It wasn’t all that long ago that Henry Rollins, the pumped-up and tattoo’d progeny of the ’80s American hardcore underground, seemed on the verge of becoming alternative rock’s own Michael Jordan — a ubiquitous icon with the cultural clout to turn everything his image touched into marketing gold, and the personal drive to, well, touch lots of stuff. There was the Rollins band, of course, who’d raged at the first Lollapalooza and then scored an alterna-rock radio/video hit or two. Before long, Rollins was popping up everywhere on MTV. He was in films and magazine ads; he wrote a column for Details; and in his spare time he put out books and CDs by himself and others on his own 2.13.61 imprint. Oh, and he developed a side career in spoken word.
The clock may have run out on alterna-rock, and with it on Rollins’s time as its “it” guy. Lollapalooza’s dead, and so is the Rollins Band’s deal with DreamWorks. But Rollins himself, who comes to Avalon this Tuesday for a sold-out spoken-word show, is as busy as ever. Currently he’s supporting a new spoken-word CD, A Rollins in the Wry (Touch and Go), that he recorded live at a nine-week residency in an LA club in the spring of ’99 — which just happens to be when he was mixing the last Rollins Band CD, Get Some Go Again. Multi-tasking is a point of pride for Rollins. Asking him “What have you been up to lately?” is dangerous.
“Gimme a time frame and I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing,” is his quick response over the phone from his LA office. “The Rollins Band is in the studio mixing down about 30 new songs, a hunk of which will come out in September. We’ve been recording on and off for a while between tours. We’ll finish the rest of the songs in April between tours — I got five days off between America and Australia, and I’m going to go right back into the studio and mix until my flight leaves for Melbourne.”
In the meantime, this May, the Fox network is planning to premiere a show called Night Visions, which Rollins hosts. “It’s basically their version of Twilight Zone, and I am the Rod Serling. I had meetings with them about being a recurring character in The X-Files. They said, ‘We think you’re interesting. We’d like to talk to you about this.’ I said, ‘Great. I’ll have a meeting about that.’ They said, ‘We’re interested in working here, here, and here.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m in Japan and Germany there, there, and there.’ So, they kept me in mind for stuff, and come fall I had employment. I already shot all my stuff for the season — twice, actually, because they changed the writing and we had to do it all over again.”
As if that weren’t enough, the Avalon show is part of a 35-date US tour that kicked off on February 13, Rollins’ 40th birthday, in Chicago. “I actually started the tour late last year, but I was on stage for my birthday in Chicago. So I’ve been flexing some of the new ideas — you know, being 40, being under the spell of George W. Bush, stuff like that. . . . I have little signposts where I know I’m going to hit that, hit that, hit that. I know I’m going to talk about something, but I don’t know what I’m going to say about it. Or I have a vague idea of a point I want to make. So little by little I get closer to 8 p.m. and I go out there and I get cooking.”
Henry Rollins performs this Tuesday, March 13, at Avalon. The show is of?cially sold out.
