HENRY ROLLINS Hardcore Hilarity

HENRY ROLLINS 

Hardcore Hilarity

Rock and roll raconteur Henry Rollins brings The Long March spoken word tour to The Astor Theatre on Friday, May 11, and Saturday, May 12, as part of the Perth International Comedy Festival. TRAVIS JOHNSON talks to the outspoken icon about as many topics as could be squeezed in to a 20 minute phone conversation.
Over the course of  a career that has now stretched into its fourth decade, Henry Rollins has been many things: author, publisher, columnist, radio DJ, television talk show host, occasional actor, acclaimed spoken word artist, and - his words, not ours - ageing alternative icon.
    One thing he isn’t anymore, though, is an active participant in the world of music. Rollins, who first came to prominence as the frontman for punk bands State Of Alert and Black Flag before founding the eponymous Rollins Band has hung up his guns, musically speaking.
    “Well, I’m 51 now,” the tattooed titan says reflectively. “Which is half of a hundred. It’s past the halfway mark. And I kind of decided that I’d done what I needed to with music. After 30 years, there’s not too many things you could tell me about performing or recording music. There’s really nothing more for me to do in music, so instead this is what I do now. I go to places and I talk to people.”
    Of course, this isn’t a sudden shift in career direction; Rollins has been bringing his sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, and always insightful point of view to audiences around the world for some time now Indeed, it’s arguable that Rollins is now more famous for his spoken word work than for his musical career. But though it seems obvious that he would reach a wider audience with that former rather than the latter - aggressive punk rock not being everyone’s cup of tea - Rollins himself disagrees.
    “I’ve never really looked at it that way,” he says. “I’ve never thought about it in terms of reaching a wider audience or promoting myself like that. I just talk to whoever shows up.”
    And talk he does, in a non-stop rapid-fire monologue that takes in everything from dating (which he rarely does) to drugs (which he never does), The War on Terror (hates it) to world travel (loves it), music history (adores it) to his own occasional forays into acting (seems faintly embarrassed by it).
    Of his recent high profile role as a neo-Nazi henchman in motorcycle gang drama Sons Of Anarchy, he is typically to the point and self-deprecating. “I play a very bad guy with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, apart from the fact that he’s a father, and he likes his kids. I guess you could say that gives him some complexity, but he’s still a white supremacist and a white separatist; just a really bad guy.”
    The average Rollins gabfest clocks in at around the three hour mark, and you get the feeling that, schedule permitting, he could easily double that without running out of material or even pausing for breath.
    “I’m fuelled by curiosity and anger,” Rollins explains. “And I don’t think I’ll ever stop being either, so I’ll never run out of things to talk about. I get angry about things I see in the world, like our needlessly protracted military involvement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and that makes me curious about why things are the way they are. And then investigating that almost invariably feeds back into the anger. But then that anger doesn’t make me lash out at people or property, or abuse drugs and alcohol; it leads me to do more benefit concerts, or more USO tours, and it leads me to talk about the things that make me angry in front of an audience who, hopefully, are receptive and open to my ideas on the matter at hand. I mean, I want to entertain, sure, but I want to inform as well; to provoke some thought.”
    Hazarding a guess, at least two topics will be on the agenda when The Long March rolls in to town: the declaring of California’s controversial anti-gay marriage law, Proposition 8, as unconstitutional, and the recent freeing of the West Memphis Three.
    Speaking on the former, Rollins, a longtime advocate for gay equality, sounds more relieved than celebratory. “I don’t see it as a big step forward, per se; I just see it as America kind of starting to catch up with the rest of the world. This isn’t really a conversation we should still be having in 2012. I mean, as long as you keep the dogs and the kids out of it, I don’t really care what you do in the bedroom.”
    And as for the West Memphis Three, who were freed from prison last August after serving some 18 years for a crime it is doubtful they committed, Rollins is quick to remind us that, though their release is cause for celebration, justice has not been served.
    “You need to remember that there is still a child murderer out there somewhere,” Rollins, whose activism for the cause of the Three included releasing the benefit album Rise Against, states. “And the nature of the bargain entered into with the state of Arkansas, the Alford plea, means that the case is now closed: there will be no further investigation, as far as I’m aware.”