Satiristas

by Paul Provenza

  HENRY ROLLINS: With Black Flag, people said I was angry. “Yeah, I’m very angry. And very lonely, very sad and very easy to please and wanting something different, and I’m getting it all out with this loud, angry music.” I’ve written twenty books and people say, “The writing’s dark and heavy.” Because I’m in pain, man! Should I shoot someone or write a book instead?

  For years, media rendered me as this angry guy with no brains. Sure, you see a shirtless, tattooed guy yelling and screaming, you’ll think: “Angry psychopath! Hide your kids!” Truth is, kids love me. So I got a better press agent. And found out there’s something else under the hood.

  I started doing spoken word in ’eighty-three. A local promoter put on shows where, like, fifty poets, artists, whatever got seven minutes each. He said, “You’ve got a big mouth. Wanna do seven minutes next week?”

  I said, “What am I gonna do?”

  He said, “We pay $10.”

  I said, “See you there,” ’cause I was broke.

  And I really enjoyed that format; I liked telling stories. So I did another, and another…I’d read tour journals, tell stories from when I was eight years old, crazy Black Flag anecdotes. Related my life. By ’eighty-five, I’m in a van doing my own little tours to twelve, fifteen people a show. I hoped to break a hundred.

  Now I do up to a hundred talking shows a year, everywhere from JP Morgan to Harvard to theaters; in Russia, Israel, Australia…

  PAUL PROVENZA: All with an attitude similar to your music?

  HENRY ROLLINS: All of it comes from an attitude of pushing back against.

  My talking shows aren’t “Daddy never held me” stuff. When you talk about being in third grade in 1968, where kids punch you in the mouth because “you killed Martin Luther King,” and your mother says, “Honey, it’s a tough time right now,” then you hang out with your dad, who says, “Your mother’s a good woman, but she’s a nigger lover so don’t listen to her too much,” that’s stuff that forms you. When I tell those stories, it’s to say, “Here’s where I’m from” and “Here’s where all we Americans are from.” You strike a chord.

  I talked about a friend who got his brains blown out in front of me—the guy shot at me, missed, got my buddy, and I had to clean it up. I got so much mail like “My brother got shot in the face in a parking lot. Now I know I’m not alone.” Talk about the most obscure minutiae of your life, and someone will be, “Dude! I thought you were talking about me!” And the more intense you get, the more people go, “Thanks, man!”

  The older I get, the weirder my stories get. And the angrier I’m getting. I’m forty-eight, and angrier than at twenty-eight. Shouldn’t I be getting fat and content? I’m getting leaner and meaner.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is it because your anger’s expanded from the personal to a bigger consciousness?

  HENRY ROLLINS: That’s exactly it! When I was young, all I wanted was to be in a band, eat three times a day, and meet chicks. Women, glory, and music. And a van with five smelly guys and not enough gas to get to the next gig. The motivation was pure: “Play or die. Fuck it, I’ll take either.” I was on a tight, feral, Nietzschean leash.

  But you get a little older, you can eat regularly, and…What’s the anger about now? You start to look around, see the world for what it is.

  When I was young, it was, all, “I can’t meet a girl; my world sucks; me, me, me, me, me.” As a nineteen-year-old is wont to be. My anger now comes from having more access to the world.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Some people say entertainers should just entertain and shut the fuck up. Granted, as in all walks of life, some are misinformed, gullible, and trite, but some are intelligent, aware, and well-read with the luxury and ability to think about and process things. And, as performers, they travel far more than any businessman or politician, to a far greater variety of places, interacting with countless people around the globe on a regular, ongoing basis.

  HENRY ROLLINS: Yeah, every armpit of the world, you do a gig in it. Twenty-five gigs! For over twenty-seven years, I’ve crisscrossed America and circled the world. And with travels, you learn.

