The Portable Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins

£12.99, 324 pp, Phoenix House, London, 1997

Just what is it about Henry Rollins, the thinking person's Travis Bickle? On the face of it, his deficiencies are more obvious than his talents. He can't sing, he can't dance, he can't write poetry (his prose is more debatable---more on that later), and those of you unfortunate enough to have seen the dreadful Johnny Mnemonic will affirm that he absolutely can't act. He looks like a demented Action Man, he has some cheesy tattoos (and some great ones!), and he admits not only to enjoying the music of Dave Lee Roth and Thin Lizzy, but also to being something of a jazz buff. The band with whom he eventually found a modicum of fame, Black Flag, generally sounded mediocre, despite enjoying massive cult status now---they built their reputation on a fearsomely intense touring and recording programme, not on excellent musicianship. And whilst the Rollins Band have their moments, and usually provide a subtler listening experience than Black Flag, too often they sound like Black Sabbath with an even worse singer than Ozzy Osbourne on microphone duty. I know all these things, even if Rollins doesn't, and yet I have to confess to being a Rollins fan. And I'm not alone---his gigs and spoken-word performances now get respectful reviews in the quality press (well, The Independent and The Guardian, at least), he is an increasingly frequent presence on TV, and there is a growing opinion that Henry Rollins is, in some mysterious and indefinable way, cool.

This is largely a personality cult rather than acclaim for his creative output---Rollins somehow manages to seem much more than the sum of his parts. Not that he's idle---in addition to extensive touring and recording, both solo and with his band, he's produced a dozen or so books, appeared in several films, and he runs the 2.13.61 publishing house, originally a self- publishing venture but now handling the work of many other writers as well, including such countercultural luminaries as Hubert Selby Jr, Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd and Exene Cervenka. The Portable Henry Rollins is a compendium culled from his first eleven books. "Portable" is a bit of a stretch---this is a pretty weighty tome---but I'm sure it's easier to carry around than Rollins himself! The quality of the writing is wildly variable. Rollins is at his best writing travelogues, tour diaries, reminiscences (Black Coffee Blues, Now Watch Him Die, Do I Come Here Often?, and what is probably his best work to date, Get In The Van, his tour diaries from the Black Flag years, available both as a large-format, copiously-illustrated book and a double CD set---I have and recommend both). He is, however, embarrassingly bad when writing "poetry" about his various abortive relationships with women. This is some of the worst rock poetry since Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix gave it a rest (with all due respect to their respective excellent musical outputs). Rollins lacks the subtlety, the sense of balance and the empathy necessary to get away with being "sensitive". And I suspect these are personal failings as well as literary ones. Make no mistake, Rollins sustained some heavy-duty emotional damage from his evidently horrible upbringing, but instead of seeing a therapist and trying to rejoin the human race, he has founded his career on roaring like a wounded beast about how lonely he is, whilst simultaneously making it plain that he will still strike out at anyone who attempts to get near. Check it out -

Close your eyes

Think of the filth

Think of the alienation

Become the isolation

Embody the alone

Use it as a weapon

Alienate others...

Henry, Henry, take it easy! Lighten up, dude! No man is an island, y'know. But of course Henry doesn't know. EM Forster famously entreated, "Only connect". Rollins responds, "Get real". Parts of this book read like pure Taxi Driver soliloquy, as Rollins prowls the nightmare streets of LA, wallowing in the urban dystopia -

At night I walk the streets

I take mental notes

I take inventory

The filth

The garbage...

My vision is pure napalm

I am here to clean...

You have to incinerate...

"Incinerate", in fact, is one of Rollins' favourite verbs, and "filth" is his favourite noun. This relentless misanthropy reaches its nadir in a welter of sub-Nietzschean quasi-fascistic ranting on the will to power and the necessity of social Darwinism -

The strong are destroyed by the weak

Decadence has set a precedent...

I am beyond your timid lying morality

I don't believe in equality...

Rollins can be insufferably self-righteous when considering the weaknesses and failings of those less disciplined and motivated than himself (ie the rest of humanity!), but it is his absolute rejection of intimacy that I find most depressing -

I must be fully contained. No leakage, no spillover. Dependency is weakness. It's such a lie.

It is no coincidence that the other major filmic point of reference for the Rollins persona, apart from Taxi Driver, is Apocalypse Now. His writing abounds in references to napalm, calling in the airstrike etc., and one can't help suspecting that Rollins' sympathies lie with Kurtz and not Willard.

Apocalypse Now, of course, contains no female characters to speak of, and I suspect that this is part of its appeal to Rollins. It's perhaps over-facile to read the rage Rollins feels against his mother behind his fear of women, but it's difficult to avoid this conclusion, just as his exaggerated hatred of the police seems transparently to be a reaction to his bullying, militaristic father. Coupled with the hyper-masculine posturing, the obsessive bodybuilding, the boot-camp haircut and the view of life as an endless combat zone, a picture begins to emerge of Rollins as a frightened little boy who wasn't taught how to love. Small wonder, too, that Rollins has become something of a gay icon. Persistent rumours have it that Rollins is gay himself and going to come out any time soon... I don't believe this, but Rollins' wholesale denial of all things feminine, emotional and "soft" does little to dispel the speculation. One of LA's most eligible bachelors he decidedly ain't.

I hate to think of the level of repression that has gone into the construction of Rollins' tough-guy façade. But this can make for compelling reading. At its best, his writing is searingly honest, brutal, visceral and artless (which is why the poems don't work).

This collection is a good (and good value) introduction to all that's good and bad in Rollins' written output, and for the completist it also contains some work unavailable elsewhere, including some transcripts of a spoken-word performance from LA in 1992, which are interesting, because they just don't work on the page, whereas they're pretty entertaining live (I have a video of this show). Just as with Lenny Bruce, a lot of Rollins' humour lies in the physical and vocal delivery, and the spoken-word performances are often both funny and affecting, showing a self-deprecating irony which is conspicuous by its absence in the strident, self-righteous written work. I still don't really understand why I like Henry Rollins and buy his books and CDs. I guess there's just something about the guy. Those of you who feel similarly indulgent, or are merely curious, could do worse than to buy this book.