rollins

I have mixed feelings about Henry Rollins.

When I watch clips of his spoken word shows, there are lines with which I strongly disagree. In 2007, he stood up and ran down the whole broad genre of electronic dance music. This doesn't work for me. All these years after hanging up my own dancing shoes, I can still be transported back to more hedonistic times by the clatter, rumble and clang of the tunes I loved back in the day. Less often, I can even hear a dance music piece made since the early 1990s that floats my boat at least a little. I don't know what the hell all the different sub-genres are currently called, or which of them are associated with which lifestyle choices, fashion items, social classes, youth tribes, venues and whatnot. I'm far, far too old to have remained connected to the minutiae. But I still think that stuff has its place and I'm glad it's not dead. So Rollins and I part company on that issue.

On others, the big man and I are closer together.

He thinks most current rock music is boring and samey. So do I.

He sees evil in the purveyors of processed fast foods. So do I. "These people want you gassy, lazy, stupid, intellectually incurious, forever watching reruns, just farting into the couch, doing nothing with your life" says Rollins.

He's also struggled with a hardwired tendency to be relentlessly cynical. So have I. He's more lately tried to see cynicism for what it is (a cowardly retreat from having to confront the complexities of reality). So have I. But he still sees anger as an important part of his emotional range. That's about how I feel about anger, even in the face of some people close to me apparently believing that all rage is always a bad thing. Fuck that. Anger is an energy, right? It helps to get things done.

The former Black Flag singer also describes an attitude to dating and marriage that I recognise as one I used to have myself. The unmarried Rollins constantly refers on stage to his inability to get laid and his reliance on masturbation for the relief of his sexual urge. At one gig, he talks about dating and how it hasn't worked for him. "I'm one of those horrible men who judges women by the most shallow criterion," he admits, advising guys not to try to judge a woman by asking her about her top three records or top five foreign films of all time. In the routine that follows, his kicks dates out of his car for variously listening to Nickleback, for not being much of a reader and for reading Harry Potter novels. 

I would have done the same myself a little while ago, I think. Well, not quite. I would have tried to get laid at least once while all the time knowing that I couldn't have constructed a workable relationship  with someone whose tastes in music, books or whatever varied too much from my own. So I guess Rollins is a lot more honourable than I was in my bachelor days.

I also differ from Rollins in that I found a way to move beyond all that. One day, I realised that I got along just fine with a lady with whom I didn't have that much in common in terms of books, records, films etc. She allowed me to marry her and we're still getting on pretty well a good few years later. Large chunks of our lives have not intersected. She will never read a Charles Bukowski novel. I'll never read Lionel Shriver. She'll always feel pretty unimpressed when I crank up some Killdozer, Mudhoney or, indeed, some Henry Rollins Band. I'll never like the fucking godawful Scissor Sisters. 

Apropos of Henry's post-Black Flag musical efforts, I have two great memories associated with that act. One is of being right up the front when the Rollins Band played to a tiny, packed hall at the art college in a smallish town in the south of England in 1988 or 1989. Shirtless, sweating, Rollins bellowed at some idiot who'd decided it might be a good idea to grab the singer's microphone stand. "Do I come into your work and fuck with your tools?" Henry demanded to know. 

A few years later, I found myself making my living in Poland, trying to connect with like minded Poles rather than selecting playmates just on the basis of their being fellow native speakers of English. So I was at this party in a house notorious in the city for its great, loud, wild parties. My head was spinning with vodka and with trying to keep up with dark, crazy talk po polsku. I rested on a sofa next to a guy whose tender years were belied by his thinning hair. He had a little satanic beard and was rocking back and forth in a catatonic stylee. From the host's impressive stereo speakers, one of my favourite ever songs was booming out: Do It by the Henry Rollins Band. 

"Yeah, motherfucker," the funny little Polish guy said, turning to look right into me with the eyes of a madman. "Do it. Just fucking do it, man."

That little feller is still one of my favourite people in the world. I don't see him too often anymore. But he's one of the good ones. We bonded to the sound of a particularly raucous Rollins number.

I don't buy everything Rollins says. Sometimes I think he's barking right up trees that are all wrong for me. But he will always make me laugh and I'll always have a grin when I think of the little but important parts his music has played in the story of my life.

I thought he was pretty good in Sons of Anarchy too.