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HENRY ROLLINS
Wouldn't talk about his tattoos
by Jonathan Williams
Photos courtesy of Henry Rollins
From the October 2004 issue of Prick Magazine.
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Henry Rollins is known for being an outspoken and opinionated person. From his musical output with Black Flag and Rollins Band to his spoken word performances and autobiographical memoirs, Rollins has become a sort of anti-celebrity willing to voice his opinion on just about anything. Whether you agree or disagree with what he has to say, you have to respect a guy who has established himself in music, literature, publishing, acting, and even voicing cartoon characters.
However, there's at least one thing Rollins doesn't care to discuss. Just ask him about the many tattoos that cover his sturdy, muscular frame and he seems almost offended, as if the subject is beneath him.
"For me, quite honestly, the topic isn't all that interesting. Tattoos are something they put in your skin and I got mine a long time ago," he says. "They're very cool and old, just like me."
Get him started on topics that do interest him, however, such as the war in Iraq or the upcoming presidential election, and he is more than willing to tell you how he feels. In fact, he says the USO tours he's done in Afghanistan, Qatar, Krgyzstan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Honduras in the past year or so have given him "a bit to talk about."
"I knew it was going to be the kind of fighting that our troops aren't really trained for," he says of the war in Iraq. "That kind of door-to-door guerilla fighting. They've kind of had to retool the strategy and they've been putting [the troops] back into training so they can get used to car bombs and all this terrorist kind of stuff. I think it's really a shame that [so many] people have died for this thing. I don't see the logic in that and I don't understand the idea of Saddam Hussein being a threat to anybody.
"It's [like] Vietnam right now," he continues. "It's one of those things where we're just going to stay until we finally get tired of hitting our head against the wall, unless you want to nuke the entire country. We're fighting, initially, a very European style war like World War II and these guys put a bunch of dynamite in a Hyundai and leave it by a building. The Iraqis are Allah-fueled. These are tough people. They're not doing it for a paycheck and they don't get to go home [because] they're home."
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Rollins is one of many U.S. citizens who supports our troops, but doesn't necessarily support the war. He feels that it is his duty as an American to point out what he feels are flaws in the way the country is currently being run. And he's more than willing to do so.
"I think [Bush has] done exactly what everyone thought he was going to do," says Rollins of the current president. "He's logging money for the people that put him in office, favoring big business over people, favoring business over ecology. It's like getting mad at a crocodile when it bites you on the ass. It's what they do and Bush is kind of fulfilling the prophecy. It's no big deal, he's just doing his thing. I'm not at all surprised.
"What's surprising to me is that no one stands up and points it out," he continues. "No one listens to his speeches and goes, 'Huh?' In his NASA speech [last January], he used the term 'courageous spatial entrepreneurs.' What does that mean? It's like astronauts are selling space and to use space as an adjective it's 'spatial entrepreneurs.' He went off the page there. You're addressing the entire world when you're the President of the United States. If you can't speak, listen to your speechwriter, stick to the page, don't smirk. And he does it every time."
In regards to next month's election, Rollins feels that Bush is likely to win, "but I don't think it'll be a landslide."
"Kerry's a war veteran [who] has a hard-on to fuck with Bush," he says. "Being a war veteran in the middle of a war, [Kerry]'s going to be able to really turn around and stick it to Bush on a lot of subjects. The President gets over a 50 percent approval rating on his handling of the war, but when you see about his home base thing, the economics and everything, he doesn't fare as well. I think at the end of the day, a lot of this election (I hope) is going to be coming down to that and it's not just going to be about fighting some war. I don't think [several] hundred war dead, which is only going to go up, is any kind of victory at all."
I guess when you put it that way, talking about tattoos isn't so important after all.
To hear more of what Henry Rollins has to say (and play), you can tune into his weekly radio show, Harmony In My Head, on L.A.'s Indie 103.1 (www.indie103.fm) every Monday from 7-9 p.m. His latest spoken word DVD, Shock And Awe, will also be available soon.
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