Peeling The Onion
Peeling The Onion
Henry Rollins (Black Flag / Rollins Band) | Peeling The Onion Ep. 17 (January 25th 2026)
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Alright, man.
SPEAKER_00Good to see you.
SPEAKER_02Hey. Thanks for coming back. I appreciate it. No problem. Can you see and hear me okay? Yes, sir. Perfectly, perfectly. Uh I just want to dive into uh just a little bit of stuff I didn't get into yesterday because we went all over the place. Don't get me wrong, it was a really good interview, you know what I mean. Okay. Uh uh mostly the Rollins band. I I guess I just want to ask you a little bit about because you you've never been into doing drugs, but you did do some LSD back in the 80s, right? Isn't that true? Yeah. Or how is that? And what does that have to do with the Rollins band? No, I was just wondering, there's just like a band that uh this is just like a question I never got through, you know. I tried LSD a few times, it was worth it, but nothing to make a habit out of. You used to watch Apocalypse Now like a lot, what uh on LSD. Is that like a misquote? Yes. It's a misquote. Okay. Let's cut that shit out of the interview, then definitely just all out. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, I read this- I don't remember which one.
SPEAKER_02I read this awesome. I read this whole book about you, and it said that you guys were like uh like just like uh hung up on watching Apocalypse Now on Acid. So that's like a whole misquote for from some Henry Rollins book that I read.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that that never ever ever happened.
SPEAKER_02Okay, fuck it then. So I was wondering when when Grand Geek, when he broke up uh Black Flag, let me see if I'm recording this. Yes, I am. Uh you immediately record your first solo album, Hot Animal Machine, and to me it kind of feels like a breath of fresh air, like there's much more power on that one uh compared to those two black flag records that preceded it, and like the production pops much more. I was wondering why did you end up recording that one in in England?
SPEAKER_00Um a guy I grew up with, the punk rock scene in Washington, D.C., Chris Haskett. He was in a great DC band called The Enzymes. Really, really cool band.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And he was living in England. He's a like scholar, so he was going to school in England, and it was summer 1984. I had a day off. I was on tour with Black Flag. He came down from Leeds, England, down to London to hang out with me. And we're walking around on the streets, and he said, You know, if Black Flag ever breaks up, you and I should make a record. Like, ha ha, like Black Flag will ever break up. I'm like, well, that'll never happen, but sure, man, we should do that. And so two years later, like to the month, Black Flag broke up. And I was in Washington, DC, and he was back visiting DC from England, and I called him, I think he was at his parents' house. I said, The Eagle has landed, I got no band. He goes, Well, I've got a band in England, like my my my band, let's do it. So I said, Okay. So I that was late summer 1986. By October 1986, I was in Leeds, England with Chris and his two bandmates, and with about$1,500, a lot of tea and coffee, and uh kind of the energy and vigor one has. Like when you get a new person in your band, all of a sudden you're writing songs because everything's new, or you join a band, everything's exciting. It was me and these three people, two of which I'd never met before, one of which I kind of knew, Chris, but I was going to be get to know him a lot better over the decades we played together.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Because that was the beginning of the Rollins band. Right. And we uh had this really freezing practice place, and we just wrote all these songs. And we weren't when we weren't there, Chris and I would sit in his freezing room drinking tea. Uh we had a cassette of a rainstorm that he recorded in DC, and we would play the cassette, and it would somehow make the room warmer. And we the two of us just wrote all these songs. Nice. And we taught them to the the rhythm section. And you know, it's not that there's nothing on that record that's all that musically intense. And we went in and recorded them with an engineer named Jeff Clout, G-E-O-F-F-C-L-O-U-T. And he wrote me like a week ago. We still keep in touch.
SPEAKER_02Uh uh.
SPEAKER_00And we banged out a whole bunch of songs. I didn't have the money to keep the two-inch tape. So we mixed it onto two quarter-inch reels, and the tape got recorded over by a reggae band the next day.
SPEAKER_02Oh, right.
