And Rock Biography
The rage of Henry Rollinza is the biography of the legend of the Hardcore-Panku and the alternative at first she destroyed him, then he learned to defeat her as his worst enemy, and then she became his best friend and source of incredible energy. Henry Rollins, most known as one of the Fathers of Hardcore and the soloist of the Black Flag group, is a nuclear reactor working on tamed anger.
He is already 60, and he is sharper, more cheerful and stronger than twenty years old, because he was lucky to find his real power in his youth. I know why. I'm trying to push out all my rage. Do you know where this rage comes from? From education. Fury lives in me, drilling bone marrow, it penetrates so deeply. ” The brightest day in the life of December 19, just a few days before Christmas.
The suburb of Los Angeles with the excellent name and the lousy population-Venice. A couple of tens of meters from the Rollinza house, two black guys are approaching them and, threatening with pistols, make their pockets shake. Only $ 50 turns out to be money for two, then the robbers under the sight lead both to the house to bring all their “shitty millions” of which, of course, were not there.
Henry Rollins and Joe Cole Cole and one of the robbers remain outside, Rollins and the other go into the living room, and at the same moment they hear two shots behind their backs - they shot Joe twice in the face. Henry jumps out of the house and runs to call the police, although it is clear that his friend can no longer be saved - his brains are scattered across the lawn.
The murder will not be disclosed, and Rollinza himself will almost be imprisoned on suspicion of it. Henry, crushed by this death, gathered the soil, which was saturated with Joe's knocked out brains, and still keeps it at home. Every morning he starts by approaching the bank and spreading with an old friend of phrases. The result of this murder was a powerful explosion of activity in the life of Rollins - he began to swing with real frenzy and work at the limit.
Anger once again saved Henry from self -destruction. The reason for the murder is not more stupid. A couple of days before the robbery, the Rollinz house was visited by producer Rick Rubin, who arrived in the vile quarter on Rolls-Royce and waving a fabulously expensive mobile phone. He was not even going to offer a contract, knowing that Henry in this case simply would throw him out of the house.
Rick was just a fan of Black Flag and took advantage of his position to listen to their new album one of the first. The neighbors identified Rubin, and a rumor went through the district that Rollins - only a rich white star, who had arrived in the wrong area. Henry Rollins: The origins of rage “when I was small, I did not have a feeling of myself. All that I was is the product of all those fears and humiliation that I survived.
Fear of parents. Humiliation from teachers who called me a “garbage basket” and saying that I will cut the lawns until the end of my life. And real horror because of my "wonderful" classmates. I was threatened and beat for skin color and size. I was skinny and awkwardly, but when others teased me, I did not go home to cry, ” - Henry Rollins. Interview for Details Magazine.
Henry Rollins was born in the city of Washington and, in his own words, became "a non -viable child of a non -viable, shitty marriage." His mother was an Irish from the middle class, she worked for the government; Father is an economist in Jewish origin. When Henry was three years old, his parents divorced, and he saw his father so rarely that when he died, he did not even go to his funeral.
In principle, he had every right to do so: his father was so poorly that he was under the absolute power of his new wife, who bared himself all the property of Rollinz Sr. and forbidden him to see his son. Henry and his mother lived in the prosperous area of Washington, but the school in which Rollins found himself was one of those where children from dysfunctional families study.
His character from early childhood was simply terrible, and in the fourth grade he was diagnosed with “attention deficit syndrome”. So, until the age of 18, Henry sat on Ritalin with its side effects in the form of anxiety, headache and depression. And this guy, whose consciousness is already under daily shock doses of the psychostimulator, is faced with a real and disgusting adult world.
At the age of seven, he is beaten and harassed by the drunken hahal of his mother, and somewhere in ten years he is kidnapped and corrupted in the van some kind of psychopath. Soon after, barely starting to get used to Ritalin, Rollins falls into a paramilitary school, whose name in evil irony is extremely precisely described by its contingent. Now Rollins are even grateful to them in their own way, because they have brought up in him the ability to stand up for themselves and a craving for labor discipline, but then it was hell on earth.
According to the memoirs of Henry himself, at school he was beaten and mocked, because he "was white in the year." There were not so many white in the class, so Henry was accused of the death of Martin Luther King and supposedly blushed for this almost every day.Rollinz's life began exactly as it was supposed to begin at one of the pillars of hardcore. Henry Rollins repairs himself “Iron is the best antidepressant that I came across.
There is no better means against weakness than to do something with force. When the mind and body awakened, finding their real potential, it is impossible to turn back. " The more or less lousy life of Henry Rollinz in school continued until high school. Once he was just tired of being a bony mannequin for whipping, and he signed up on a box, which, however, was not particularly completed.
