Come In and Burn...
An Unofficial Henry Rollins and Rollins Band Site... |
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Rollins In London - Part 1 ...
Hi there Andrew. Scott from Aberdeen here. I'm going to send
you this little letter directly this time, as I have a pretty dodgy
Internet connection, it tends to take me quite a while to get through to
your page or the Rollins talk page, and it has a tendency to crash my
machine. So if you could lump this onto the relevant page I'd really
appreciate it. Thanks just now for the great site, I've wasted a lot of
time browsing through it and I've gotta say that you update it a lot which
I'm grateful of. Alright, onto the real deal...
Scott
t01siks@abdn.ac.uk
Mon Jan 15 23:47:38 1996
I'll start with a little bit about myself. My name is Scott and I'm a
student in Aberdeen
in the North of Scotland, I'm twenty three and very
luckily have a car. My girlfriend was at the time, living down in the
South East of England for a few months when she informed me that she had
found an advert in a newspaper stating that the Public Insomniac
Tour was coming to London, England for one date only, and at
a time when I was on holiday too! The story progressed that we decided to
get the tickets and somehow just try to get to the show even though this
would involve a round trip of roughly a thousand miles on my behalf. If
you are ever in the situation where you have even the slightest possibility
of seeing Rollins, take it, make the effort. I drove for in total about
twenty six hours, and slept in other people's houses and on a floor, it
was worth every minute.
Rollins hasn't done a spoken word show in Britain for some time, and the
last time he was here I was out of the country, so I was desperate to see
him. I guess this makes me a little biased so I'm going to include a few
excerpts from a review written in the Guardian on Monday January 8 1996 by
Caroline Sullivan, a really good article in my opinion which captured the
feeling of the evening. I also have the Melody Maker
article that's on Andrew's Rollins page at the moment too. I felt this
article was rather typical of British muso-journo snobbery, and in
particular the aloof nature of MM and their inability to admit that they
enjoyed a gig or record, especially if that artist is starting to become
more popular. I'll try to do Rollins justice and write things both from
his, and my point of view.
There were I guess about five sections to the gig, five main stories, and
I'll post each one seperately. These are not taken from recordings and are
just the best I remember or re-interpret them. I don't have any photos to
post as our camera was confiscated by the rather over-zealous 'security
staff' at the venue.
Caroline Sullivan's article is titled 'Monster Mad Mellow', she 'wonders
if mean rocker Henry Rollins can possibly be related to the loveable
raconteur performing at the Forum'. This kind of sums up the gig for me.
The mood before curtain deadline in the audience was definately edgy. Most
people looked like they hadn't ever been to spoken word show before and
most hadn't ever seen Rollins. There were a lot of very young looking
folks, especially girls, looking like they didn't know what to expect.
What do you have to judge Rollins by? Mostly what other people write about
him. And what do people write? That he is some kind of intense psychopath,
and that in his presence you constantly wait for a fist in your face or
whatever. We were all, I think, most surprised when instead 'Hank' turned
up, and proceeded to make us feel right at home joking and laughing and
just telling stupid stories.
As I said before, I've never been to any of Rollins spoken word shows
before, I've seen the Rollins band a few times, and caught his intense
chatter between songs. The only other thing is a video and spoken cd. On
both of these there is a real mixture between 'talking shit' and 'dealing
with heavy shit'. Rollins may make you laugh but he will also take you to
the lonely and kind of depressing place where he seems to dwell. There is
usually a point to this forray, such as the recounting of Joe Cole's
unfortunate demise. As much as Henry tells us that this is just a self
indulgent blues trip, he gives us his point that maybe you should
appreciate your life. In the Forum only once did he really get anywhere
near this level in his story about going to visit a cancer patient in Oz.
Even this however, tended to have more of an uplifting effect on the
audience. The bravery of this kid with cancer is an example to all of you
to stop worrying if you are having a bad hair day, or if someone steals
you parking space, kind of thing. On the whole, 'Rollins the comic, is
relaxed (a big surprise), comical and witty, the rock monster recedes and
is replaced by Tom Hanks'. 'The only echo of the screaming tattooed
monster is the paradest posture and elephantine biceps. Old Hank lounges
there, smiling affably and speaking in a light American accent - a boy you
could introduce to your parents'. At one point Henry mentioned how he had
ran into Frank Black one time and gone up and introduced himself. Frank
started talking about how they would both be washed up by next year, and
proposed the Las Vegas show revue - 'Hank and Frank'. Henry may not want
to think of himself as a stand up comic, but he could pull his
considerable weight against what most have to offer. Some of the american
media references were a little obscure for us limeys but he made us
understand it all from his point of view, which made it funny anyway. 'He
kept the place rapt for three hours. Yo, like, a triumph.' The drive etc.
was definately worth it, get to see this man if you can.