SPEAKER_00So the multi-tracks are gone just because I I just didn't have the money. Right. And so there's no way to remix the record. I don't think it needs it. Right. And I put the two quarter inches under my arm and flew back to Los Angeles, and I found a record label, and the record came out. And so um, it was a record made with a lot of enthusiasm and low impact relationships. We hadn't been with each other long enough for the contempt to grow in, like with every other band.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And it was a it was like probably the only fun time I've ever had making a record that was like kind of stress-free. There was stress because it was all my money, it was like all the money I had. But it was just everyone was so excited about it, like me and the other three. And the music was good. Like it, it it's not like I'm trying to inflate my ego, but it it didn't suck. Like we would we'd listen back and go, Wow, this is okay. And the record came out, and that that's that's how that happened. It was it just happened with like a few phone calls and a plane ticket. Okay, you know, you could get plane tickets really cheap in those days, right? Pan Am, that was the that was the the airlines you could fly to England really cheap.
SPEAKER_02Ah, okay. I mean, I don't know if you care about that, but I know it was chosen as one of Spax magazine's albums of the year in 1987, the German magazine. Did you know that?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_02It was so uh was drive-by shooting recorded at the same time as as Hot Animal Machine?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the EP and the LP, it was all one big session. And I used to hear drive-by shootings in my neighborhood. That's why I wrote this song and trying to make it funny, because it was just in your neighborhood, people would get shot. Right.
SPEAKER_02I mean, that album to me is like funny as fuck. Like it's so over the top. I can imagine people getting and raped at that release at the time. Was that the case, or did people just genuinely take it? What do you remember?
SPEAKER_00Uh no. Um I've never heard a complaint about that record. Like, oh, that song offends me, or that's mean. You know, if you write a song about shooting in America, someone will buy you a drink.
SPEAKER_02So okay. And there's an awesome wire colour on there, man. X Lion Tamer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's it's one of my favorite records, Pink Flag by Wire.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's one of my favorite songs on it. In my opinion, not that it matters, is it's a perfect record. And the first three wire records, they're all different, all produced by the same guy, Mike Thorne, an EMI in-house product producer, I think. He saw them at The Roxy when punk rock broke out, and he went, I'll I want to work with that band. And he brought them to EMI and said, sign them. And I think he got them the deal. And those three albums, uh Pink Flag, uh Chairs Missing and 154, they're they're just fantastic in their own way. They're all different and they're all brilliant. Definitely. And so I was listening to that wire album a lot, and I just kind of brought a tape with me. I go, I like this song, and they said, Well, let's let's let's do it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And there's a few covers in those sessions just because enthusiasm.
SPEAKER_02Right. To get something new in. But but then it did the live time record that was much heavier in production than the previous solo material. Was that something that Ian brought in? Or yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh the the uh record, the the Hot Animal Machine record, let's see, that it came out in I guess early 1987.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so it occurred to me, well, I need to make a band and keep going. Because I was 25 when I made Hot Animal Machine, and it I was in my mind, I had a lot more to do musically, and so I knew that Black Flag's opening band on the last tour, Gone, had broken up, and they had this amazing rhythm section of Andrew and Sim, Andrew Weiss and Sim Kane. Yeah, and so I was in Trenton, New Jersey, where they live for a show. Or I was in New York City for a show, a talking show. So I took the train out to Trenton and I I met up with them. I guess I took a taxi to one of their apartments, and the three of us met. I go, look, two questions. Are you guys done with gone? And they said, Yeah, like it and didn't end well. I'm like, okay. So you're you're done with Greg. And he went, they said yes. I said, Would you like to be, are you interested in doing something with me? They said, yeah, sure. And so I gave them cassettes of the record, and they go, Okay. And so in April of that year, like two months later, yeah, I brought Chris from up from DC. I came in from Los Angeles, and I said, uh, this is a guy you've never met before named Chris, and we're gonna be a band. And everyone kind of went, okay. And we loaded the gear into Sim's mother's garage and started playing. And in an hour, Andrew and Sim are incredible musicians. In an hour, they'd learned everything on the hot animal machine record. Okay, and it's one of the best rhythm sections you're ever gonna find. So the song sounded like rip roaring, right? And within three days, that was ready to go, and then new songs started happening. And I'm forgetting exactly what got written first, but Lifetime started getting written in that garage in a week of seeing the whites of each other's eyes.