Henry Rollins

Rip It Up, Issue 201, 1 May 1994, Page 29

Henry Rollins

“To me success is playing well or making a record.”

"Chris was living there and he called and said ‘Look, I’ve got a cool studio, I’ve got a drummer and I’m flying in a bass player so get here and let’s do this’. I left the next day on a standby out of LAX but I nearly didn’t do it. If Chris didn’t have the bass player I wouldn’t have gone as I was so depressed about the whole Flag thing. It was Chris who singlehandedly gave me that nudge. Something in me said I had better go and just let him lead me around or I’m not going to do anything. So I got there and we had almost no money so we ripped through the session, couldn’t even afford to buy the studio masters. I had some friends at a label called Texas Hotel who said they'd put it out, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Joe Cole heard it and was like ‘Wow, you gotta tour’ which I resisted for a while because of the Flag thing but he talked me into it. When it came to deciding who was going to be in the band we decided we had to start at the top and work down, so I got in touch with Sim and Andrew as I knew Gone had split up. I asked them if we could come out and jam, so Chris and I humped it over to the East Coast and we got together in Sim’s basement. They learned ‘Hot Animal Machine’ in like eight minutes and then we started doing new stuff. We were good in about three days and in a week and a half we were ready to tour. After 12 days we opened for the Circle Jerks and just decimated them, flat out killed them, and the crowd knew it. We walked offstage and said ‘Yes, this does not suck’ and went out on tour. We wrote stuff really quickly, and by the time we hit England a year after ‘Hot Animal Machine' we had written ‘Lifetime’ which we did with lan Mac Kaye. It was so much fun.”

The Rollins Band was always so tight. “To me it’s the rhythm section that makes a band go. Sabbath always had a great rhythm section, that big bottom end you could build a roof on. You can get by on a good singer but you really need that rhythm. It’s something Ginn always stressed. Andrew and Sim were like Siamese Twins they’d played together for so long. They were like Sly and Robbie and we were so happy. We knew we were good, we wiped the floor with whoever we opened for and the record was great. It was good coming from Black Flag and no-one could say ‘You suck since the Flag split!’” The new band was quite a step to take after Flag. “It was down to guts. I had to take a chance and really go forward or get my ass caught in the door. I learnt that from seeing David Lee Roth at the Forum in 87. Joe and I went, second night and it was cool but he did a few new songs and a bunch of Van Halen stuff. He was in a different demographic and all, but it still seemed gutless. Like Sammy Hagar,

he hates David Lee Roth but he still has to play ‘Jump’ and has to do it every night. But anyway, I figured let's do it all the way. The only flak I got was calling it the Rollins Band but I called it that because I wanted to have options open, to be versatile. If I wanted to play with four tuba players I could. I wanted it to be me, it's my band and if it sucks I get the blame. It’s like actors, they don’t get the blame if a movie sucks — it’s the script or the direction or whatever. That’s what I wanted, if it sucks I take it on the chin so fuck you. It wasn’t an ego trip, it was actually pretty scary.” With Melvin joining you’ve sort of gone through it all again, it’s a new band with a new set, no old songs. “To me it was the only thing to do. We could have taught Melvin the old stuff, but that would have been gutless, we had to do a whole new thing and stay musically honest. Live it’s turning out so cool, Chris is like murder because he doesn’t have Andrew negating everything he does. It’s a totally new band. I didn’t want Melvin to feel like he was the new guy because we’re all the new guy. With Andrew it used to be four cool guys and the bass player. Now it's five cool guys. The songs are just flowing, it’s way more fun and I look forward to playing live again. The last 20 shows with Andrew were just so hard, like ‘What will he do in front of 5,000 people to fuck us up?’ He would be playing on his back and Theo would just want to pound him but we had to stay with the tour and our responsibility. Now it’s over and everything is better and more fun, we’re going after so much more creatively because the big baby is gone. I wanted to send him the new album with a card saying ‘Thanks Andrew, never could have done it with you’. He’s been gone more than a year and it’s good.” The new material is really alive, shorter, punchier songs. “Again, due to losing Andrew. With him everything had to be at this pothead pace, the narco funk groove. Now it’s all ready to get up and go, which it does. We get the tune and we’re out! It’s so much fun live, like throwing clothes off. Not saying I didn’t like the long stuff like ‘Blues Jam’. It was so much fun because it was so long it became like this environment you lived in and moved around in. I like this new stuff more though, 1 haven’t done this since Flag. Instead of this dinosaur crushing everything in its path we’re more like a Jaguar.” Because, of course, you’re back out on the road this week. Why do you still do this totally intense schedule a decade on down the line? “At this point it’s what I know. Not to put down the home life though. I mean I like this place, it’s a really cool pad and I’ve got the tunes, I’ve got the