It turned out badly to boxing at the frail and rapidly exhausted Henry, but his rage and almost hysterical desperate were laid the first seeds of respect among classmates. Soon in the life of Rollinza, Mr. Pepperman appeared, who made much more for Henry than his father. Pepperman, a hefty and tough veteran of the Vietnamese War, was a new class teacher Rollins and, for some reason, stopped his eyes on him.
Seeing that the guy was not quite missing, the teacher suggested Henry to do the bar, and generally made his favorite. The latter was manifested in the fact that he in every possible way threw a dead student: he beat him into a pile, knocked out textbooks from hands in the eyes of other schoolchildren and so on. Behind this external aggressiveness was a rather cunning army trick: classmates for the first time in their life began to empathize with Henry and respect him for not grazing before the evil army Verzila.
And Rollinz secretly was grateful to Mr. Pepperman, so he began to engage in a barbell. He showed ten basic exercises, and then his student was already engaged in his own. Once, Pepperman once again suddenly drove Rollinza into his chest, but he only burst out laughing and went on - by this moment he himself became a strong and tough guy - the teacher realized that his work was done, and later both treated each other with respect.
Iron is a beautiful reference point, an all -knowing donor prospect, like a lighthouse in pitch darkness. I realized that iron is my best friend. It will never betray, never run away. Friends come and go, but two hundred pounds of weight is always two hundred pounds of weight. ” Hardcore leaving school with a pumped -up and embittered guy, who for the first time from early childhood tears from Ritalin and now climbs on the wall, Henry Rollins entered the University of Washington, but left, without studying even a year.
Instead of sitting up in the classroom, he begins to wander at the lowest paid work: he transports donor buds, works in the laboratory, collecting corpses and excrement of thousands of killed rodents, sells ice cream and all like that. Along the way, Rollins is fond of Punk: he listens to Ramones and just goes crazy when he manages to get to Bad Brains concerts or hear Black Flag.
These groups played something completely wild and crazy even by the standards of punk rock, but did not even suspect that they would become the founders of the new genre and one of the most striking cultural phenomena x. I just like this idea. Sometimes I fly off the coils and I want to kill everyone in a row, but this is just an outlet for frustration that you feel. I don’t have a pistol, but there is a microphone and a printing machine - a big difference.
” Interview for Rolling Stone. On the western and eastern coasts of the United States, the beginning of the X finally ripens the hardcore as a musical genre with a concomitant subculture. The groups and their fans still considered themselves pancakes, but in local isolated waters the movement mutated almost beyond recognition. Instead of a shocking look, ironic and leather jackets characteristic of British panka from x, representatives of the new wave tried to look more modest, more often shaved to zero and dressed more utilitarian and discreet.
But the music became more radical: both in terms of texts and in terms of rhythm. The compositions were shorter, but much anger - and with a colossal emission of energy. Each song was like an explosion of hatred, and the texts were much “more psychopathic” and angrier. Fights and MOSCs became a distinctive feature of hardcore concerts, so that some of the special fans of the underground began to go to them solely in order to break the muzzle.
In the end, Henry tries to break into this world, accompanying different rock bands in tour and helping with the organization of performances. So he is noticed in the Teen Idles group and even allowed to take the place of the vocalist, who then too often forgot about his duties. In M Rollins becomes the frontman of the State of Alert, created on the fragments of the collapsed Extorts.
Thus begins his career in show business, which still lasts. Only a year later, the State of Alert, who gave a dozen concerts with a dozen and recorded a mini-album, fell apart. But almost immediately, Rollinza was invited to Black Flag, where a new vocalist in return for the departed was also sharply needed. Henry hesitated: firstly, I would have to quit everything and move from the west coast to the eastern, and secondly, he did not believe in his strength until the last.
Fortunately, a friend - Ian McCay, who later became the legend of Hardcore and the father of Straight Edge, was able to convince him. Black Flag Black Flag and Rollinz was known in the Andigund X. But with the advent of a new exalted and furious vocalist with all his internal demons and outbreaks of hatred, the group began a new life. Henry becomes a detonator for the whole movement: on the stage he was whispering or loudly screaming, moving, as if distraught and ready to attack the crowd of spectators.
Due to the intense of the situation, I often had to deal with conflicts, and Rollins quickly learned to deftly and evil from scolding those who tried to start a fight or mocking the group. Refusing to cooperate with producers, managers and large labels, the group, in accordance with its philosophy, took all the concerns to organize for itself. The musicians themselves found funds for promotion, they themselves lay out ads about concerts, transported their equipment themselves and arranged concerts, relying only on themselves and the help of fans.
The principle of DIY, with all its simplicity, had a revolutionary effect on the underground x. In his book “Iron”, Henry Rollins wrote about this: “The group experienced financial stress twenty -four hours a day. We fought him all the time while we were a group. No “corruption”, no “rock stars” and other garbage. People sometimes carried some garbage about this, and it always became funny for us.