Filed under: Concerts and Tours, News, Exclusive, Spinner Interview, Q + A
David Livingston, Getty Images for NAMM
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 30 years since an angry, 20-year-old former ice-cream scooper named Henry Rollins burst onto the cultural radar, stomping around barefoot and shirtless as the fourth lead singer of the pioneering California hardcore band Black Flag.
On Feb. 13, Rollins will celebrate his 50th birthday with a special spoken-word performance in his hometown of Washington, D.C., and he’ll also mark the half-century milestone with multi-night runs in New York City and Los Angeles.
Rollins took time out of his busy schedule to chat with Spinner about joining Black Flag, making the transition from fan to frontman, learning to live life as a public figure and his role in ‘Punk: Attitude,’ a recently rereleased documentary about the music that changed his life.
In ‘Punk: Attitude,’ some of the people interviewed define the genre as caring a lot about politics, like the hippies of the ’60s, while other people celebrate its nihilistic side. Which is it?
You can run into difficult territory if you try to define punk rock, like, “This is what it is.” It’s something subjective. There’s an element of [the old adage]: Someone says, “What’s the blues?” And someone says, “If you have to ask, you’re never going to know.” It’s different for different people. For me, it was an awakening. I was a very repressed young person. I wasn’t good at school. I didn’t fit in. This was every person in the world, I’m sure. I didn’t dig my peers. My teachers were not friendly to me. I was getting it on all sides and not having a good time at all. When I heard the anger of Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten and the kind of disaffected cool of the Ramones, it really came to my rescue. It really spoke to me in a way that a lot of the rock records I had [didn't]. I had Van Halen and Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent. These bands were still playing in those days. I saw Led Zeppelin, and less than a year later, I saw the Clash. Musically, the baton was being handed off.
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