How Henry Rollins helped spread the Ramones and Black Sabbath ‘virus’ in Iran
Although he has retired from recording and performing music, Henry Rollins has settled into his role as a missionary who now travels the world and indoctrinates strangers with the gospel of rock, jazz and everything in between.
It’s tough to pin down exactly who the punk veteran is today; in the broadest terms, he tries his best to experience the world in all its grandeur and then share it with others in the hopes of inspiring them to do the same. In a pointed sense, he insists on visiting places that Westerners are typically advised to stay away from with the bold objective of bridging the cultural gaps aggravated by incompetent politicians.
During a 2016 talk at the Soka University of America, he discussed the alarmist discourse surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis and how it disproportionately affected his outlook growing up, but which was quickly challenged by some of his classmates from Iran and their generosity, with one of them even helping him with math to ensure that he graduated high school. Having developed a ‘soft spot’ for the country and its inhabitants thanks to his first-hand experiences with its people, Rollins ignored former US President George Bush’s appeal to stay away from the troubled location.
“With that president, I started going to every single country he told me not to go to,” he said. “When I was told, ‘Be very afraid’, I would go”.
By that rationale, Rollins ended up in Tehran toward the end of 2007, and though a government-appointed tour guide followed him around for a bulk of his trip, he also managed to sneak away and explore the city by himself. In explaining how warm and polite people were toward him, he recalled one particular conversation that resulted in a quest he takes immense pride in. While talking about access to music in the country, a “student-aged guy” told him, “Our scene is so underground, we need a shovel to get down to it. We got to be really careful”.
Of course, the man took this as a call to action and asked, “Could you make any use of a one-terabyte drive of MP3s, where you would take said hard drive and just give it to households and spread the virus of P-Funk [Parliament-Funkadelic], Black Sabbath, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington?”
As soon as he received the green light, he began compiling audio files of what he considered to be the greatest music ever made and loading them onto a storage device, finally handing it over to a friend, and over the course of an entire year, they filled the drive with about 175,000 songs.
“We got that thing back into Tehran, where to this day, it is still making the rounds, and P-Funk and the Ramones are going from household to household,” he beamed. “And so, when the next president says, ‘We got to go over there and straighten those people out’, you can say, ‘Those are Ramones fans over there, man!'”
Minuscule though it may seem in the grand scheme of things, Rollins’ attempt at bringing people from different corners of the world together is rooted in his enduring passion for music and its power to cross bounds. Notwithstanding the cultural differences that are blown out of proportion by those who benefit from it, he has taken it upon himself to instead focus on the human connections that prevail through all the noise.
