What to know about Henry Rollins’ spoken-word tour coming to Columbus

On Mar 11, 2022

In the 1980s, Henry Rollins fronted punk band Black Flag, and when that dissolved, went on to form the Henry Rollins Band.

But words have always been as important to him as music.

Rollins has been doing spoken-word performances since the ’80s, and this month is launching another long series of them, the first since 2018, including an appearance at the Southern Theatre on Monday.

“I think there are 80 shows in 86 days. I asked for no nights off, which the agents love. I don’t go to clubs, I don’t dance, I don’t drink. I’m a workaholic,” Rollins, 61, said, speaking by phone from somewhere in “my beautiful, beloved U.S.A.”

His high-intensity shows, which demonstrate the range of his thinking and feeling, and swerve unexpectedly between comedy and tragedy, may seem spontaneous, but they’re meticulously prepared.

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“I try to do nothing on the fly,” Rollins said. “I rigorously go through everything and keep shaking it and seeing if it’s worthy of being on stage. I literally tell these stories to someone else, and I say them out loud to myself. I just don’t think, for me, improvising has any benefit. I’m loathe to waste people’s time.”

His life on the road is just as carefully regimented.

He goes to bed early, works out at a gym in whatever city’s he’s in, eats 1½ meals a day, and heads to the venue to spend some time writing or working on his radio shows before the event begins.

“Sometimes that is punctuated by the road manager bounding onto the bus, always cheerful, he’s Australian, I don’t know what it is about those people, saying, ‘I found a great record store!’ We’re both vinyl fanatics. So I’ll shower at double speed, skip the .5 meal, which is usually a protein bar, and we’ll go to a record store or two. I’ll go to five a day if I could.”

Fans who have been to Rollins’ spoken-word programs in the past will notice some differences in this one.

His 2018 “Slide Show” was almost entirely based on his travels.

”I stood in a darkened room with a clicker and for two and half hours, I showed photos I’d taken from the 87 or 88 countries I’ve been to,” he said.

This time around, though, “it’s material that I didn’t get the benefit of travel to generate. Usually, in past tours, the centerpiece, the big story in the middle, was travel-based. Went to Korea, went to Antarctica, things like that. I was not able to travel in this time. So I had to come up with other ways to put together material,” he said.

The “centerpiece” of the talk is more personal.

“Something really bad happened to me about a year ago. I survived. No one died. But it ended up being the center story. So it ended up being an asset, even though it wasn’t great at the time. I’m not going to say anything about it, I just want to pull the sheet off it when I actually get there. But it was not cool.

“At the time, a few parts of it were funny, because they were so surreal. Within weeks, I think the whole thing was really hysterical, except for the really sad parts. And so, that’s going to be my centerpiece story.”

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Rollins has always been sensitive to his audience, but after the past two years, he feels even more so.

“One of the things I’m thinking about is, I’m going to be looking at my audience every night, and there are going to be people in there who lost a dad, a mom, a brother. Real loss. Not like, boohoo, my tour went away. Someone said goodbye on an iPad. It’s going to be a very intense tour,” he said.