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And it just came we just Chris and I just basically moved to Trenton you know, sleeping on people's floors and couch surfing, and and then by May, a tour had been booked. The band had a set, and our first show was at the Trenton City Gardens. Uh I think it's gone now. Great venue, opening for the Circle Jerks. Nice. And we left like two days later on tour, May, June, and then in July, I think, we went to Europe, met uh a band that would be our opening band, we do the tour with called Gore, uh uh Dutch band, and we met their sound man, a guy named Theo. Right, and we liked Teo, and Teo liked us. He's just one of these amazing, cool guys. Right. And so the European tour, you know, it neither band had much traction in Europe. So some nights there's like 50 people, other nights, oh, it's the black flag guy. You know, it the black flag was the only real reputation between the two bands why you'd even know. In Germany, we we did very well, and that might be because of Specs magazine, but we were doing like six, seven hundred people with a band with like no record out, really. Okay, and it was all on the reputation of all the black flag guy, which is really you know, you don't don't take that on the road and think you're gonna eat every night. Anyway, we wrote the lifetime album in its entirety, almost in its entirety, on the road. Like one or two songs were written in that garage, the rest were written at soundcheck. Okay, which just becomes for a lot of bands, soundcheck is like band practice, songwriting. Like that was the Rollins band all the time. We we would just go to Soundcheck and just work all the way until quitting time, take a break, and then go do the show. That happened for years and years and years, and so we finished the European tour in England and in London, drove up to Leeds, where where we had done the Hot Animal Machine Record, same same engineer. Right. I I'm not remembering if it was the same studio. I'd have to look at the back of the room.
SPEAKER_02It was recording in the same studio as hot animal machines, it was that I've long forgotten.
SPEAKER_00But it was with Jeff, and you know, we called ahead, like, hey Jeff, can we, you know, can we you want to do another record? And he's like, Oh, you guys. But it was me and Chris in a different rhythm section, right? And all my bandmates, you know, they all can produce. So like, I'll produce, no, I'll produce, no, we'll produce. I'm like, oh, this is a nightmare. So I called Ian Mackay from a payphone. Okay, and coins, shoving pound coins into the payphone.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00I said, I I'm gonna have a war on my hands if if I let these guys try and produce more bass. No, it needs more drums. You know, it'll be like that. And he goes, I'll fly out and produce it. Because Ian's like, you know, OG. No one's gonna it, no one's gonna argue with Ian, and he's a really good producer. He's produced more records than anyone I've ever met. Okay. And I said, I can't afford to fly you out. He goes, I got it. And you know, he was he was broke too. He just did it because we're friends, and he flew out there, took a bus up from London to Leeds, and said, Okay, met Jeff. He had already met um Sim and Andrew from the Black Flag Tour. He knew Chris because we all grew up together, and we went in and did lifetime in like four days on what was left of what money the tour made.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Like 3,500 bucks. And Andrew and Sim flew home. Chris went back down the road to his flat in Leeds. I left the next day back down to London to the venue I'd just done a show at with the band to do a talking show with Lydia Lunch and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.
SPEAKER_02Nice.
SPEAKER_00And I left for like another six or seven weeks of talking shows that got me all the way to December in Switzerland.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00So I was in Europe like June, like June, July, August, September, October, November, December, or August. Okay. September, October, November, December. I was there like four or five months, and I came back with the lifetime tape under my arm, and that came out as Lifetime and the Do-It EP.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00All that was done kind of at the same time in the same session.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, with with uh Pink Fairies cover and the Valley of the Underground cover and next time, those that's those covers. You're talking about those ones.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. All of that was done with the the lifetime sessions. We were playing all of those covers at night for encores.
