged. I’ve played two hours of pretty challenging jazz and people have responded in a good way, and that’s as good as it gets.

M: You’re still on hiatus as a musician. Will we ever see you return to singing?

HR: I do miss playing music but the only way I would do it would be to not play any old material. I like those songs but I don’t want to recreate the past. To me, it’s not something Miles Davis or Coltrane would do. I’m not saying I’m anywhere near those guys but I just like their idea of moving on. I don’t want to give people an approximation. I’m more interested in doing things that are new.

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