Henry Rollins has a problem. He has to keep working, and if he dares stop, he feels uncomfortably inadequate, just like he did this winter break. Or, as Rollins put it while lecturing to an audience at his spoken-word tour stop at Convocation Hall in Toronto last Saturday,
"There's nothing for me to do. I go to the office, and there's no one there because everyone is with their loved ones putting sweaters in boxes and wrapping them ... so people can hold them up later and lie through their f---ing teeth and go 'Wow, it's everything I always wanted.' Not me! Not me! I'm alone in my underwear at my house poised over the 'enter' button over my laptop on E-Bay."
Touring is not only important for his career, it's important for his life. Rollins' two-day excursion from Rochester to Toronto on his spoken-word tour conveniently missed Buffalo this past weekend. But the punk rock legend/actor/self-proclaimed "total bulls--- artist" managed to relay a few words to The Spectrum to make up for his absence. He's not a fan of student apathy.
"I think there are a lot of students who are motivated and turn on," Rollins stated in an e-mail interview. "I also think there's a lot who just walk down halls and go to class. I don't remember ever being that intellectually sedate in my life."
If his lecture at Convocation Hall was any indication, "intellectually sedate" is far from an accurate description of Rollins. Taking advantage of the Canadian audience, Rollins spent two hours and 45 minutes viscerally expressing his viewpoints on American foreign policy, culture and living in "whore central," also commonly known as Los Angeles.
"So many Californian people should have been put in warm pails of water at birth. It's true," he said at his Toronto show.
At age 42, Rollins is at a position where he can make a living venting his viewpoints, such as on his spoken-word tour, on film or as the head honcho of his punk hardcore group, Rollins Band.
But as a resident of Los Angeles, Rollins is a part of the camera-savvy culture he so gleefully mocks - an ironic career twist coming from the man who jokingly sang "We got nothing better to do/then watch TV and have a couple of brews." He will appear as a cop in the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer film, "Bad Boys 2." He hosts "Full Metal Challenge," a program on The Learning Channel that features homemade vehicles destroying each other a la "Battlebots." And, as he informed the Toronto audience, I do buy things at the Rite-Aid where Winona Ryder scored all her pharmaceuticals."
While on that subject, it's apparent that if it weren't for his work, Rollins would be forced to contemplate life at "whore central" and its illustrious denizens like Winona Ryder. And her relation to the military's morale.
"Winona owes the court some community service time. ... I say that she does four or five shows a day at every military base all over the place before these poor boys go in and do whatever they think they need to do. And as an actress, in this scene she'll be a naked girl jumping up and down on a trampoline, going, 'Whee!'Whee!'"
Rollins' lecture, which included numerous amounts of celebrity name-dropping, indicates the distance he has traveled as a young punk in Washington, D.C. About 23 years ago, the former ice-cream parlor employee became lead singer of seminal hardcore band Black Flag after he jumped on stage at their show.
But Rollins isn't a fixture in Los Angeles's social circles. And when he does go to parties, as Rollins told the audience, he usually makes fun of the guests, like he did to a drunken punk rocker at the party at the Osbournes mansion.
Although words are the way Rollins expresses his disapproval at the society he lives in, music is still an integral component. Part of his lecture revealed his condemnation of radio rock, especially the melodic choruses present in most angry modern acts like Disturbed or Linkin Park.
"I say make up your f---ing mind. Be the f---ing rock guy or the pop b----. Either one of them is fine. But don't be rock guy and have pop interludes in your songs that are catering to epic radio approval. And if you do that, dress like pop guy, don't dress like rock guy ... with the dreadlocks on the dark side with a little bitch part in your song."
For his part, Rollins, succinctly summed up his influence on today's music in the interview: "none." The myriad of modern-day hardcore acts belies this idea, but Rollins has moved on to other projects. Not only does Rollins still make music for old punks, he's funding their legal defense.
Last November, Rollins released "Rise Above," a compilation of Black Flag songs covered by guests like Ice-T and Chuck D. Profits from the album were allocated to the defense fund of the West Memphis Three, the Arkansas teenagers dubiously convicted of murder in 1993. Evidence from their trial rested largely on their interest in heavy metal.
"I was dissatisfied with how the boys were treated at the trial, the lack of due process and other basic tenets of American justice," Rollins stated. "I also think they are innocent."
At the show, Rollins mentioned that during the middle of the production for "Rise Above," he tried out for "Bad Boys 2." Rollins's Hollywood adventures didn't detract from the serious side to his message; the cornerstone of the muscle-bound speaker's show is the effective use of humor to poke fun at the society he lives n.
But there was an odd mix of humor and discomfort when Rollins chose the most inopportune time last Saturday to criticize the space program.
"That's doing a really lot of f---ing good. While you're in this ghetto ... here, have some more money to go dick around in space. And I feel really bad for the people who got killed."
He then proceeded to discuss how he tried out for a part in the space disaster film, "Armageddon."
Rollins, to the approval of the Canadian audience, summed up the problem with his native country's mentality.
"It's the dick thing. I saw it months ago when Bush said 'War with Iraq,' and I said, 'S---, now we're all going to die,'" Rollins said.
"If women ran the world, they'd fly to each other's countries and talk about how they felt about the conflict with Iraq. They'd be like 'I hate you,' 'I hate you.' That's why tall skyscrapers are built ... every time we f--- the world and they piss us off, we add 30 more stories."
But he did offer consolation for the soldiers.
"Send uber-strippers to these places in iron cages so they can't be dismembered. They'll bring brass poles and do that thing they do with their pudenda, which as you know is Latin for the naughty bits. And they do that thing to the brass poles and they crassly grind their pudenda into their audiences' faces. And they do this to a Kid Rock CD or something like that."
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