SPEAKER_02Okay, okay. I mean, uh did was everyone involved in the songwriting by then by that time, all four of you.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. Yeah. Um every once in a while I would write, I wrote all the lyrics, but every once in a while I would also write the tune. Okay. You know, I would hum it to the guys, and I ended up doing that quite a bit uh in later lineups. But we had this ethos where if we're all in the room writing together, then no one it's not gonna be the singer and the guitar player like the Rolling Stones. Okay. Uh I started doing that a little later on when I would just kind of write a lot of the stuff myself. I'd go, okay, here's the bridge, here's the chorus, here's what I want the bass to do. I I really kind of could dial it in. But that was years and years later. And so we just kept the idea of like Black Sabbath or the damn. They just split everything four ways. You don't discuss it, you don't argue. And it's just one argument you don't have to have.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And I was always fine with that. And people would say, you know, you write, you know, lyrics in in and and music in the publishing world, it's music and lyrics. And if you're the lyric writer, it doesn't matter how many other people write the the tune, you get half the publishing. Right. So you should do that. I'm like, I just don't think that way. I don't care. And so with the Rollins band, it got to the point where I think it was it was Andrew or Sim. We were in the van one day or on the bus, something. And Tao had been our sound man for years at that point. Okay. And someone said, we should cut Tao in as one of the songwriters. I mean, he's with us every day. Like at soundcheck, like he's on stage with us, going, ah, like that song sucks, so I try this. And so we cut Tao in as one of the songwriters.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And so the publishing got split five ways.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00And he was really happy about that. And we were like, hell yeah, man. And that carried on. When Andrew left, we got Melvin. We told Melvin, hey, like we split everything and and Teo's in. He's like, great. Okay, I didn't care. I don't know of any band that ever did that. No, me, but it was such a righteous thing to do and the right thing to do. It's right. And yo, Tao, he's just like one of the most excellent human beings I've ever met. He's just a great human being. And I'm so glad we did that. Because it would be one of those things where years later, you're like, oh man, we should get the lawyers to go in there and do it retroactively. But we did that in like 1990, 91, something like that.
SPEAKER_02Right. But uh Theo, he co-produced uh the wartime fast food for thought release, right? That was Teo.
SPEAKER_00Uh I think Tao I I'm not remembering if Teo was involved. I know he he produced the wait.
SPEAKER_02Uh wait, it was com it was composed, it was produced by Andrew. It was this it was co-produced by Teo and written by you and Andrew. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Was this Andrew's brainchild? Because I love the juxtaposition of the super fucked out, funked up bass and drums machines, and you ranting like a you know preacher on steroids. Really good performance by you on that one.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Um, it was this idea that uh Andrew and I both like go-go funk music. Anything with big bass and drums, Andrew is probably gonna listen to it. And we both liked Go-Go, which is a very kind of uh rarefied version of funk music, almost exclusive to the Washington, D.C. area. Right. And he knew about it just because the guy knew knows a lot about music. And we were on the black flag tour in '86, and we were talking about go-go, and we both came up with this idea of like an industrial go-go band, like go-go from hell. Right. And I said, Yeah, and we should name it wartime. And he went, Yeah. And like, we're just, you know, two young idiots talking a bunch of crap in a van on the way to a show where we're gonna get bottles thrown at our heads. And that was 86 in 87. Andrew said, Well, let's do wartime. I was like, Well, yeah. And so he wrote the tunes, I wrote the lyrics, and we did that Grateful Dead cover, because what would be funnier than an industrial go go version of a Grateful Dead song? That'll make him mad. Right. You know, we did Franklin's Tower, it's just a beautiful song, and we wrecked it, of course. Um, and that was the concept, and the woman who signed the Rollins band to Imago, uh she Heard the we did a demo which I kind of like better than the final record, just a little less uh considered. Anyway, um we played that for her, and she went, I'll sign that. And she was at Chrysalis at the time, which uh half of the people who were Chrysalis, one left, Terry Ellis, and he formed Imago.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And she was Kate Hyman, she was the AR person. So we were on Chrysalis for that 12-inch.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00And then a couple of years later, she said, Hey, do you have a record deal? I said, No, we're on a label right now that we don't owe them anything, but we don't like them. And she said, Well, come and be on a Mago. And that's how the end of Silence and Wait were on a Mago, same AR person. Ah, okay, really. She took us to Imago, and that ended up being pretty good for us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, it was a label that they they got behind us in a big way.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00But Kate really liked the wartime demo, and she said, done, signed it. And she just like signed it like in a day. You know, it's if you know the right person, all of that goes very quickly. And I uh there wasn't really any money. We spent most of the money buying microphones and equipment to record the thing. We recorded it in in Andrew's living room.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh with gear that we bought with the advance.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And we made us we made a video for it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for the whole truth. Do you mean that one? Whatever the song was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I was the idea was doing a ripoff of Madonna crawling out of the water in one of her videos.
