NEW YORK CITY (1983) “Henry Rollins”

He'd gone from a low-level local band to the most important position in all of punk: LEAD SINGER OF BLACK FLAG!

Photo: Kevin Salk

When I first arrived at Wesleyan University in 1979, I was disappointed that people there weren’t more interested in current music.  Punk and New Wave were happening.  College radio was becoming a thing.  There were tons of bands.  Every city had its own scene.  But people at Wesleyan were still listening to the Grateful Dead and blowing soap bubbles on the quad. 

My sophomore year, a freshman kid from Washington DC arrived.  He knew about music.  I told him about The Wipers, Portland’s best band.  He told me about The Bad Brains, DC’s fastest band.  Also, he had some high school friends who were in punk bands.  This was Ian McKaye and Minor Threat.  And another guy named Henry.

That fall, Minor Threat’s first record came out.  It was an instant hit. And not just in America, all over the world. The other guy, Henry, continued to be talked about as well.  He had his own band called State Of Alert (S.O.A.)  They played a similar anti-authority “hardcore” style. My DC friend and I would sing S.O.A. songs doing mock-caveman voices:

     Men in blue
     Come for you
     Sirens red
     You'll be dead! 

S.O.A. was not as good as Minor Threat.  But this Henry guy was apparently some sort of character.  Was he a good singer?  No.  Was his band good?  No.  But you kept hearing about him. And you wanted to know more.  You didn’t know why you wanted to know more.  You just did. 

Typical “hardcore” set list (The Necros)

Then one day, my DC friend burst into my dorm room with incredible news:  Henry had joined BLACK FLAG, the legendary L.A. band and arguably the greatest West Coast punk band of all time! 

AND … he had changed his name from Henry Garfield to “Henry Rollins”.  He was moving to Los Angeles.  He was going Hollywood!    

This was mind-bending news.  Henry had been on one level of the punk rock world (a very low level) and now he had ASTOUNDINGLY jumped up multiple levels into the most important position in all of punk:  THE LEAD SINGER OF BLACK FLAG!

Then, just a couple weeks later, more incredible news:  Henry Rollins had reportedly jumped up on a table at a fancy Hollywood restaurant and caused a disturbance! 

I had no idea what Henry looked like. But in my mind I could clearly see a 19-year-old DC-style punk jumping up on a table and kicking some dishes around.  This Henry Rollins person was becoming a legend.  And he hadn’t even done anything yet!

I was a huge fan of Black Flag at the time.  I considered their first single “Nervous Breakdown” to be the single greatest song of American Punk Rock, ever.  I had seen them play once in Boston (Dez Cadena on vocals) and it was the most thrilling night of my life.

A few months later, Damaged, the first full-length album by Black Flag came out. Henry Rollins was the lead singer. I went right down to my dinky college-town record store and bought it.  I took it back to my dorm room and put it on. 

“Rise Above” was the first song.  Instant goosebumps.  Greg Ginn’s brilliantly fucked up guitar.  That throaty bass.  Henry singing:  Rise above/We’re gonna rise above.  

The other songs were fantastic too, including the previously released “Six Pack” with its iconic lyric: 

     I've got a six pack
     And nothing to do
     I've got a six pack
     And I don't need you! 

Damaged was an incredible statement.  Punk was supposed to be nihilistic, dark, uncompromising.  But most punk was still entertaining music.  This new updated Black Flag was not “entertaining music”.   It was chaos.  It was power.  It was unflinching brutality.  If you were 15 and frustrated and full of rage, Damaged was the inside of your brain.

photo: Lucian Perkins

Unfortunately, I wasn’t 15.  And though I could appreciate its brilliance as a work of art, I found that I rarely put Damaged on my stereo.  It didn’t hold my attention like “Nervous Breakdown” did.  Maybe Black Flag was more of a singles band.  Maybe the problem was, a whole album of it was too much.  And you had to be in the exact right mood to listen to it. 

And then there was the Damaged cover.  It was a picture of Henry’s intense face and shaved head.  He was punching a mirror.  There was broken glass and blood.  It was . . . . . terrible.  It was totally cheesy and cringe! And their previous cover art had been amazing!  It made you wonder about Henry.  It made you wonder about Black Flag in general.

Ian McKaye, Henry Rollins

*

It was a couple years later, in 1983, while I was at NYU summer school that I went to a Minor Threat show with that same DC friend.  It was an all-ages, afternoon show at CBGBs.  Henry was there. 

He’d come along for the ride.  It appeared he had not cut his hair since Damaged because he now had long hair down to his shoulders.  He was wearing a white sleeveless t-shirt with the armpits cut out.  He seemed subdued.  But nice.  He was killing time, hanging with Ian and the guys.  It was summer in NYC. 

A bunch of us went for a walk to get food.  I remember asking Henry about the future of Black Flag.  In a way, they were one of the original “hardcore” bands.  But hardcore had such a limited style.  It had become so doctrinaire.  (Judging from his long hair, maybe Black Flag was rejecting the hardcore ethos?)   

Henry didn’t seem too worried about “hardcore”. He said Black Flag would just keep going.  Just keep pounding away.  For him it was a kind of an exploration, it seemed.  Or maybe a test of will.  He was going to grind to the end and see what happened.  

The Bad Brains Photo: Lucien Perkins

*

After I graduated from college, I traveled and focused on writing and was less connected to the music world.  Black Flag continued to release records but I didn’t listen to them.  In 1989, I ended up back in Portland, working at Powell’s Books. 

One day, on my break, I was poking around in Powell’s small press section and I saw a book called Hallucinations of Grandeur by Henry Rollins. I had heard that Henry was writing now.  There were rumors of poetry readings (yikes).

