Henry Rollins Adds 23 Dates to Current Frequent Flyer Tour
Henry Rollins has just added a second leg to his popular Frequent Flyer tour. Preferring the term talking show over spoken word, Rollins is a story teller with a journalistic sense of accuracy and a comedic sense of timing.
Born Henry Garfield February 13, 1961 in Washington, D.C. and changing his last name professionally to Rollins, Henry first came to fame in the highly acclaimed punk band, Black Flag. With its demise in 1986, the following year witnessed Rollins emerge as a solo artist. He unleashed several recordings including Hot Animal Machine, the EP Drive by Shooting (as Henrietta Collins & the Wifebeating Childhaters), live recordings from Holland with the Rollins Band, and the spoken word album, Big Ugly Mouth, that included his debut effort Short Walk on a Long Pier, which until that point had been a limited cassette release.
Since then his restless curiosity and multifaceted interests have taken him in exciting new directions. His art house cult film days with Lydia Lunch behind him, Henry can now be found on both large and small screens. Most recent acting stints include white supremacist A.J. Weston on the hit FX series Sons of Anarchy and survivalist Dale Murphy in the horror flick Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. In 2009 Rollins helped co-finance the documentary H for Hunger, a 90 minute humanitarian project hoping to create awareness surrounding the global epidemic.
For two seasons Henry hosted his own talk show for the Independent Film Channel and filmed the highly acclaimed Henry Rollins Uncut documentary series for IFC visiting Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel. He blogs regularly for Vanity Fair and expounds on current social and political issues.
Eight weeks of travel to the Middle East, India, Nepal, China, Sri Lanka, South and Western Africa add fuel to Henry’s performances but are not limited to globetrotting. His ability to captivate, entertain and educate audiences is a tall order for shows that average three hours for a man armed simply with a microphone.
As Henry told The Times Online, “I read as voraciously as possible but you don’t know about a place until you go. Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit. I am looking not only for the facts,” he says, “I am looking for storytelling gold. People don’t like being humiliated. The idea of respect and honor is so deep in the Middle Eastern world, and when you kick a guy’s door down in front of his wife, he never gets his balls back from that. The only way he gets them back is to kill you. It’s like when you talk shit to a 19-year-old, he’s got to get back at you. And I think American foreign policy has walked up and said ‘What’s up, faggot?’ to a lot of cultures.”
Thirty years on the world stage does not provide one with the kind of workhorse precision Rollins delivers. He moves audiences with his ability to communicate the emotional and intellectual depths of the evening’s maze of topics whether its file sharing music with a boy in Kandy, Sri Lanka, critical views of Sharia Law while visiting Riyahd, Saudi Arabia, the 25th anniversary of the leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) in Bhopal, India, or evening highlights culled from C-SPAN.
Although self imposed retirement from the concert stages keep Henry from personally retracing musical history, he never strays far and can be heard John Peel-style Saturday nights on the NPR affiliate KCRW waxing a seemingly infinite knowledge on every musical genre.
Being the world’s most recognized self-described fanatic, Henry contributed on several projects including The Flaming Lips interpretation of the Pink Floyd classic Dark Side of the Moon and added liner notes to the upcoming remastered deluxe edition of The Stooges Raw Power box set. Two separate documentaries currently in the making, one focusing on the legendary Black Sabbath and the other on the ground-breaking Bad Brains, both feature interviews with Rollins.
“I have to keep it real for myself. These kids write me, saying “hey man, when’s the band coming back?” And I’m like, "well I don’t have any band plans" and these kids write back and they’re sincerely bummed, and I’m like, 'Really? Come on man!' And I explain it to them; I don’t want to be up there dialing it in. I don’t want to take a song off the rack like it’s an old suit to see if it still fits. Life’s too short and you don’t want me on stage, lying. If I don’t want be there, believe me, you’ll know. I’m not good at faking it, and I wouldn’t want to betray the music,” Rollins told The Skinny.
New product is available exclusively on his 2.13.61 imprint. Spoken Word Guy is the newly released live performance album recorded at The Birchmere Theater in Alexandria, Virginia in 2008 just before the last presidential election. The two disc CD set will be available for digital download in April. According to Henry’s dispatch the title is derived from the cover photo.
“We were in Spain for a talking show in 2008 and the man waiting to pick us up had a sign that said “spoken word” and I thought that would make a good photo, so I shot it before he saw me.”
Current North American dates for the Frequent Flyer Tour are as follows:
Mar. 9 Alexandria, VA Birchmere
Mar. 10 Alexandria, VA Birchmere
Mar. 11 Philadelphia, PA First Unitarian Church
Mar. 12 New York, NY Irving Plaza
Mar. 13 New York, NY Irving Plaza
Mar. 14 Tarrytown, NY Tarrytown Music Hall
Mar. 16 Bayshore, NY Boulton Center
Mar. 17 Somerville, MA Somerville Theater
Mar. 18 Portland, ME Space 538
Mar. 19 Halifax, NS Rebecca Cohn Auditorium
Mar. 20 Moncton, NB Capitol Theatre
Mar. 22 Montreal, QC Le National
Mar. 23 Ottawa, ON Bronson Centre
Mar. 24 Kingston, ON Sydenham St. United Church
Mar. 25 Kitchener, ON Conrad Centre
Mar. 26 Toronto, ON Queen Elizabeth
Mar. 27 Syracuse, NY Westcott Theater
Mar. 28 Ithaca, NY Castaways
Mar. 30 State College, PA State Theater
Mar. 31 Pittsburgh, PA Hazlett Theater
Apr. 1 Kent, OH Kent Stage
Apr. 2 Columbus, OH LC Pavilion
Apr. 3 Newport, KY Historic Southgate House
Apr. 4 Lexington, KY Buster’s
Apr. 5 Bloomington, IN Buskirk-Chumley Theater
Apr. 7 Chicago, IL Vic Theater
Apr. 8 Milwaukee, WI Turner Hall Ballroom
Apr. 9 Madison, WI Barrymore Theater
May 14 Minneapolis, MN Pantages Theatre
May 15 Davenport, IA Capitol Theater
May 16 Brandon, SD Brandon Performing Arts Center
May 18 Boulder, CO Boulder Theater
May 19 Billings, MT Babcock Theatre
May 21 Edmonton, AB Winspear Centre
May 22 Calgary, AB Jack Singer Concert Hall
May 23 Kelowna, BC Community Theatre
May 24 Victoria, BC McPherson Playhouse
May 25 Vancouver, BC The Centre For Performing Arts
May 27 Seattle, WA Moore Theatre
May 28 Bellingham, WA The Nightlight
May 29 Las Vegas, NV Aladdin Theater
May 30 Eugene, OR McDonald Theatre
June 1 Great Pass, OR Rogue Theatre
June 2 Reno, NV Grand Sierra Resort Theatre
June 3 Sacramento, CA Crest Theatre
June 4 Fresno, CA Tower Theater
June 5 Santa Cruz, CA Rio Theatre
June 6 San Luis Obispo, CA Downtown Brew
June 8 San Francisco, CA Herbst Theater
June 11 Los Angeles, CA Largo
June 12 Los Angeles, CA Largo