SPEAKER_02That's funny as fucking hell, that video. It's so good, man. You can see your acting skills coming through there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, thank you. But we did that with a guy named Jesse Dylan, whose father is a very famous songwriter named Bob.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And uh Jesse was just a friend of mine, and he said, Um, you should do a video for that song. I said, Yeah, no problem. Uh like we'll use my big budget. I had no money. So he said, Look, so we shot the in studio part on this little video set. It's like dressed. And I he said, uh, come at like 6 p.m. And we, I think Andrew and I showed up, or maybe just me, and I said, Where are we right now? He said, I'm doing a video for the replacements. This is their set and their camera setup. They just went home for the day, so we're gonna do it here for free. And so I don't know if the replacements ever knew that we kind of borrowed their set. And then, so Jesse said, Okay, now we're back in LA. He goes, Okay, I want you to come like crawling out of the water like Madonna. I go, Oh, in that MTV video. He said, Exactly. I said, So let's go to the beach. He said, Well, I've got the beach. Okay, and so we drive to this house and we go in through a gate, Malibu, very nice, all this property, and a pickup truck pulls up with three guys and a German shepherd, and they all have side arms like pistols, and one of them has a shotgun. I'm like, whoa, I hope this is we're friendly with these guys. And they go, hey Jesse, who's your friend? I go, this is my friend Henry, he's cool. And they went, okay, Jesse. And I said, Jesse, where are we? He said, We're at my dad's house. I go, we're at Bob Dylan's house? And he went, Yeah, that's my dad, dummy. I'm like, can we meet him? And he went, Well, let's see. And this is Bob Dylan's 24-hour security. Okay. Like three very capable men in a pickup truck with a dog. So if you're found like running on the property, the dog probably gets to you first, and maybe the buckshot fills up your ass cheeks later. But you know, the guy doesn't want to be bothered. And so there's a phone on a metal pole, an outside utility phone. And he walks over and he picks it up and he calls the main house. And there's houses on this property. I said, Is that Bob Dylan's house? I'm in awe. You know, it's not even his dad anymore, it's Bob Dylan. And I point at these houses to my left. I said, Is that Bob Dylan's house? Like, not even your dad's house. And he went, No, that's the house, the houses for the help. His house is up the road. I go, he owns all of this? It's like this huge bit of Malibu, which is like, you know, a thousand dollars per blade of grass. Like you can't afford to breathe there. Right. Anyway, uh, he called his dad, like, hey dad, you know, yeah, I'm making a video with my friend. And he had his assistant come out in some big SUV with two plastic bottles of water. Oh. He said, Bob, wanted you to have this water. Like, will he sign the bottle? So we went to his place because his dad owns beachfront property. And you can shoot without a permit or without anyone looking, and you can just be there without anybody in the way. And it's how to do it on the cheap. And so uh that sand you see me on belongs to Bob Dylan. And I never met Bob Dylan, and I saw Jesse like one or two other times in my life years later, and he's a very nice man, and that's it.
SPEAKER_02Okay. I mean, by the time you did the End of Silence album, you had been playing those songs on like festivals like crazy, like the Lollapelosa, right? Didn't you test these songs out there?
