New Musical Express - June 13, 1992
transcribed by Mark Stenton
IT’S ONLY AD ROCK ‘N’ ROLLINSDue to, erm, ‘hit’ these shores next week for a dynamite double-header with the Beastie Boys, wall-punchin’, Brit-bustin’ HENRY ROLLINS meets his NMEsis in Steven Wells, eager for an insider view on those LA riots and happy to sit as hanging judge before the jury of Rollins, Ad Rock, Mike D and MCA in a kangaroo court spesh. The defendants ? Bono and Moz, natch !
A record company executive stands ashen-faced outside the Henry Rollins dressing room. "Are you OK ?" asks a minion. "Did you speak to Henry ?", "Well, sort of," murmurs the man, "He was kinda busy, uh punching the walls..." "Do Rollins," said the Ed, "His music’s shit but he gives good interview and he’ll probably kick your head in." Rollins is the Colonel Kurtz of punk rock. His favourite quote is "A broken nose is kinda the international language." He will stare at me, the white knuckles of his tattooed fist clenching a billiard ball "Are you an assassin ?", "Uh, I’m a journalist, sir...", "You’re neither !", he spits, "You’re an errand boy. An errand boy sent by grocery clerks...". "No, no, no, no, no, no !", says a friend, "You’ve got him all wrong ! He’s a laugh !". "Oh ! RIGHT ! You’re Wells !", says Rollins. "You’re the guy who wrote that if I had real balls I’d perform wearing a frock ? You ought to be CAREFUL, man ! There’s a lot of PSYCHOS out there !" One of the best things about being a rock hack is the chance to write incredibly rude and funny things about people. One of the worst things is meeting the people you’ve been incredibly rude and funny about and they turn out to be shaven-headed beetle-browed muscle-men who look as if they’d be more at home squatting in the boonies eating raw rat-flesh than playing rock music. And that’s just the Beastie Boys ! The Beasties and Rollins both have their roots deep in the flinty mulch of US hardcore punk fucking rock. Rollins got his ‘drop down and give me 20’ image from 72-hour week, don’t-drink-don’t-smoke, 90-minute-workout-with-weights-before-every-gig dedication. Rollins talks of his bizarre and brutal career in terms of military metaphors and "no safety nets". Put it this way, Prince Andrew would rather be in the Beastie Boys than the Henry Rollins band.
Our Henry’s music isn’t shit - it’s actually quite jolly in a sort of ram-your-brains-down-your-intestines sort of way. And (as befits a man with parallel careers as poet, publisher and spoken word performer - sort of a punk Peter Ustinov) in the interview situation Rollins makes the average rocker sound like a cabbage with a throat infection. Mention the LA riots and stand well back, like in the next county... "The media have a mission. They have to try and make us think that these people are savages. That’s why you pay us to protect you from them. In America it’s always been the black who’s got the shit end of the stick, from day one and for several centuries, never the white guy. So even in your DNA, in your bone marrow, blackey is the bad guy and whitey is the good guy. Black hat, white hat. When I saw Rodney King get beaten on that video, I was not surprised. I’ve been living in LA for 12 years and I’ve been harassed and intimidated by cops. I’ve seen beatings. I thought - ‘Oh ! Finally they’ve got it on video, good !’. When those guys walked, that just said to me, well, now they’ve come out in the open that they don’t give a fuck what they do and that it is a police state and that the cops can do whatever the fuck they want and that the vast white majority won’t actually come out and say it, but they feel it’s OK as long as they do it over there to the darkies and they leave us and our neighbours alone. That’s the way they want it. They keep the ghetto inhabitants killing ghetto inhabitants, burning ghetto establishments, the cops like it, it keeps the jails full and makes the cops look like the good guys. The white man has been made to hate and fear the black man, and the black man has been taught to hate and fear the white guy. And what’s the result ? The result has been my friend getting his face shot off, the result has been a big part of the city that I live in burning and horrible violence and people in fear of law officials. In New York or Washington, you can walk up to a cop and say ‘Excuse me, sir, how can I get to Ray’s Famous Pizza ?’, and