LOON

Henry Rollins at the Dominion-Chalmers church in Ottawa, Canada (photo: WB)

Lost in the supermarket

By now, Henry Rollins is already hundreds of miles out of Ottawa and on his way to his next Canadian tour appearance. But last night he spoke to an audience of a few hundred at the Dominion-Chalmers United Church for no less than two and three-quarter hours.

An avowed “work slut”—he doesn’t care for ‘down time’—the 51-year-old “spoken word” performer (uh, he talks with his mouth) from Washington, D.C. covers a lot of “real estate” in a short time both in touring and his on-stage material.

Since the Canadian leg of that global roadshow started earlier this month, Rollins has already criss-crossed a substantial part of our country in his “Bon Jovi- mobile,” a pastime he swears is essential to avoiding the certain depression of staying at home for too long and being impelled to lose his way in a grocery store.

“Henry will speak for about two and a half to three hours…”

The more sedentary (and older) members of last night’s audience who recall Rollins from his Black Flag punk days—an era he variously dated as “1857” or “the Bronze Age” throughout his performance—may be wont to describe his gigs as more of a marathon affair than concert.

As the no-frills promoter from Spectra Sonic announced at the top of the evening, “Henry will speak for between two and a half and three hours.” “Oh, yeah,” he added before leaving the stage, “look for us on Facebook and Twitter and all that crap…” Yup, it was definitely shaping up to be a rare triumph of substance over style.

So the lineups in the tiny church washrooms formed right away and there was a run on the bottled water at the “box office”. And we knew we were in for a very long haul of 1970s Bruce Springsteen time-space proportions.

Rollins was, as they say, hip to that from the very start. When he first came out on stage, he told us that during his usual pre-concert check he hadn’t bothered to test the comfort properties of the seating, so sure was he just by looking of the torture our sorry asses were going to endure.

It’s not like you need to train for a Henry Rollins show but you really can’t watch this man perform without exercising your mind and body over the long haul. Rollins is not your typical “standup” performer.

Fear of a Blank Planet

He speaks sincerely and with intent and with compressed energy that he tells his audiences is borne from a deep fear of his audience’s reaction–an enduring pre-show dread that outsizes any sense of reassurance and satisfaction by a factor of five-to-one.

So how can you not pay close attention?

You have to because Henry Rollins implores you to with his riveting commitment to doing exactly what you are watching before your own eyes—him standing there in front of you, talking to you, reflecting, recounting, extrapolating, riffing, orating, and being funny and serious not always in equal measures.

During his three-hour performance, Rollins is a complete study in concentration—no mugging or hackneyed stagecraft. No timed pauses for sips from a water bottle or draft glass.

Once positioned at centre stage with the microphone in his left hand, gripping it to the hilt, holding it unwaveringly at chin level, his right arm slightly bent at the elbow, right hand raised with palm open, he doesn’t move far off the mark.  Knees bent, feet slightly apart—reverting from time to to time to this, his own version of the Namaste position. He is yours. He will not let you go and so you stay there and listen.

Transformed and informed by punk

Rollins’ Ottawa performance was an intense, geo-politically meandering and seamless narrative rap about American society, continuing education, the punk rock principles that inform his world view, teenage angst, Haiti, vaginas, Joey Shithead and DOA, Tibetan repression, technology that home-delivers pizza on hovering plates, 1970s punk bands that should have resisted the urge to stage reunion tours four decades on, North Korean cult-of-the-personality mausoleum etiquette, and his recent adventures as on-camera host of a National Geographic documentary series.

He was funny, intense (you said that twice), in-your-face, poignant, compassionate, eloquent, blunt, and unsparing with his honesty. His prowess as a raconteur is undeniable.

Although he seems at times as if his thread has been lost or tangled or mired in an infinite regression of Odyssean proportions as he describes past events from his admittedly chequered life and travels, what he is actually doing is layering an intricate psychic template of an event with enough spiritual and sensory details as are necessary to get you as close to the real deal as possible.

Venomous snakes

So you are with him in a raucous Manhattan punk venue in the 1980s when a behemoth mutant bigfoot stage-diving fan hurls himself from a vaunted stage next to Rollins and his Black Flag mates onto a “human bullseye”—a petite female fan who “didn’t get the memo”, as Rollins puts it, soon enough to evack from the abandoned (but for her) club dancefloor that is about to become a ground zero of “atomized” fan matter.

Then you’re part of his NatGeo crew at a venomous snake-infested Pentecostal church service in Kentucky where the preacher segues from spoken word into grabbing a Les Paul gold-top and commences to laying down electric blues licks that summon up a kickass rhythm section soon followed by the eruption of venomous snake-wielding congregation members babbling in tongues and praising God.

And you’re even alone with him in his Bon Jovi-mobile portable crib, fighting back fatigue and jet lag, bothering to answer e-mails from solitary people asking him for answers to daunting questions.  Rollins  feels a responsibility to send back responses and does. Because he tells us that that is what his punk experience has taught him.

And it’s very humbling to hear about his humility and humanity and he puts it out there whether it makes you feel comfortable or, like one of his e-mail correspondents, inclined to pull back and retreat from his unrelenting candour.

Getting what you see

Henry Rollins is nothing if not someone who cares deeply about the world he lives in, the world he is crucially mindful that he shares with you.

So he periodically warns against the “traps” that divide those in authority from the rest of us—sexism, racism, homophobia–and so when Rollins speaks in the first person plural, he doesn’t come up sounding fake or presumptuous. You are getting what you see and seeing what you get.

In an age of instant-everything, where more and more artists either don’t really care or bother to get their audiences to give their brains a workout, Henry Rollins makes a difference.