SPEAKER_00Well, that that was a a a thing that we did for a long time was we would take we would write on the road and then take the songs out and just you write them at sound check, and you know, you get them beat into shape, and then you, you know, you risk it, but you risk messing it up, and you you do it live that night, and then it it, yeah, okay. You work out the bugs on it, and you put it into the set. And by the end of the tour, everyone's hearing like mostly new material, and some people get mad, but yeah, it is what it is. You just keep moving. Like a lot of like Miles Davis, Warnett Coleman, uh um Coltrane, they just kept moving on. You know, they're not gonna play the favorites, they just literally writing new stuff. I always like that idea. I'm not comparing myself to John Coltrane, but I like the idea of like new music, new me, like go, go, go. Like, forget the past, just make new stuff. And so we we were writing the end of silence songs in like 1990. And then by the time 91 comes around, we got put on Lollapalooza. Uh Jane's Addiction asked us to be on Lolla, or Perry asked us to be on Lollapalooza, and we played those songs pretty much every day. And all the way, like you know, whatever that was, June, July, August, you know, the whatever the tour was. And then we all took a break from each other and regrouped in New Jersey, I believe it was, Rockaway, and we recorded the end of silence record like it was band practice. I mean, we knew those songs, you know, we just went in there and just kind of played and left because we had just been playing them. You don't need lyric sheets, no one needs to remember what you know chord is this, because we've just been playing them, and I think that's one of the reasons that record kind of has that kind of power to it, because we were just like really ripping those songs with confidence, and so we did that to a certain degree with the Wait album, but just not as many times playing them live.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And the silent songs, man, they got played like 75 shows, 100 shows, Reading Festival, you know, all over the European tour cont festival uh thing, uh, our own shows, opening for Jane's Addiction, then opening for Jane's on Lollapalooza. Like a year in sum, those songs were, and I think that's not a bad way to go. You know, it's a way to go.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00And you know, just to really season a song. Because I I just I know that some bands, you know, they just they kind of write songs very quickly and they record them quickly, and then you hear the band on tour, and the live version just smokes the studio version. Like the I saw the Minutemen in '83, they recorded a bunch of songs, and then they went on tour with those songs. And you know, they were opening for us, so I watched them every night. And those records are really good, but the live versions, I was like, okay, that's what you don't do. You don't have the songs kind of written and do them in the studio.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Take them out on the road and test them. Because if you can't do it live, you can't do it.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00So any song that can withstand a live show, that's what you take into the studio.
SPEAKER_02But they also, it's it's getting more funky. Like the bass is much pronounced, and you guys are really stretching the song length, you know. Like, I think seven of the ten th songs stretch stretch the five-minute mark, and four songs go past past eight minutes, and then one close to nine, one close to eleven, and I think one close to twelve. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's uh due to Andrew and Sim.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Because they go long. Uh and Andrew, like you know, Bootsy is his hero. Right. And um Andrew's Andrew and Sim are two of the best musicians I've ever seen, ever. And I just happened to be in a band with them. Uh we we were a very solid unit. That lineup was, I think, a very good version of that band. And songs just like the songs on End of Silence, we brought in this producer, and we went to band practice with him in the room. He's taking notes. He went, okay, first off, you gotta take two choruses out of every single song. Because like he's timing everything, and like all of your songs are like eight minutes plus, and even songs like low self-opinion, he's like, look, you guys, like you it can't this song can't be like eight and a half minutes, like all of them were really long, and so we were cutting out like choruses and bridges. He says, let's just, you know, kind of make the point. And there's a song, uh I'm forgetting the name of the song, but it has this kind of very atmospheric beginning at the beginning of the song. It's on end of silence, okay. Uh uh obscene. Okay. And it kind of just starts out of nothing, it's like vapor and suddenly starts making more and more noise. And the producer, he said, like, what the hell is that? And we're like, it's it's what we do, man. And we had this big argument. He said, just just like start on the riff. It's so exciting. You know, and he has a point, and we went, well, no, it's our album. And he went, okay. And we kind of fought him on every song, and that producer, Andrew, Andy Wallace, Andy Wallace. Fresh from doing that uh that Slayer record season the Seasons of the Abyss. Okay. He nearly made Andrew and Sim leave. Like it really came to logger heads, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00There's a few things he did that none of us liked. He was one of these real nine to five guys where like he puts on his producer hat. Hey guys, I'm here. Let's start. And at like 5 p.m., you know, a lot of bands, you're just kind of getting going, you know, the caffeine is kicking in or whatever. And he goes, Okay, I gotta go pick up my son, I gotta go. Like, it's we're the juices are flowing. It is now time to record, you know, meaningfully for like the next five hours. He went, Well, I gotta go pick up my kid. See you tomorrow. And he he left. And luckily, Teo was there. All right, so we just kept going. And like Tao, you know, he we had a great engineer. Teo's also an engineer, it's what he does for a living. He's a front-of-house sound person, record producer, engineer. Like there's no studio, he doesn't know his way around. So we just kept going with Teo. And you know, we should have done that record with Teo. I mean, we really should have, but we were under pressure from the label. You know, bring in a producer with a name, and we didn't know, or I didn't know, it was my decision. But um Andrew come, you know, he complained. He complained the entire time. And Andrew Simon Chris never liked the sound of the end of silence, and myself, I preferred the demos.