  You learn that a good part of the world is always hungry. Most of Africa is all food insecurity and poverty, which leads to everything bad. To a fifteen-year-old mother deciding, “Do I sell my body and feed my kids today, or not sell my body and not feed my kids today?” Guess what? They’re the little girls with their own kids at the AIDS clinic I visited in Cape Town—with a hundred fifty others just like them, out of two hundred people the one doctor and three nurses treated that day.

  That gets me up in the morning. You see parts of the world where people are eating snow and making rock soup and you think, “Am I Nero? I can’t sit and watch this or I’m part of the problem. To be a responsible person of the planet I’ve got to do something.”

  We who travel do get an understanding. It doesn’t make us experts—believe me, I’m no scholar—but you can’t tell me that after being to all these places I’ve been to, the tremendous access to all kinds of people I’ve had, that I don’t know a thing or two. You get perspectives.

  Day after September 11, I asked my manager, who’s traveled so much he’s sprouted wings, “Were you surprised?”

  He went, “Nah. Were you?”

  “Nah.”

  So many people said, “I can’t believe they did that!” Really? I can’t believe it didn’t happen sooner. Don’t they understand what we do in other parts of the world? I beg my fellow Americans to think critically. What might another country looking critically at America have seen recently? They’d see wonderful people oppressed by an imperialist leader, a government eroding the line between church and state, revoking civil liberties, and referring to the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” as they torture prisoners. They’d see the only country ever to use nuclear weapons with stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, more conventional arms than all other countries combined, and military spending greater than any nation in history.

  Maybe that country might go, “The American people need to be rescued.” Let’s say it’s Belgium. They come over with Jean-Claude van Damme DVDs and hazelnut hair gel, going, “We’re here to save you, with the best of intentions!”

  What would Americans do? They’d go, “Thanks, but you got ’til this afternoon to get the fuck outta here before we kill you all.” We’d throw everything we had at them, and blow ourselves up before we’d give up. Why should Iraq be any different?

  Americans are aware of very few other countries: one to the north we’ve built a virtual fence against lest they attack us with gay rights and health care, and one down south where we’re building a real fence to keep them out unless we need our hedges trimmed or our children cared for, and then it’s, “Come on in! Shhh!…Ninety to a room.”

  All other countries just “hate our freedom.” Never mind that we’ve been stirring their coffee with our dick since Truman. Or before.

  I was detained at San Francisco Airport when they saw in my passport that I’d gone to Syria: “Why’d you go to Syria?”

  “Curiosity. And that’s a legal passport and visa, so why are we really here?”

  “Were they nice to you?”

  “Yeah, the people were wonderful to me. How do you like them apples?” I could tell that bugged him. “Our government says it’s dangerous.”

  What temerity! I said, “Sir, if you drive about eight exits to Oakland, you’ll get shot in the face in a parking lot.”

  I was invited into people’s homes in Iran. Hung out with cab drivers and their families in Lebanon. The women were beautiful, the food was great, everyone was friendly. Is it always that way? No, you can have a hard time anywhere there’s humans, but in this country, we don’t want to know what things are really like elsewhere.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your crowd mostly already agrees with your worldview. Do you care that you’re preaching to the converted?

  HENRY ROLLINS: With my crowd, it’s “preaching to the perverted.” But remember, the alrea
dy converted pass their books and CDs around and spread your stuff for you. I sign beaten-up copies of things and they’ll say, “It cruised my whole dorm,” or “It hit every bunk in the barracks.”

  But a lot of people who aren’t my crowd bounce off me from TV, the Internet…I get hate mail, so I know for sure I’m reaching beyond my crowd. You know you’re breaking through when you get that “Get out of my country!” stuff. That’s a “Eureka! We’ve made contact! This one’s got gills and a primordial tail!”

  With some of those, you just have to accept there’ll be intellectual casualties along the way. What you hope to do is make sure their kids get to hear P-Funk before it’s all over for them. Try to bring their kids over to the bright side, where the Ramones are.

  I’ll get some kid, “I read your interview where you talked about Henry Miller so I read Black Spring that you said made you want to write books. That guy’s amazing!”

