Talk ‘n’ Roll: Rock pioneer Rollins gives spoken-word performance Friday

Spencer Patterson

Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003 | 8:21 a.m.

Henry Rollins has never been one to back away from a challenge.

From the moment he jumped onstage during a Black Flag concert in 1981 earning an invitation to join the seminal punk rock band Rollins has made a career of taking chances and speaking his mind.

So when Rollins saw two HBO documentaries chronicling the plight of three young men jailed for a trio of murders many believe they didn't commit, the 42-year-old musician immediately decided to get involved.

"The first documentary made me curious. The second one made me very angry and reactive," Rollins said in a recent phone interview from his tour bus in Norfolk, Va.

"It's a small town in Arkansas, with an alarming population beneath the poverty line, and they weren't ready for a triple-homicide trial. The crime scene was just trampled on."

Rollins arrives in town for a spoken-word performance Friday at 7 at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay.

Soon after watching the documentaries, Rollins played a series of live shows, with benefits going to aid the legal defense of Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley, also known as the "West Memphis Three."

Those live appearances were merely an appetizer, however. The main course arrived last October in the form of "Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three." The CD features Rollins' band backing a diverse roster of vocalists on such Black Flag hardcore punk classics as "Nervous Breakdown," "Gimme Gimme Gimme" and "TV Party."

"I tried to come up with an idea that would have something out there on the shelves to keep perpetuating interest and awareness," Rollins said. "I thought of everything, but it kept coming back to a benefit record. I did a few benefit shows, but when the show is over, the awareness goes away when people go home. A record has a longer shelf life."

Once he devised his plan, Rollins put together a wish list of singers he wanted to hear cover his former band's material. But getting those musicians to come on board was not easy.

"The only difficult part was getting the singers," Rollins said. "They weren't lacking for desire. The difficulty was getting to them via their managers and agents. That proved to be more of a challenge that it should have.

"They shouldn't be that protective of their artists when we're trying to do a benefit CD. It's a yes or no proposition to sing a song that's 100 seconds long. It's not like we wanted them to write a triple concept album."

Eventually Rollins nailed down an all-star list of contributors including rapper Ice T, Queens of the Stone Age singer Nick Oliveri, former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton and alt-country phenom Ryan Adams. Some came into the studio to record, while others sent in their vocal tracks.

Completing the lineup were two musicians dear to Rollins' own heart: punk icon Iggy Pop and hip-hop legend Chuck D.

"Luckily for me, (Iggy) is a guy I kind of know. I see the man now and again," Rollins said. "So I sent him the music and the documentaries so he could immerse himself in it, and he called back a couple of days later and said, 'Hey, I'm in.'

"Having him and Chuck D on the record was very huge for me. I look up to both guys very much. I've hung out with Chuck before, but this was our first project together. He's an exceptionally cool guy, very intelligent, and he's made a few good records here and there."

Rollins himself sings on six of the tracks, the first time he has attempted some of them since Black Flag's final tour in 1986.

"I haven't sung these things, even in the shower, for many years," he said. "So it was a little trip in the way back machine."

Which leads to the question on the mind of Black Flag fans everywhere: Now that Rollins has revisited his early years, is there any chance Black Flag might be reborn with a reunion tour or album? Quite unlikely, he says.

"I don't think the people who wrote and originally performed the music would necessarily be in the correct shape to go out and render those songs the way we can," Rollins said. "I don't know if they'd be at a physical or mental capacity to go out there and professionally deliver, and there's no way I would want to or need to do something compromised like that."

Instead of looking back, Rollins prefers to concentrate on the present. At the moment, that includes more solo touring, as he approaches the 20th anniversary of his first spoken-word performance later this year.

"My audiences have grown from 12 to 60 people a night to 800 people a night to 3,200 people a night, so that's a difference. But the intent is still the same," Rollins said. "I talk about stuff that happened last week, last month, last year. It's current, and it changes all the time as the story keeps unfolding."

Rollins' plans also includ acting. His movie resume already includes "The Chase," "Heat," "Lost Highway" and "Jackass: The Movie," with his next film, "Bad Boys II," due to hit theaters this year.

"I just showed up for the ("Bad Boys II") audition not really wanting to be there, and I got it anyway," Rollins said. "It's one of them big movies, so you can get caught up with being on the set with a couple hundred people and a couple hundred extras.

"We did scenes in a huge office building, and I thought we were just walking in on the regular staff. And the crew looked at me like, 'You dummy. This place is an abandoned building when we're not here and these people are all hired.' "

While such sojourns "keep things interesting" for Rollins, his prime objective continues to be keeping audiences on their toes. And right now, that means challenging them to learn more about three men he believes should be freed from unjust incarceration.

"I talk about it during the show, but not in a preaching or overreaching way," he said. "I just say, 'Look, here's a thing that happened and here's the place you can go to find out more and there are handouts on the way out you can grab.'

"If it becomes the whole evening, you can wear an audience out. It becomes oppressive to where no one will want to check it out because it stood on their neck for an hour and now they're just (ticked) off that you did that to them. So you have to use the sugar lump to bring people to things."