I pulled out Hallucinations and took a look.  It was not poetry.  It was a tour journal, or just a journal in general, mostly covering the years ’84 and ‘85.  It was published by Illiterati Press and was cheaply made, with an amateurish cover.  It was pretty raw looking. 

I read the first entry.  It was Henry hanging out in a punk club in Oklahoma City.  Killing time before a gig.  He was making gentle fun of the local punks.  It was funny.  And accurate. You felt like you were right there.

*

I bought the book and then after work—with building excitement—I hurried down the street to a late night café and started reading. 

The first section was the ‘84 Black Flag tour.  A different city nearly every night.  Through the U.S. and then Europe.  It was funny and observational and highly entertaining to read.  He would get in a fight at one gig.  At the next gig a creepy girl would proposition him.  At the next he would walk around the city.  The next he would shred his voice and end up in the hospital.  

Henry was in his early/mid twenties when he wrote this.  So there were lots of dark thoughts, alienation, defiance, visions of nuclear annihilation. And of course, he saw himself as the freak, the outcast, the person completely removed from society. 

But then it would shift to some humorous scene at a 7-Eleven or a poignant moment at the laundromat.  There were odd bits about his childhood, his schooling, some brief mentions of a difficult adolescence.  He had lived in his car for periods as a teenager.  But he’d also been the manager of a Haagen Dazs in DC, which he seemed to enjoy and was good at.

One cool thing about Hallucinations of Grandeur: it was a journey across America, it was a panorama—as seen through this very particular subculture.  Even if you didn’t know the style or the spirit of this music, you knew these descriptions were true to life.  All the broken down punk bars.  All the lost and damaged kids.

Another interesting revelation:  the Black Flag phenomenon had become a much more significant force in the culture than I realized.  I was one of the trendies who got bored and moved on.  But Black Flag had kept going.  And Henry Rollins had become an underground superstar, somewhere in the mix with people like Iggy Pop, Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits.   

Aaron Cometbus

*

As a piece of writing, Hallucinations had a huge effect on me.  It was so straightforward and unpretentious. And it caught those tiny details that grounded you in that world. I was already reading the great zines of that era.  Cometbus.  Doris.  Dishwasher Pete.  They too, had the effortless prose of amateur raconteurs. Writing for themselves. Being funny, being sad, amusing their friends.

I also loved the “Scene Reports” in Maximum Rock and Roll magazine.  Where local kids furiously typed and mailed in their dispatches from cities and towns all over America.  Relating the significant events of their local scene.  The social goings on.  Which bands were cool.  And which individuals had betrayed the ETHICS and IDEALS of PUNK ROCK! 

The funny part for me was I was also reading the “important” authors and the New York Times Book Review and plowing through THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES every year, which was like doing manual labor it was such drudgery.  I guess I still hoped the “high literary” style would rub off on me.  And that someday I’d be having cocktails with Joyce Carol Oates! 

[I can’t be too critical of myself.  Jack Kerouac, followed a similar route, trying at first to be a proper literary novelist, with a pipe and a sweater, before finally letting go and ripping into his typewriter—loaded up on amphetamine in his case.]

The way I finally learned to “let go” was by writing continuously until I got so bored, I started doing what I really wanted to do.  I eventually started messing around with a gang of teen-aged scene-girl characters and ended up with GIRL, my first novel. Which was loose and free and FUN.

Scene Report: OKLAHOMA

*

In 1992, for my birthday, my girlfriend got us tickets to go see Henry Rollins do a spoken word show in Portland.  She’d noticed that I jumped up any time he appeared on MTV.

I was excited to go and a bit nervous.  It was in a music venue, but was set up more like a theater.  There were rows of chairs.  On the stage was a stool and a microphone.  Like a comedian. 

I checked out the other audience members.  There were hipster types, college kids, possibly some local musicians, but no one I knew and at that time I still knew most of the Portland music people.  

Mostly it was normies: the kind of young people who go to comedy shows.  Or poetry slams. Or would pay the $40 to see a Violent Femmes concert. They had probably seen Henry on MTV.  Or read about him in Spin.  Or heard him being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. 

The lights went down and out he came, in his black t-shirt, his bushy eyebrows, his slightly military-looking hair. He was older, but it was still him.

He strode around the stage as he told stories about his life on the road.  He was good at it.  It wasn’t comedy exactly, but it was very funny at times.  He’d been doing this for a while, you could tell.

The people loved it.  They were cracking up.  I thoroughly enjoyed it as well.  After an hour, I began to wonder how he would end it.  Would he just tell one last story about the anarchist punk squat in Denmark and walk off?

He didn’t do that.  What he did—at about the 70 minute mark—was suddenly pivot into a kind of “Coach Rollins” routine.  The monologue turned into a pep talk.  A “you can do it!” inspirational message. 

It wasn’t as weird as it sounds.  Henry really was the outcast kid who slept in his car in high school.  That’s who his core audience was, or had been, when he was the lead singer of Black Flag: young people who’d been through some serious shit.  So that’s who he was really talking to.  And there were a few of those types present, sprinkled through the crowd.

And the normies? Well, they didn’t mind it.  They took it to heart.  Who doesn’t need an occasional pep talk? Maybe it would inspire them to work harder at Nike.    

So yeah, the “Coach Rollins” finale.  From a purely dramatic perspective, it was necessary. To conclude the narrative arc, he needed to bring the show to a point.  And the point was . . . . Stay Positive?   I mean, yeah.  That’s what it was.  From the lead singer of Black Flag!  But it made sense in a way.  It was weird.  But it made sense.