the guy’ll go ‘OK, look, here’s what you wanna do’ - you don’t even make eye contact with an LA cop. I hate racism and I’m sure everyone in this room does. I grew up in the 60s. My Mom worked for Humphrey, I watched Washington burn, I had National Guard on my corner when I was in Third Grade, I had kids beating me up for killing Martin Luther King, I had my face flushed down toilets - I was thrown into urinals because I killed Martin Luther King. I put another eight-year-old in slavery - I mean, come on ! And that’s how it is. And you push these people long enough - you ever been to Compton ? You should go to Compton. Jesus, man, sending six hours there is one thing, spending 16 years there and then seeing Bush on TV saying ‘If you’re not on drugs you can do anything you want,’ and the kid goes ‘Oh yeah ? I could be like YOU ? I could be literate ? I could get out of here ?’ Uh-uh ! Well, then you go ‘Well, here’s a MAC 10, here’s a knife and here’s some drugs. Wow, OK, I’ll go for it !’ For me, you couldn’t get me to pick up a gun and kill anyone. But you raise someone in a shithole and give him no opportunity - and these people aren’t stupid, man, they see the bottom line, they see they ain’t getting out of there. You hand someone in that situation a gun and they might go ‘Fuck, I’m blasting my way out like, y’know, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’ And in LA it all came to the boil and everybody knows where it’s at now...kind of." Henry pauses for breath and Mike D seizes the moment. "There’s a huge fucking community in Los Angeles of kids who don’t go north of Jefferson Boulevard, they’re kept down below. They don’t go out of a two-mile radius, that’s how segregated it is." "A lot of these kids grow up not ever seeing a white person for real," says Henry. "I think a lot of people are seeing that the system doesn’t work," says MCA, "You’ve got a lot of people with no power, no money, no control over their lives." "They keep you hanging on, " growls Rollins, "They keep that carrot dangling in front of you. Then you’re 55 and it’s goodbye. You’re disposable, it’s Death of a Salesman. If you’re lucky, you get to be Willy Loman. That’s if you’re lucky..."
Henry Rollins recently saw his best friend gunned down. He was lucky to avoid being killed himself. Has this changed his attitude towards violence ? "No, I still have problems controlling my violent impulses. I don’t go out and mug people or anything, but I find it awful hard to walk away from someone who is antagonising me. I’ve learned enough lessons from winding up in the hospital and stuff after altercations so that I can walk away and live to play another day. As regards my friend - I’m just really tired of this glorious gangster thing, because the reality is kids with their faces blown off and that’s not good. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of hearing how cool guns are. I’m sick of hearing ‘I’m gonna shoot you in the head’, y’know, ‘I could kill you, man’ - I’m not impressed with that kind of cold bloodedness, because when you get close to someone who’s that cold, you don’t want to be close to that person, you really don’t. I’ve been around those people, I was almost killed by those people and it’s nothing to glorify. Those people are scary, man. It’s not cool, I don’t think those gangster people are cool. They scare me, man. That’s why I don’t listen to those records. When I hear ‘Straight Outta Compton’ I just hear the fury, the fury and the rage and I’m a fan of that. I go ‘Yeah, man, that guy is just, fuck, he’s in there !’. But when it comes to the point where a 17-year-old is dead in the playground two blocks from my house, murdered by another 17-year-old, I just see a beautiful life wasted and that is the bottom line. I’m totally against anything that smacks of that."
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury (aka Henry Rollins, Ad Rock, Mike D and MCA), Mr Bono and Mr Steven Patrick Morrissey have been accused of being "utterly bummed out and bogus". You will hear all the evidence and the arguments and it will then be up to you to decide whether they are innocent or guilty.
Mike D "OK, Bono..."
Ad Rock "He’s like Alan Alda !"
Henry "I think the guy’s the most pompous, pretentious, unbelievably crass guy I have ever encountered in music. He is unbelievable !"
MCA "You think he takes out Sting ?"
