henryrollins.com
Long March Tour rolls across the globe
Henry Rollins has been a communicator in just about every medium there is going for well longer than most people’s diminishing recent memory. In a fleeting half-century, Rollins has worked as band roadie, a spoken word artist who created his own record label and inspired tons of others, a writer and journalist, film and television dramatic actor, musician, standup performer, “social activist,” and radio host and interviewer sans pareil.
Last week the Henry Rollins Long March Tour blazed a trial across most of Western Canada (including a gig in the Yukon) that will ricochet back through venues in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes before heading across the ocean to Europe. This Wednesday night in Ottawa, Rollins will be appearing at the Dominion-Chalmers church auditorium at 355 Cooper Street at 8:00 p.m. You can buy tickets online at TicketWeb and even print ‘em up yourself.
Most of what you may need to know about what Henry Rollins is up to right now is also accessible through his official website: henryrollins.com so we won’t waste your time mining his Wikipedia entry and paraphrasing it (any more than we have already done). Suffice it to say that Henry Rollins likes to communicate with people and his permanent record attests to his talents in that department.
Henry answers the call of the LOON
That said, as part of LOON’s tireless commitment to bring a fresh and independent breath of fresh air to what the conventional mainstream media and “blogsphere” has to say on the important events and engaging personalities of our epoch, we took full advantage of one of Rollins’ ‘preferred’ means of communication–the e-mail interview–to ask him the following question:
LOON: In his “keynote” speech to the SXSW music gathering in Austin this year, Bruce Springsteen referred to rock critic (and later musician) Lester Bangs’ comment in 1977 that:
“Elvis was probably the last thing we were all going to agree on, Public Enemy not counting. From here on in, you would have your heroes and I would have mine. The center of your world may be Iggy Pop, or Joni Mitchell or maybe Dylan. Mine might be KISS, or Pearl Jam, but we would never see eye-to-eye again and be brought together by one music again. And his final quote in the article was, “So, instead of saying goodbye to Elvis, I’m gonna say goodbye to you.” …And while that’s been proven a thousand times over, still here we are in a town with thousands of bands, each with a style, and a philosophy and a song of their own. And I think the best of them believe that they have the power to turn Lester’s prophecy inside out and to beat his odds.”
So LOON‘s question to you is:
Do you think that the world today is too fragmented and people too caught up in their own separate worlds–be they music or art or sports or politics or social networks–to be brought together to overcome and solve the really serious problems facing all of us?
I do. I think it is human nature to divide and dominate, separate and discriminate. The primary lines of division are financial. Others are determined by race, religion, etc. Music can provide a unique crossover, where people who do no agree on many thing but they might both like a certain band. I think however that bond wears thin very quickly and that music is not, nor has it ever been as powerful or unifying as it has been said to be. Songs can’t stop wars and Bruce Springsteen’s awesome abilities pale when compared to those of DynCorp.
Henry
Far be it for LOON to hog the microphone for the “follow-up” questions or comments that Henry’s answer to that particularly framed question may elicit. The point is that if you want to give your brain and body a workout, check out the Henry Rollins Long March Tour when it visits a locale near you.
