Reconsidering Rollins
Get in the Van, Bang! & One from None
When I was in Vancouver earlier this month, I picked up a couple of books by Henry Rollins—Bang! and One from None—and tore through them. There’s something about the former Black Flag vocalist’s writing that really speaks to me, and it got me thinking about his reputation as a writer. Are you ready? Because this might be somewhat controversial. Here it is:
Henry Rollins is overrated as a vocalist and underrated as a writer.
That’s not a knock on Rollins’s abilities as a performer. I could fill this edition of Message from the Underworld with Rollins’s accolades and he deserves every one of them. His stamina and endurance allowed Black Flag to go farther than any other American hardcore band before it. Black Flag blazed the trail for other bands to follow and the hardship it endured along the way is the stuff of legend.
But let’s look at how that legend got made because it happened long after Black Flag came to an end in 1986. I would argue that Rollins did more for Black Flag after he left the band, and he did it not with his voice but his pen.
When Ginn broke up Black Flag, Rollins focused his energy on two fronts: his writing and his new band.
Rollins published short booklets of prose that mined his journals and spoken work performances and were modeled after the zines that Pettibon produced with SST. In fact, the first one he published in 1984, 20, included art from Pettibon.
Rollins produced these zines in small batches that he sold at his performances. He had trouble keeping them in print and eventually opted to combine these zines into longer, perfect-bound books under his own imprint 2.13.61.
(A clue that Rollins regarded these compilations as books came in 1992 when he collected the first five of these compilations under the title: The First Five.)
Rollins experimented with style and form and though his voice is remarkably consistent he went from someone who jotted down his thoughts and feelings in a journal to becoming a bona fide writer.
In 1994 he produced his most ambitious and most successful project to date: Get in the Van. Rollins documented the entirety of his experience with Black Flag with a plethora of photos and flyers in his own inimitable style.
Due to the growing success of Rollins’s other project, the Rollins Band, which had toured Lollapalooza in 1991, and was riding the wave of post-Nirvana guitar rock, Rollins was becoming impossible to ignore. The Rollins Band’s 1994 album Weight produced two of the band’s biggest singles: “Disconnect” and “Liar,” which was in heavy rotation on MTV.
Get in a Van, both the book and the audio book, which Rollins recorded himself, were instant successes. In 1995 Rollins was nominated for not one but two Grammy’s: one for best spoken word album and another for best metal single. Get in the Van won, bringing an enormous amount of attention to a band that hadn’t played a note in eight years.
The timing was perfect. The success of Get in the Van resonated with punks wrestling with the way mainstream America had co-opted punk rock. Older punks were feeling intensely nostalgic for the old days when being in a punk rock band was not only unpopular but conspicuously uncool, not to mention extremely hard.
On the other hand, thanks to bands like Bad Religion, Nirvana, Green Day, Offspring, Rancid, and blink-182, there were more fans of the genre than ever before, and who better than Henry Rollins to give them a much-needed history lesson?
After reading Get in the Van, how many of these fans bought a Black Flag CD? How many bought a T-shirt? How many fans did Rollins turn-on to his old band?
I suspect that number is very high, but these questions are more compelling: What impact did Get in the Van have on the fame Black Flag enjoys today? Where would Black Flag be without Get in the Van?
Given Rollins’s influence and success (not to mention his celebrity), it’s odd that his reputation as a writer lags behind his other accomplishments. Perhaps it’s because he does so many different things: TV and film actor, radio host, spoken work performer, newspaper columnist, pitchman, activist. An appreciation of Rollins’s written work is long overdue.
Henry Rollins is nothing if not prolific and some of this books are better than others, but Bang! might be my least favorite of his books.
When Bang! was released in 1990 he’d published more than a dozen books. Some of the early books were zines and Bang! brings two of these together—Knife Street and 1000 Ways to Die, both published in 1989—along with some shorter pieces, including “Afterburn” and some Black Sabbath-inspired pieces.
