In 1995 Rollins was nominated for not one but two Grammy’s: one for best spoken word album and another for best metal single. Get in a Van, both the book and the audio book, which Rollins recorded himself, were instant successes. The Rollins Band’s 1994 album Weight produced two of the band’s biggest singles: “Disconnect” and “Liar,” which was in heavy rotation on MTV. Rollins documented the entirety of his experience with Black Flag with a plethora of photos and flyers in his own inimitable style.ĭue to the growing success of Rollins’s other project, the Rollins Band, which had toured Lollapalooza in 1991, and was riding the wave of post-Nirvana guitar rock, Rollins was becoming impossible to ignore. In 1994 he produced his most ambitious and most successful project to date: Get in the Van. Rollins experimented with style and form and though his voice is remarkably consistent he went from someone who jotted down his thoughts and feelings in a journal to becoming a bona fide writer. (A clue that Rollins regarded these compilations as books came in 1992 when he collected the first five of these compilations under the title: The First Five. He had trouble keeping them in print and eventually opted to combine these zines into longer, perfect-bound books under his own imprint 2.13.61. Rollins produced these zines in small batches that he sold at his performances. In fact, the first one he published in 1984, 20, included art from Pettibon. Rollins published short booklets of prose that mined his journals and spoken work performances and were modeled after the zines that Pettibon produced with SST. When Ginn broke up Black Flag, Rollins focused his energy on two fronts: his writing and his new band. I would argue that Rollins did more for Black Flag after he left the band, and he did it not with his voice but his pen. Black Flag blazed the trail for other bands to follow and the hardship it endured along the way is the stuff of legend.īut let’s look at how that legend got made because it happened long after Black Flag came to an end in 1986. His stamina and endurance allowed Black Flag to go farther than any other American hardcore band before it.
I could fill this edition of Message from the Underworld with Rollins’s accolades and he deserves every one of them. That’s not a knock on Rollins’s abilities as a performer. Henry Rollins is overrated as a vocalist and underrated as a writer. Are you ready? Because this might be somewhat controversial.
There’s something about the former Black Flag vocalist’s writing that really speaks to me, and it got me thinking about his reputation as a writer. When I was in Vancouver earlier this month, I picked up a couple of books by Henry Rollins- Bang! and One from None -and tore through them.
Black Flag at the Olympic by Wild Don Lewis
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