SPEAKER_02Right, okay. Uh myself.
SPEAKER_00And uh Andy Wallace puts a very uh kind of a sheen on things. And I I never listened to records I'm on, but years later I heard a track or two from The End of Silence. I and I the first thing that hit me was I see what they mean. It's a little shiny compared to the demo, which again I prefer. And it's a little, hey man, uh, compared to how we were. And that's and that, and I don't know what listeners thought, um, but that that record, I I just remember playing, you know, it's before CDs. I had a cassette of it, and I was back in in Los Angeles where I was living, and I played the tape back. I really liked it. And I was like, okay, wow, I think I think this is a good record. And um the when the record came out, I think all of us had this feeling like this might do really well. Not like, hey, we're playing stadiums, but maybe this you know, this record, you know, it well, those guys complained about the production. Okay, fair enough. It doesn't suck. It's a solid record. And I I'm never one to uh inflate anything I do, but you know, it it's it's a solid heavy duty record, it's okay. And I just thought, well, wow, and a lot of people saw us on Lollapalooza, way more than would ever see us on our own. You know, it's like a field of people every day, and maybe they'll show up for this. And the record came out, and MTV likes it, and Tower Records likes it, and radio liked uh low self-opinion, and the label got behind it, yeah, and the band, you know, we'll play two shows a day. You know, like we played the label Love Tick is we'll play everything. Hey, would you do this festival? Of course. Would you play in your sleep? Yes. Would you play on Sundays? Yes. Two sets a night, book it. And between on nights off, I would go do a talking show. Okay. And so in '92, between the band and myself, I think I did 185 or 186 shows.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00And the tour started in February, ended right before late November, Thanksgiving in America. And uh that was the end of Andrew, the Andrew lineup. Um, but that if you hear live tapes from that tour, that was a on a relentlessly heavy lineup. And we even wrote songs on that tour, and I think one of them came out as like a CD extra track on some reissue of maybe End of Silence. It's called A Hole in the Back of My Mind, Hole in the Back of My Head. It's about uh a friend of mine getting shot and killed, right? Um, but we had more songs that we'd written with Andrew, and damn, I just you know, I thought they were really good, and we never got a chance to record them. Uh but we did that that whole song uh at Reading, and Reading got professionally recorded, and someone gave me a cassette of it, and that's why we have that.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but there's other songs, there's like another four or five I th I thought really good songs, and we would make you know board tapes at soundcheck, and so I have like soundcheck recordings of them on cassette, and I haven't played them in you know since 1992. Uh, but it's too bad that we never got a chance to, you know, at least do a low-tech demo of those.
SPEAKER_02Right. So by the time Andre is out, what do you feel like Melvin brought to the Rollins band? Like, did the creative process alter in some way when he enters the band?