Story 1: Embarassing shit that happened to Hank on
stage.
I don't know if you are aware of this but Henry has pretty bad eyesight. I
guess glasses don't really go with the image and contacts are not really
practical, so he tends to wander around half blind. Anyway, on an
indistinct gig somewhere in the states Henry is all psyched up back stage
and bounds fiercely onto the stage and about 10,000 people erupt. Hank
gives a quick salute, and turns to find that he can't see the mike which
is usually left just behind this point so he can find it. He doesn't want
to start crawling about on the stage infront of 10,000 people looking for
his mike so turns to the audience and gives it a big rock-out punch the
air gesture, whilst looking over to the side of the stage mouthing the
words, 'I can't find the mike' in big oversized words. The stage manager
is mouthing, 'Over there' and pointing in some sort of non-descript
direction that Henry can't make out. So Henry starts running around doing
further rock out poses whilst looking for the mike. Sim Cain eventually
stands up over the drum kit and has to point to the mike with his drum
stick, by which point the audience is getting a little suspicious. Here's
one that in Oz last year might remember. As you know the Rollins band are
due for a new release soon, and have been trying new material on stage.
This means that because Rollins hasn't sung these songs like 500 times
then he hasn't ingrained them into his brain to the point of singing them
without thinking about it. The opened up into one of these songs and all
was going fine until Chris accidently stood on his guitar lead and pulled
it out. He screams 'Oh shit' and plugs back in but loses it a little and
goes into the bridge instead of the chorus like the bass and drums. This
just confuses the hell out of Rollins who, having sung like half of one
verse, procedes to forget all of the rest of the words to the song
entirely. What to do? Again he resorted to running around the stage
'rocking-out' and playing air guitar and shit for the next five minutes of
the this wierd half instrumental with a half minute of singing at the
beginning and then five minutes of what sounded suspiciously like chorus,
verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, verse. Again, he thinks he got away
with it.
The last and far and away, best story in this section takes place in a
South American festival for around 50-150,000 people, headlined by TA-DAH
Mr. Big!? It's a show so they decide to do it and all get down there.
Whilst the band are lazing on the beach in South America, Rollins gets
another gruelling promo schedule and through several days of too much to
do manages to arrive at the airport with two days of no sleep. He's
getting to that hysterical stage of sitting crying his eyes out at the
sentimental shitty movie on the plane, and then suddenly breaking into
hysterical laughter. He gets off the plane is swamped by journalists, who
immediately start snapping away. Hank can't stop talking and gets all of
these full page photos in the local papers the next day with him looking
like Sylvester Stallone. His face in some tortured grimace, half way
through a word, eyes in half blink, arms gesticulating wildly. There are
all of these goofy photos with like 'El retardo Henry Rollins' headlines.
Cool. Anyway, he gets all psyched up backstage banging his head into
things and screaming, while the rest of the band look on, gaze at the
ceiling and each other and say "I think he's ready". Henry runs on stage
to 150,000 screaming South Americans, finds the mike (phew), and adopts
his typical crouched screaming position. His knee comes up and his head
comes down. Bang, he knocks himself out cold just as the band start. After
like twenty seconds he wakes up and gets up looking for the guy who must
have sucker punched him. The first to come back is his hearing and and it
sounds like a broken washing machine being amplified by a jet engine and
he's busy thinking' Who are this terrible band, and where am I?' When his
vision starts to clear. He thinks, "Who are all these people, what song
are we playing and what the fuck just happened?". At this point he notices
his face is covered in blood, and his head and knee both hurt like shit.
Two and two makes four, and he starts to calmly examine his head which is
cracked wide open exposing his skull. Chris is asking him how he is, and
he starts grossing out the whole band by touching his skull with his
fingers. This has all happened in the first minute of the gig before Henry
has said a word. Things get pulled together and he manages to get through
the rest of the 60 minute set bleeding all the time. The bit that sticks
in Henry's mind is the image of Evan Dando coming on stage next singing
all of these "be nice to people, and like everybody" songs, whilst
standing in a pool of Henry's blood.
I guess these stories were intended to warm up Henry on the night, but
they also managed to put the audience at ease and set the tone for the
rest of the evening. I'll mail the next installment of this soon if anyone
is interested in this one.
Still to come...
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