The Show: An Evening With Henry Rollins
The Performer: Henry Rollins (funny that)
The Venue: Arts Centre, Melbourne
Date: September 19, 2016
Last week I once again had the privilege of watching the aging alternative icon live. This is the third time in the last 10 years I have been able to see Henry Rollins do his spoken word show in person. In fact if you ever get the chance to watch the ‘Henry Rollins Provoked: Live from Melbourne’ DVD you can listen to me during the credits raving about how the show was 3 ½ hours long and I wish it had been even longer! Or else that snippet of my fanboy gushing is on youtube at the 4.45 mark HERE.
The performance this year was at the State Theater in Melbourne, a huge room that fits just over 2000 and indeed it was completely packed out. It was interesting to see the rest of the crowd, I think the majority were in their thirties and forties with a smattering of fans in their twenties and a healthy dose of the 50+ range.
Rollins was his usual self. For an 8pm start he hit the stage at 8.05 (and I think the only reason he waited 5 minutes was for the latecomers to be seated) and as soon as he picked up the mike the mouth started going and didn’t stop for 2 ½ hours (good value for a 2 hour show eh!) with big dollops of sweat dropping from his left elbow illuminated in the spotlights. As usual he started off talking about some of the local issues, in particular how despite his extensive vocabulary he had to look up the word ‘plebiscite’ and then proceeded give voice to what many Aussies at this time are thinking “Really? Spending 160 MILLION DOLLARS on a question that in this century should be a complete no-brainer?”
I’ve noticed over the years that Rollins talks less and less about his showbiz days and more and more about his travels to different countries and this show was no different. In fact the two showbiz stories he did tell I had heard before (about being on a plane with Motorhead and when he had lunch with David Bowie) but it was nice to hear them again and let’s face it, it’s hard to do new material for fans that obsessively watch every second of stage time you perform whenever another fans loads it on youtube.
I was a bit afraid that this show may go the way of the second live show I had seen him perform, which had been great as always but had almost verged on being a bit too preachy in telling people how they should travel more (I’d love to Mr. Rollins, truly I would. However I have a wife, kids and a mortgage that sadly I have to support with a day job which precludes me from taking off to Nepal on a whim). But no, while there were lots of travel stories they were funny, entertaining and I can’t get the image out of my head of Rollins listening to Iggy Pop while half buried in snow at the South Pole, fecal-covered penguins rutting like mad not 5 feet away.
The rest of the show was talking about how various old ideas society holds need to either reworked or thrown out which lead into discussions about his family (I had heard a lot about his family on different spoken word CD’s but even I learned some things about the man’s life I didn’t know before) and various other topics. He often talked about the hate emails he gets for not hating particular groups like LGBIT’s and various ethnic groups and being told to get out of the county, sadly a trend that seems to be cropping up on our once ‘most friendly nation on earth’ continent as well. One thing both I and my mate Matt who came with me noted was that Rollins did not swear once. I mean – not one time! Now he has never been particularly prolific with his penchant for profanity but neither have I heard him shy away from using f*ck, sh*t, a**hole and the like when emphasizing a point or when a sentence could benefit from it. But not one swear here, in fact when giving examples of what people say about his President he would utter sentences like “Oh the President is a BEEP BEEP BEEP”. Yes, he actually said BEEP. I don’t know whether the lack of his usual mild obscenities was due to being in such a classy place like the State Theatre or whether this is par for the course for him now that he has reached the respectable age of 55. Could it perhaps be a result of his vegetarianism? His first spoken word CD I ever listened to a looong time ago to had plenty of curse words whilst talking about eating in Russia and mocking the vegetarians for the crappy food they were about to receive (“C’mon Veggie boy – eat your shit, you non-warrior pussy!”) and how he was looking forward to his big hunk of meat. Now he eats no meat at all and uses BEEP in a sentence. There may be no correlation there but I do wonder. Meat and swearing and now neither swearing nor meat…. hmmm… this requires study. I best start rounding up a large enough pool of test subjects to examine this hypothesis.
Anyway, once again Henry Rollins provided a great show. As said, he went a good half hour over time which means you were getting even better value for money. He was intelligent, insightful, witty, funny and was able to entertain the crowd discussing a diverse range of subject matter. So if An Evening with Henry Rollins sounds good to you (and I know a few female friends who certainly wouldn’t mind) try to catch a show before he heads back overseas – if you miss him this time then I encourage you to catch him on his next Aussie tour.