  And I’m, “Ahhh! We have a reader!”

  “What else should I read?”

  “Oh, we’re cookin’ now!”

  PAUL PROVENZA: So you think you’re making a difference?

  HENRY ROLLINS: I know I’m making a difference. I get letters every day, “You helped me get off drugs.” People on the street, “I thought I’d never vote, but after hearing you, I’ve got to.”

  Plus, my little record company has this “Talk Is Cheap” line of CDs, two for ten bucks, and a dollar from each goes to the Hollygrove Children’s Services Center in my neighborhood. Another line, one dollar from each goes to the Southern Poverty Law Center, fighting hate groups. We did a benefit CD for the West Memphis Three, three kids serving life on charges a lot of people believe are false.

  How much have we contributed? Who knows? Who cares? If I only paid for Christmas presents for the kids at Hollygrove, maybe one of ’em won’t rob a liquor store because they’ve seen there is some good in the world.

  You think we’re pissing in the wind because the world’s not changing? You don’t change the world, you change worlds.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You mentioned reaching the younger generation, but I find an overwhelming conservatism at colleges. There are exceptions, but in general I find them predictable, consumerist, and resistant to countercultural or subversive ideas.

  HENRY ROLLINS: Because those kids are going right into the Right-wing, corporate world and they train them all that way.

  America’s school system should be the envy of the world, but we’re what, forty-sixth in literacy? Now what can’t America do better than everyone else in the world if we cared to? But man, they don’t want us thinking. That’s why in the “halls of academia” they’re just beer bonging and consumer-ing their lives away, texting themselves into oblivion.

  It distresses me that young people don’t see college for the opportunity it is. I run them down at universities: “If you privileged little bastards drop below a certain grade point average, I want you pulled from your seat, a kid from the ghetto put in it, and I want your parents to pay their tuition. You get to learn, drink coffee, and hang out with interested, interesting people all day—and you’re not even paying for it! So many people want to go to college, but they’re in Compton or the South Bronx. Working at McDonald’s will be their best option. They want so much more; you have the opportunity and want so much less? It hurts me. You wound me when I get another of your typo-ridden letters.”

  It does hurt, ’cause I come from the high school education, $3.50 an hour minimum-wage world managing a Häagen-Dazs store, thinking, “Dead end ahead.” I saw $3.50 an hour for the rest of my life. Black Flag came along; I told my supervisor I was leaving, and he said, “I’ll make it $5 an hour.”

  I said, “It’s not the money. It’s the shot.” We stay in touch to this day, by the way. He’s so proud of me.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you consider yourself brave?

  HENRY ROLLINS: No. I’m not brave, I just don’t have much fear. There’s a huge difference. Bravery is one thing; I’m, just, “Ah, I don’t give a fuck when I die.”

  I really don’t, either. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to die. I’m not jumping in front of speeding cars; I see a gun, I’m running. But if it happens…Whatever. I’m not really all that taken by life. I don’t wake up every morning going, “Yee-hah!” Maybe because I think too much, but I’m not really all that happy to be here.

  In Iraq, I was in this building that was getting bombed, and this soldier rushed over, “Sir! You’re in a fortified building! You’re in no danger!”

  I went, “Cool,” and kept signing autographs and chatting.

  “Sir? You’re not scared?”

  “Oh, I’m scared. I just don’t really care when I die.”

  “Sir?…Uh…That’s really fucked up.”

  “You have no idea.”

  JELLO BIAFRA

  JELLO BIAFRA EMBODIES the political conscience and artistic integrity of the post-punk, hard-core movement of the Reagan era. Leader of the Dead Kennedys and founder of the independent record label Alternative Tentacles, Biafra found himself, his band, and his label singled out as guinea pigs for Tipper Gore’s PMRC and its crusade against music they deemed too vulgar and explicit. Biafra won his case—but at the cost of his band and the exclusion of independent artists from mainstream distribution. As a successful spoken-word artist and active Green Party member, he’s now one of the most recognized voices against censorship, organized religion, and corporate hegemony in America. Biafra displays his signature candor and sharp humor about the ordeal of his trial and tells us how he stays informed and fights back, and how being a punk taught him the DIY ethic.

