Interview with Henry Rollins
Words: Michael Spadoni
Photos:  Maura Lanahan

Appearing:
September 23, 2007
House of Blues, Orlando

September 24, 2007
Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa

September 25 & 26, 2007
The Theatre, West Palm Beach

REAX:  Having such a strong influence on American culture through your writing and music, which of your many career choices has been the most rewarding to you?
Henry Rollins:  For me, the most rewarding thing is the fact that I keep getting to do it every year, no matter what it is.  I'm over twenty years into this and I still get asked to go on stage.  As far as any single one thing, it would probably have to be the speaking dates just because there is no one else up there but me.  No one is going to see you twice if they don't like you because they have an idea of what they're going to be getting the next time.  That's turned into a very amazing thing.  In the 80s, I started doing these talking shows, not knowing that it would turn into one of these things that I would go all over the world with... and to universities.  It all started out in clubs with poets and it has taken on this very interesting life that has put me in some very interesting places all over the world.

REAX:  What haven't you done professionally that you would still like to do someday?
HR:  Nothing really.  I'd be splitting hairs.  I'd like to write better.  I'd like to do more documentary-type work, where I get the idea and I get a budget and a film crew and I'd go crack it out... stuff like that.  But, that would fall under the umbrella of television.  I have no burning desire to direct, if that's what you're asking.  I have realized all my potential and probably some potential that I don't have that I'm acting on anyway.  At this point, I'm more in a mood of trying to refine what I do.

REAX:  Watching your show, I love the way you interview musicians... you know what they've gone through.  You have that insight that most music journalists don't have...
HR:  Yeah, and that's what blocks most music writers from really understanding that experience.  On the other hand, it can probably keep them objective when objectivity is needed because they don't have that, "I got burned by my label," which clouds a lot of musicians.  They get tainted by the industry and the machinations of it and it precludes them from having a pure look at what the real job is, to go out and create.  The mechanics of the business are as determinate as the art itself.  What if you are a really great painter? If no gallery will put you on their walls, you're that tree in the forest that falls and no one hears it.  Or, if you're in a great band in a small town and no one plays your music or comes to see you, then you're one of those great urban myths that just a few guys who staggered into your garage will crow about for the rest of their lives... and quite honestly, no one will believe them anyway.  There is so much of that in entertainment.  It's why so many of these guys do drugs, drink, and lose their minds.  It can be so damn frustrating at times.

REAX:  How do you feel about the imminent collapse of the major record label?
HR:  I think it's great.  I think it's fantastic.  Anything that should collapse... should collapse.  Anything that's leaning that way, get it over with.  Especially something like an empire or recording industry.  The major labels are plummeting to the ground under the weight of their own greed, arrogance, and how they think they know more than the people who buy the records from them.  When one A&R guy has four assistants and you realize that for this guy to smoke dope with the bass player in a band, it costs the band and the label, with all those salaries combined, well over one hundred thousand dollars…  It's why records are nineteen dollars or fifteen dollars.  It's why all this stuff costs so much.  They have been able to put pork into every recording contract.  Imagine a band spending a hundred thousand dollars on a video.  Do you know what a little band could do with a hundred thousand dollars?  You could buy a van, some gear, a recording studio, and you could go on the road.  Or, you could make a three-minute video that may or may not be played on MTV.  So what you have is a lot of greed and a lot of A&R people thinking that they're the band.  It's falling apart... good, hurry, fall and fall hard.  What comes from it will be what it should be and it will find itself.  People are now making records at home and posting their music on MySpace.  They're getting their music out there to people who like music and they're going on the road.  People are going to their MySpace page and then going to the show.  It's changing.  You obviously know that there was a time before there were LPs.  People like Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra took advantage of the medium.  Duke Ellington started writing suites and Frank Sinatra started making conceptual albums.  You know, Come Fly With Me.  "We'll do a bunch of songs about being lonely," the concept album.  Well, the album went away and at some point the CD, I'm fairly sure, will just be that thing you buy by the spool.  It will just be blank media and you will subscribe to labels.  I can see the CD and even the record store going away and bands not necessarily recording an entire album and touring on it.  Ten years from now, you'll look back on today and say, "Wow."  It's changing and I like this kind of change.

REAX:  Do you see the control going back into the artists' hands?
HR:   Absolutely, that's where it's heading.  That's where it had to head.  That's where it used to be.  The art used to dictate the industry and for many years from the 80s until now... the industry dictated the art and that was the problem.  A&R guys went from a cool dude who liked music so much that they gave that kid a job at Elektra, to a guy who used to sell software who is now selling records.  Those are the people I've met.  When you ask them, "What is your favorite record by The Clash," and they say, "The Clash... oh, is that the band who had that 'Rock the Casbah' song?"  I'm like, "Man, you work at a record label?"  Sometimes you can't find people more divorced from music than ones who work at a record label.  My dad hated music, but he didn't work at a record label.  It's the love of music that is making the majors have problems.  Alternative means are now at the disposal of those without a label affiliation and I couldn't be happier about it.  It had to happen for good music to get out there... and not like that music that some guy thinks will work.  That's how you get bands like Nickelback... and long may they wave.  They're probably very nice guys and I have nothing against them, but that's corporate rock.  The fact that they get to exist and other bands don't, that's where I start having a problem.  That's why I like the Internet, that's why I like MySpace... not so old men can troll for little kids, but so that some microscopic band can get their music out to somewhere like Austria or Romania.  That's how we take the music back from people who like money, from people who put zeroes in columns.

REAX:  What do you think your success as a writer and performer says about America?
HR: That we have an appalling literacy rate and we're satisfied with the mediocre.  What it says is that people are looking other places for voices to listen to.  No one of my father's age would look at a guy like me and take me seriously at all.  So, times have changed.  I'm older now; I'm 46, which puts me in that gray-haired... where people call me mister.  It's not out of respect, it's because they don't want my diaper to shift in my pants and for me to have a moment in front of them.  With the graying of hair and lengthening of tooth comes that bit of respect or pause where they don't let you off so quickly.

REAX:  There is a legend in these parts about a tour with Black Flag, where during a show you encountered some "prematurely bald" young troublemakers, damaging yourself on two consecutive nights, first in Orlando and then Tampa. This resulted in Florida being left off of tour schedules for many years. What really happened?
HR:  It was Orlando where we had problems for many years with skinheads who would beat up our fans... and beat up our sound man in '86.  At one point, these same guys... who were really... oh, man they were tough.  They came up to another one of our shows and they were in the crowd sieg heil-ing us, and I said, "Oh, you guys are all so fat, I don't think you'll make a good Nazi."  And those guys were in shape, so that just got them even madder.  And, "Is that your girlfriend, what a hog."  Now I was enraging all of them and all the kids around them were laughing hysterically, which was my purpose.  I'm not really in the business of calling women ugly, but this was a laser-targeted insult... a result-oriented insult.  Then they started getting into it with the Cuban-American security who all pulled out knives and straight razors and waited for them in the parking lot.  There were some problems with some of the more regressive elements of Florida.  It's a state I really like, but there are some people stuck in the evolutionary mud down there.  It's like that anywhere else in America too, you just can't single out Florida.  We have problems in this country and you can solve that by giving everyone a really good education.  If you don't educate people, then they will listen to Rush Limbaugh.  When you do educate people, they make better choices, which is why the government chooses not to educate people to a great extent...  it would be harder to make them into criminals and soldiers.

http://21361.com/