I’m a bit late posting this, as I’ve been battling with a flu/sore throat bug that’s kept me in bed and downing NyQil for most of the weekend, but Friday’s fun was seeing Henry Rollins spoken-word act at the Moore Theatre here in downtown Seattle. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Henry’s music (Black Flag, The Rollins Band, etc.), I became a big fan of his spoken-word performances a few years ago after one of the people hanging around the Pit brought over a videotape of Talking From the Box.
Rollins is an incredibly intelligent man, and does great spoken-word performances — cynical, insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and about ten or twenty other good adjectives. I’d been able to see him once before when he came to Anchorage a couple years back, and as soon as Candice let me know that he was going to be in Seattle, I knew I’d want to go again. As it turned out, Candice picked me up from work and we went, then met up with Chad, Rick, Casey, Liza (Rick’s roommate), Kim, and Kayo, and then we all went out to a bar after the show. The show was great, the after-show party was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, up until I finally had to head home and put my sick self to bed.
I’d had the Rollins spoken word album Think Tank for a while (autographed by The Man, even, after the show in Anchorage), and I highly recommend it. At the show Friday night, there were two new spoken word albums available — Talk is Cheap, Volumes one and two, both of them 2-disc sets, and both of them just ten dollars each! At the moment they’re only available at his shows, too — needless to say, I’ve got them both.
Snippets from a couple articles about Rollins from local papers plugging his show:
“In a way, I think it’s good that major labels have charged so much money for their wares,” he said. “Because it’s going to cave in and there will only be one record company. A new release will just say, ‘FM Music,’ and it will sound like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez put in a Cuisinart with the Korn guitar player, who will be out of a job….”
— Seattle P-I: Henry Rollins likes to keep himself ‘off balance.’
“TO ME,” SAYS Henry Rollins, “the way to really get close to the material is to go at it from almost an insane or an absurdist angle. If you just go for the straight facts, you know, they kind of come up to meet you with a fist in the face. It’s like the idea of us getting into a war with North Korea. I can’t see it happening, but the way for me to internalize it is to envision these old guys running around the war room with hard-ons, looking for some payback for when they had to bail out of Pusan in the ’50s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s thing: ‘Yeah, we can handle two wars! Absolutely two wars! How ’bout fuckin’ three? Come on, you motherfuckers, we’ll start two half-wars over at your house, and we’ll have another one on the White House lawn right now, bitch!'”
— Seattle Weekly: Henry Rollins Brings the Noise