Henry "Oh yeah, because Sting isn’t trying to be so real and down in the street with you. At least Sting, you couldn’t get him to pose out like he’s been in a factory or something. If you said ‘Sting, why don’t you pose out with these coal miners ?’, he’d go ‘I think not !’ But with Bono, he’s gonna get that ‘everyman’ money, he’s gonna get that Barbra Streisand income, he wants all your money and he will mutate into any form to get it. If you watch Rattle And Hum, you will see that he is one fourth of one of the worst, pretentious, bogus bands on earth. They went down South and discovered the blues. They practice a song for like 20 seconds and then go ‘OK, we feel it, lets do it ! Here’s a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles and now we’re taking it back - VOMUUUUURGH ! That should have been a sucking chest wound right there, 30 yard six, take him out ! And ‘we’re so humble about it.’ You see the Ledge or The Edge or whatever the fuck, we got that humble pilgrim thing - s’like, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE !"
MCA "Now he’s dressing up like the Electric Cowboy though."
Henry "Yeah, and he’s fat, they’re all letting it out a bit. We went to that Windmill Studios place that they now own and everyone from a Bic pen to spray paint has kinda made a pilgrimage - ‘We love you, Bono ! We travelled from Melbourne, Australia, just to write on this wall. We’ve seen you 18 times ! Love Melody and Susan’ - that’s when you want to call in the air strike !"
Morrissey...
MCA "He looks like Vanilla Ice."
Henry "I think he is Vanilla Ice. If vanilla Ice had brains he’d be Morrissey. I just think that Morrissey just typifies how fucked-up you Limeys are. That wallowing ‘huuuuuuuuuuh ooooooooh ooooooh’ - it’s like, y’know, get that grease outta your hair, get a girlfriend, get a James Brown cd, get some Vitamin C, get some fucking clean air and some sunlight, go outside for a walk - get over it ! Morrissey, buddy, come on ! I’ll help him out, I’ll take him out and we’ll play frisbee ! Cheer him up a little ! Take him out to Burger King, get him a Bon Jovi record ! That guy just generates - he makes bumming-out into a hip thing. The typical English boy, pock-marked, bony white, teeth falling out of his head on a diet of chocolate, white sugar, tea, fried food, sitting at home, grease running out of his face, bumming-out on life, sitting in a shitty industrial town listening to Morrissey wallow making tons of money out of some kid’s urban industrial misery. Morrissey is a smart fucker and he plays the line, he wears those see-through shirts, he plays that AC/DC line, he plays both sexes. The guy’s smart, he’s a businessman. But he’s playing business with people’s souls..."
MCA "He’s my man ! I don’t know why Henry goes on about him. We were in England and we were having tea together. He’s a good guy !"
Henry "But, see, he helps those English kids stay all fucked-up and ill, he gets that pasty white, do-nothing, lethargic Limey thing and makes it a cool trip. What ? Nah, it’s not a racial stereotype, I’m just busting on Limeys, I’m having a good time here ! I’ve got you in a room with a tape-recorder on, I know you’re going to print the most derogatory shit I say ! Like I’m gonna give a fuck when I come to England and blow you motherfuckers away again this year ! I already did it to you once, I’m gonna do it to you again just like I did the year before and the year before that - you keep printing the bullshit, I keep coming back and torching your venues. Hey, Bono’s lucky, when he was walking up Westwood Boulevard a couple of years ago, that I didn’t take his hat off his head and smack him. Cos I saw him without any bodyguards and I was like ‘Oh, this is it !’ - but I wimped out because I was with a girl."
Mike D "I’d just like to see Bono and Morrissey fight each other."
Henry "Aaaaaw ! I don’t want to fight those guys, I hope nothing horrible happens to them. I don’t wish any ill upon their bodies, I just like bustin’ on them. I don’t hope they get hit by cars, I hope they live to be 90 and make many records. I just think that U2 are evil. If I was in a room and Bono was going ‘Come on ! Lets fight’ - I’d walk away...
Roadie "You could put him in a chokehold."
And Henry just smiles...