  JELLO BIAFRA: Let’s rewind to the obscenity bust: even though the vigilantes, Tipper Gore’s PMRC, had announced they were targeting the Dead Kennedys, I thought surely this country has grown up enough since the McCarthy era and Lenny Bruce that no one was going to waste public money trying to bust us on this. But lo and behold, on April 15, 1986, the LAPD flew officers to San Francisco, where, in conjunction with the SFPD, both showed up at my house, broke a window by the front door, walked on in, and trashed the place, claiming that they were looking for “harmful matter.” They even looked in the cat box for “harmful matter.”

  All they wound up walking away with was my address book, some Alternative Tentacles Records stationery, copies of the Frankenchrist album, and H. R. Giger’s poster. I suspect they were hoping to find drugs or guns.

  Even my mother said she was relieved they didn’t plant drugs on me during the raid. It’s easier to laugh now, but at the time I was scared shitless. I knew what the LAPD were like; the Rodney King video was no surprise to me, ’cause I had seen them treat my fans that way with my own eyes in Wilmington, California, and in front of the Whisky a Go Go.

  Then this cop walks in with his Eliot Ness trench coat, asking, “What are all those pictures of missing children doing on your kitchen wall? Do you know where they are?” One of my roommates had been collecting milk-carton kids and lining our kitchen walls with them. I was tempted to tell him they were all buried downstairs, but I was afraid they’d dig up the entire house and the landlady would get a little upset.

  A few months later, me and four others in the record distribution chain were charged with one count each of distributing harmful matter to minors—a law they’d never used before. Then an attorney friend called and said I was charged in Los Angeles. I said, “Oh, great. What do we have to do? Pay a fine or something?”

  He said, “No, you don’t understand. CNN is calling. CBS is calling. They all want to talk to you.”

  I thought, “Oh my God, this is it. I’m Tipper’s pigeon! We’re going to have to fight this with everything we have.”

  Michael Guarino, the prosecutor assigned to the case, even said before they started looking for me, “We believe that this is a cost-effective way of sending a message.”

  In other words, “We picked a small, independent person to pick on in hopes that this artist will collapse, then we can us
e the guilty plea as a precedent to go after bigger fish.”

  He later admitted to an LA Weekly reporter that he had files on other musicians—they were looking at going after others after they convicted me.

  Trouble is, they wound up not being able to convict me. The thing they used on me was that I was doing something that was harmful to children. The defense we used was “Look, if everything that might harm one child gets banned, all art, all media and literature will be dumbed down to the level of a first-grade reading book.”

  And I think that’s a valid point. But I was shaking in my shoes. We sat for three weeks in Los Angeles as the Frankenchrist album got dragged over the coals. The prosecutor built up the offending H. R. Giger poster as being so shocking, so terrible, that this guy should be put away for it. My attorney opened his defense with handing out a copy of the Giger to the members of the jury, and I thought, “Oh shit, here it goes.”

  But I could see out of the corner of my eye that they were studying it up and down, and if you’ve seen this painting you’ll know how funny that is. Then one or two of them realized they were looking at it upside down.

  In the end, the jury deadlocked seven to five in favor of acquittal, at which point the judge dismissed the case. The prosecutor later admitted that as soon as the lyrics were allowed as evidence, he realized that they were probably going to lose the case. Not only would we be able to prove thematic content and why I wanted that visual art to be part of the album in the first place, but we could also then show that there was real value in the lyrics. They may be offensive, they may be shocking, but they’re making a point.

  Interestingly, the jurors who I thought would want to hang me, the older African-American parents, were the ones who were most hard-line for acquittal. They didn’t like attacks on freedom of speech, because they’d seen those kinds of attacks used on other people they respected.