“Re-invented the wheel”: the 1979 concert that changed Henry Rollins forever
For many music obsessives, the question ‘what’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?’ spurs on a spontaneous and all-encompassing bout of amnesia, during which you tend to forget every live performance you have ever witnessed. The same cannot be said, however, for punk hero Henry Rollins, whose live music experiences are pretty hard to beat.
Even outside the realm of Black Flag, who put on some truly incredible live performances during the 1980s, with Rollins as their rather intimidating and yet utterly captivating frontman, the performer has witnessed the kind of shows that even the most seasoned of punk historians would fawn over. After all, Rollins was in the right place at the right time when it came to punk rock, and his roots in Washington DC allowed him to witness the emergence of hardcore’s golden age.
At that time, Rollins’ day job, working in an ice cream parlour in DC, gave him enough pocket change to attend as many live shows and consume as much of that new era of rock and roll rebellion as his heart desired.
Pretty quickly, those local shows sparked a lasting friendship between Rollins and future Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, as well as exposing him to the punk mastery of Black Flag. Before too long, the ice cream apron was thrown down, and the microphone picked up with a fury.
Not every single one of those shows was revolutionary, of course, but Rollins managed to bear witness to some indisputable watershed moments when it came to punk rock. Earlier this year, during an interview with Far Out, he reflected on some of those shows, musing, “For me, perhaps the most mind-blowing shows I saw were in 1979, 1980. As far as one show, that might be difficult to choose.”
Difficulties aside, it didn’t take much to send Rollins delving into his internal archive and plucking out some particular highlights: “April 20th, 1979,” he started, “I saw The Cramps at a small club called LBJ. The stage was about one foot high, and I stood right in front of the band, and it was overwhelming.” As if standing that close to the otherworldly energy of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy wasn’t enough, that same year brought further revelations to the blossoming punk frontman.
“June of that year, The Damned came to DC,” Rollins continued, but it wasn’t just the vampiric English punks that made that show so memorable. “Bad Brains opened for them,” he explained. “We had never seen them before. They were the opening band, so the place wasn’t nearly full”.
Adding, “They walked out on stage, and a lot of the audience shrank back. Myself, Ian MacKaye and some others went right to the front.”
Fans of that pioneering hardcore outfit can probably guess what happened next, but both Rollins and MacKaye had their young minds absolutely blown. “The set was probably half an hour,” he said. “In that time, at least for me, they re-invented the wheel. I had never seen that much energy come off a band.”
He concluded, “It was truly amazing. After that, the Damned went on, and they were fantastic, but it was the Bad Brains that we were talking about walking back to the car. We went to go see them every chance we could.”
Rollins also highlighted the very first Minor Threat show, in December of 1980, as a “really great” gig, but as far as mind-blowing live music experiences went, it seems as though Bad Brains were tough to beat during the early days of DC’s hardcore boom.
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