computer and I’ve got somewhere to sleep. Yet after about a week I get claustrophobic. I can’t sleep well and I want to get back out. As soon as I’m on tour it all comes back. I sleep better, I write better and I don’t know why! I also like the fact that I’m 33 and still out there doing this for real. It’s a lot harder for someone my age but I love it. That’s why I train really hard, so I can go ‘That’s right, I’m in my 30s and I’m still going to smoke all of you’. It’s an endurance test. I want to outlast the guys who are 23 and can still go three nights without sleep. The old man can still go out and break your neck kids! I mean, it would be so cool to be Bob Dylan for a week. He’s the man, he’s done so much great work but wouldn’t it be cool to get some smokin’ rhythm section to back him up, the Red Devils or the Blasters or something, and start doing places like CBGBs, just walk out on this little stage and BAM! Iggy still does that. lan saw him at the 9.30 Club, a place as big as this room, and he said it was terrifying. Iggy was on the PA with his pants round his ankles screaming ‘l’m a fucking old man but I’ll KICK YOUR ASS!’ I’d love to be doing that.” OK, let’s talk about weightlifting. It such a cool thing but people are like ‘You’re into power lifting? God, you jerk’. "For me, the weights are great for a lot of reasons. There’s this political correctness thing. You say ‘l’m a man and I like women’ — oh, you sexist, rapist whatever. ‘I like to play real hard’ — oh you macho dickhead. I’m expected to be sorry for using my body’s capacity? Fuck you. At the gym you don’t have to apologize for being the way you are, and there’s these big, ugly hunks of iron sitting there that don’t care about anything. No one can lift them for you and every time you lift you get stronger. The weights will always meet you 50/50, you get back whatever you put in which is the fairest deal imaginable. If you work hard you’ll rock, there’s a lot of precision involved, a lot of grace and a lot of discipline. You can go through ‘The bass player quit, the woman left and there’s no money’ but 200 lbs is always 200 lbs. The other thing is I’d want people who work out seriously in my corner. Someone who’s in touch with that pain factor is going to be more stable in a strange situation. Anyone who takes the spirituality to the sport is someone who can deal with the weird shit, who won’t flip out easily. Strong body, strong mind. There’s definitely something to that.” Back to music. What’s your relationship to modern music?

“Well, you see these people, you watch certain bands and say ‘Wait a minute, I’ve seen that before, he’s doing someone else’s thing’. I can’t say I listen to many contemporary bands, they just don’t move me. So much of it seems conceived in a boardroom.

They have the right clothes and a sincerity rap but it’s all aimed at a demographic. It’s bad to generalise but I can’t listen to the Breeders or Soul Asylum, I just can't get to it. I mean, long may they live but I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m 33 or something.” Obviously you’re not Generation X. “Whatever that is — bunch of lazy fuckers. I’ve never been comfortable with that stuff right from the Black Flag days. .We were always an outsider’s trip, and Rollins Band is playing to the same sort of people. It’s odd, the idea of ‘success’ and ‘fame’. To me success is playing well or making a record." You’ve always dabbled with the mainstream though, like the Gap ad. That bummed a lot of the alternative types out. "Mission accomplished. I thought it was pretty funny personally. I take that stuff seriously, but it’s not important to me. All it means is a press agent somewhere is doing a job. It’s just a game, the writing and playing is what counts. It’s like the movie I’m doing. It’s cool but it’s just another project. I’m just a hashslinger really, there’s a pool of me and I dole it out. ‘There’s your book, there’s your movie, there’s your record’.”

The movies are an interesting new trip. “It’s a different media but it draws from stuff I’ve been doing for a while so it’s not a stretch really. It’s like I play guitar but this week I’ll play bass. They say you’re going to be this person, and you’ll be mad, jealous and scared. You read the script and you know why you’re like that, then you do it. It’s all just another discipline. You have to be sharp, be patient and be consistent. As dumb as these actors are, they know how it works and how to pull it off. It’s choreography, I’m a bonehead and I can do it. I’m pulling my weight on this movie at the moment, ultimately I’m doing as well as anyone else on the cast.” What I like about it is you surprise people. They think you’re some sort of punk knucklehead but you do these movies, the spoken word thing is really striking a chord with people and you have a great book company. “Yeah, it’s nice that there’s room for stuff that’s not beating you over the head but is still making you sit up and react intelligently, there’s room for that whole vibe. It’s to throw people a curve too, the guy who sees the band goes ‘Yeeeahh, right. What a moron’. But then he reads the lyrics and it’s not so dumb. ‘He’s got a book company? What is it, comic books?’ Then they see this powerful stuff like Don Bajema and Bill Shields, and they say ‘Well, this is really cool’. I think most people figure I’ll just be some sort of intimidating, stupid asshole. Although I’m sure I’m a lot of bad adjectives, I like to think I'm some good ones as well.”