Henry Rollins on the “purest” album that gave him the courage to fight audiences
Henry Rollins does admittedly have a way with words, from his political intrigue in Black Flag to his solo spoken word records, via regularly taking the piss out of a number of his so-called contemporaries, including a notoriously hilarious diatribe against Morrissey, Rollins is a true enigma in every sense of the word.
Naturally, given the aggressive nature of 1980s hardcore punk, Rollins loves anyone with an output of vitriol and energy, none more so than Iggy Pop and his band, The Stooges. Discussing his introduction to the band and particularly their Fun House record, Rollins made it clear that he is in evident admiration of Pop.
“In the summer of 1981, I leave Washington, D.C. to join Black Flag, and they’re a whole other animal,” Rollins explained. “They’d ask me what bands I liked, and I would list them, and they thought almost everyone sucked. ‘I like the Clash.’ ‘Poseurs.’ ‘I like the Sex Pistols.’ ‘Please.’ ‘The Damned.’ ‘Eh.’ They just thought punk rock was utter crap.”
He continued, “At one point, one of the band members said, ‘Look, if you want to be in this band, you’ve got to be down with Black Sabbath, the Stooges, and the MC5.’ One day, in the van, I put on Fun House. Upon first listening, a few things hit me. OK, this is my favourite record, and it’s the purest record I’ve ever heard, and I’m never going to do anything that good. All of that remains true to this day.”
Fun House is the Stooges’ second studio album and was released in 1970. While the record had been an initial commercial disappointment, it later grew in cult stature, and none more so than in the eyes of Rollins. Through Fun House, the Stooges would continue to lay the groundwork for the future of punk rock.
“Fun House is just feral genius,” Rollins then explicitly admitted. “They were not musicians; they were hyenas on the Serengeti that eat the antelope’s guts after the lions have had their fill. But what repulses you is the Stooges will have dinner and survive and thrive on antelope intestines because they’re that tough.”
Evidently, the raw energy of the record got to Rollins and gave him an excuse to let loose. He concluded, “I was not an Iggy clone on stage; no one can do that. But through the Stooges, I got in my mind that its Black Flag versus the audience. If we played a song that the crowd didn’t like, they always took it out on the singer. And for me, that meant many trips to the hospital to get stitched up.”
