Love child

Is Henry Rollins pining for romance?

by Gary Susman

NEW YORK -- It's hard to imagine tattoo'd punk warrior Henry Rollins -- neck as big as my waist, music as muscular and disciplined as he is, bellowing voice as deep as his rage -- getting his ass kicked by . . . love? Yet here he is, on the Rollins Band's seventh album, Come In and Burn (DreamWorks), howling on nearly every track about his romantic failures.

Of course, a Rollins Band love song sounds like no one else's. When Rollins -- who plays Avalon this Tuesday -- delivers, "All I want/Is the world I think I see/When I look into your eyes . . ./Please, please, please/Don't ignore me," he's not so much crooning seductively as threatening to bang his head into a wall out of desperate need. For Rollins, love is a Nietzschean builder of character. As he shouts on "Rejection," the final track, "Rejection never felt this good . . ./At first I didn't see it as kind/But you did me a favor when you left me behind." No pain, no gain. Even songwriting is a feel-the-burn workout for Rollins.

"Lyrically, I wanted to put myself in more vulnerable spaces," he says of Come In and Burn. "As soon as I realized I had some discomfort, then I knew I had to go right for it. I just wanted to push myself."

What stopped him before? "Insecurity. It's weird living in public. You just go out there with a thick skin. I realized that's not the way to go. I don't write worrying about what other people are going to think. I write lyrics to make myself feel better if I'm feeling bad. It's like blues music. We're basically an Apocalypse Now blues band, a bulletproof blues band."

Come In and Burn does display a jazz tinge atypical for a genre Rollins derides as "utterly Caucasian music." It's there in the hard-swinging beats of drummer Sim Cain, the funk-flavored bass runs of Melvin Gibbs, and the modal harmonies explored in Chris Haskett's guitar solos. So is there a connection between the romance-oriented lyrics and the jazz-inflected arrangements? "The two weren't running together. We've just really learned to play together as a unit. And that jazz element that the drummer and the bass player come from is really coming out more.

"The lyrics were written from the summer of '95 to the summer of '96. It's a snapshot of those 12 months. In that time, women in, women out. There's two women on the record. One woman gets `Rejection,' one woman gets `All I Want,' and the other songs are about going out looking."

Does Rollins see himself as someday having a stable romantic relationship?

"Wouldn't mind."

How about being a dad?

"No, no, no. I love kids. It's just so much work. At my place, all I have is a big-ass stereo system, 500 pounds of weights, a fast computer, and a futon. I come and go when I want, play music loud when I want, lift weights when I want. I'd take that over `Honey, I'm home.' "

Thinking about his own abusive childhood, Rollins muses, "I don't know how good a father I would be. I would never hit my kids. I don't care what they did; it would have to be verbal. We would have to discuss it. I know people who were raised without getting a whupping, and they turned out fine, people you'd want to see be parents."

But the main reason he doesn't want to be a father, he says, is that "I hate what domesticity does to men. It just strips men of what is really awesome about men -- the hard, lean, can-do thing. You see these dads at the airport, 10 pounds overweight, carrying the big, fluorescent nylon containers of baby products, with their overweight wife and their two hysterical kids. Uh-uh. Not me.

"If people want kids, they should adopt them. There's lots of little kids at the pound, with their little noses pressed up against the chicken wire, looking for a good home. But I'd rather lead a less domesticated, more spartan lifestyle. I like eating standing over the sink. I like sleeping alone, for the most part. Who knows, two years from now, I might be Mr. Dad, with some screaming woman telling me what to do, with me putting up drapes. But for now, no. There is nobody in the world who is going to bum out if they don't marry me. Nobody on the planet is going to go, `Damn! I wish I was with Henry.' I'm not the kind of person women go mad about."

Still, maturation looms for the singer, who has a patch of gray on the back of his head. Will he still want to lead his no-strings, rocker's lifestyle at 50?

"No. I'm 36. We'll see how long I last. I love music. But I'm very limited. At least I know it. I'm not a musician. I use music as a tool to express myself. And at a certain point, that need will be fulfilled. I won't want to make music after that happens. That might be one more album, that might be 10 more. I just want to keep it real."

The Rollins Band, with openers Skunk Anansie, play Avalon this Tuesday, May 13. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are available at the Orpheum box office, or by calling 931-2000.