Knife Street feels like it was written for the stage. He isn’t telling stories about his life per se but ranting about the dark side of the metaphorical street. You can really feel Hubert Selby Jr’s influence here with its running commentary on junkies and criminals. You won’t find the kind of laconic observations that make Get in the Van so entertaining. Rather, Rollins ramps up the energy to “I’m going to hell and you’re coming with me” mode, which he does so well:
The night rapes and confuses
We got the technology
No one gets out without getting a taste
Look at the survival rate
So far they are perfect
1000 Ways to Day is a very unusual book. It’s a long list of aphoristic outbursts that look like very short poems but aren’t. Although there are a thousand of them it’s not a catalog of literal ways to die either. They’re more like angry koans. Not only is the form repetitive but so is the content. Rollins returns to certain subjects over and over again: anger, heroin, isolation, loneliness, napalm, and rape. Man, there’s a lot of rape.
Here's five (#611-615):
Child
Abuse
From Hell
That bird
That sings
At 3:00 am
Sings to me
He approaches
The electric chair
The priest
Coughs
Don’t worry pal
We are
Right behind
You
She is amazing
No one
Can make me feel
Worse
Grim isn’t it? In 2010 1000 Ways to Die was made available as an e-book and Rollins had this to say about it:
“Many years ago, I embarked on a project to write one thousand extremely short stories. The idea was if one was to watch a train pass by at great speed, one would see a lot of people and possible stories. I filled up quite a few steno pads with these very short glimpses.”
As art I don’t think these glimpses are all that compelling, but as an intellectual exercise it’s interesting to see all the themes of Rollins’s early work mapped out in one place.
When reading Rollins it’s important to know the context of what’s going on in his life, context that is often omitted from or edited out of the published pieces.
For instance, there’s a clear before and after in Rollins work when his friend Joe Cole was murdered on December 19, 1991, something I hope to tackle in a future edition of Message from the Underworld.
The problem with reading Rollins’s books in the order they were published is that the material doesn’t follow a linear sequence.
For instance, One from None, which was originally published in 1991, collects the writing Rollins did in 1987, the year after Black Flag’s demise. So while it’s the fifth book in The First Five series, it actually fits in somewhere between Pissing in the Gene Pool and Art to Choke Hearts (numbers three and four), which were published separately in 1987 and 1989, respectively (and together in 1992). Actually, there’s some overlap between Art to Choke Hearts and One from None as they both draw on material written in 1987.
One from None is a fascinating book. Written the year after Black Flag broke up, Rollins records his thoughts and feelings with few markers of time and place despite starting up the Rollins Band and going on multiple spoken word tours. It's Get in the Van turned inside out. Intense and elliptical, it's the journal of a young man who had the rug pulled out from him but was determined to build a career as an artist.
There’s a lot of anger in Rollin’s writing. A lot. In his earlier work there are pages and pages of stuff like this:
The garbage and the stench are the welcoming committee
I enter these places like a knife
I exit like a bullet leaving the skull
In between I walk trails thru their guts
After Rollins became a veteran of the road, he identified with the plight of soldiers returning from war and were baffled by the humiliating banality of life at home. He was fond of the movie Apocalypse Now and it captivated his imagination. Images of war, napalm, and death appear over and over again.
But this bit about walking the streets of Washington, D.C. on an autumn evening, a motif he returns to again and again in his books, reveals his maturation as a writer:
It’s so close to me I don’t want to say it out loud
It’s wrapped up in the night wind
This thing that blows thru me
Sealed in a black envelope
The feeling I get when I am walking alone on an autumn night
The lightness
Ian might be able to tell you
So many thoughts wait for the night
Sometimes you get to be alive
I’ve had nights like that. We all have. Moments that speak to the truest part of your self and that only the people who know you best could begin to understand. That’s the writer that emerges in One from None.
The last third of the book contains a long interview he did in Switzerland that’s light on biographical details but heavy on philosophy. It could be called "On Being Henry Rollins."
I’ll end with this telling bit from the first half of One from None:
Be careful of people
People on their way up
People on their way down or out
These punk rockers turned stoner record executives
So funny that they survive
Now who could that be about?
Corporate Rock Sucks Links
My book was featured in the AV Club’s What Are You Reading? segment for the month of June. Thank you Mark Schimkowitz for selecting Corporate Rock Sucks.
Also Corporate Rock Sucks was reviewed in the International Times and The Deer Blog.
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