SPEAKER_00It's just he's he just brought Melvin, basically. He's like Andrew, he he's very fully formed. Like you can't tell Andrew anything about how to play a bass. The guy is insanely talented. Okay, and you'd be foolish to instruct Melvin Gibbs on what to play. Like he's better than your whole family tree on a bass. He's also the smartest guy uh in pretty much any room he walks into. Like, that's what a lot of people don't know. Melvin is has like a next level intellect. It's uh he's like a PhD brain, like uh crazy smarts. I'm not uh I I'm I read his writing, like he's just you know, he can teach, he can teach class anyway. Okay, yeah, he he's like professorial in music theory. Like you can't I've tried to read to muddle through his writing on music theory, and I'm just like, okay, if you say so, I have no idea what he's talking about. So but I'm you know I'm easily fooled. Anyway, I called Flea at the when we had no bass player. I go, any suggestions for a bass player? He said, Oh, yeah, Melvin Gibbs, of course. No brainer. Him and Sim together, forget it. And Chris called Vernon Reed, living color, another good friend of ours. And he goes, Who should we get for a bass? He went, Oh my god, call Melvin. And both, you know, these two amazing musicians, Flea and Vernon, both said call Melvin. And and I called Chris, I go, like, Flea recommends Melvin. He goes, like, no way. That's what Vernon Reed said. Because Vernon and Melvin had played together, I think, in like decoding society. And they're both like in the black music coalition. They just had all this like, you know, Brooklyn, Manhattan, New York, you know, energy going on. And I knew Melvin because I had met him when his band opened for ice tea one night in '91 or '92. Okay. So I kind of met Melvin at that show when Body Count uh played and Melvin's wife's band opened. And Melvin, I just met him backstage. And he wonderful guy. He's just a really good man. And so I I somehow got a number for Melvin. And I was making a movie up in Canada. I was making a film, I was in a film called Johnny Mnemonic. So um I'm I'm getting punched out by Dolph Lundgren, which is just the best time ever. And um we had this practice schedule. I'm gonna wrap the film, fly from Toronto down to New York. Andrew and Sim and Melvin and I will meet in a rehearsal space somewhere in Manhattan, and we'll audition Melvin.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And at this point, you know, Andrew, sorry, Chris and Sim are very seasoned musicians. I'm, you know, I can get by. Melvin is like such a pro. And so it's like four old prostitutes getting, you know, coming into a set, like, hey, let's make some good old school porn. Come on. And we met Melvin, and everyone gets along. We're all adults. And Melvin said, Okay, well, um, I have an idea. Great. He goes, like, I brought a riff with me. Let's just jam on this riff. Like, cool. And that riff ended up being the song Civilized.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And easy. Enough. And suddenly, you know, we all kind of fall into it. Like in 30 seconds, everyone's playing the riff. And I'm immediately coming up with lyrics, like, no problem. And we played it for like 40 minutes, and now everyone's sweating, everyone's smiling. And it's obvious to all four of us, at least, that this is probably gonna work out. So we, you know, we were all laughing. I said, So, Melvin, you know, you you want to go out on a date with these three ugly men for the rest of your life? And he went, Yeah. So we all uh, you know, dried our eyes and and put the gear back and went and had lunch somewhere in the East Village and agreed, like, okay, we're a band. And I probably our manager contacted Tao, like, hey, we got the bass player. And we took a breather. So I had we had to, Chris and I had to find our way to New York because we're gonna write in New York because uh Sim and Melvin lived there. And where else are we gonna re you know work? So Chris and I got an apartment, you know, by the month. You can rent an apartment, a three-bedroom apartment, and we fly Teo out because he's gonna, you know, be there to go, hey, that song sucks, which he was very good at. And I call uh around trying to find a practice place, and uh, I talked to Michael Girard of the band Swans, and he goes, Well, I'm gonna go down, I think, to Georgia this summer to work on music, and why don't you guys just rent my practice place, which was you know, like third and A, like you know, like Lower East Side, and I went done. And so my manager, I don't know what the money was. We sent him the money, and he gave us the key. And I don't think I we saw Michael for the rest of the year. I think I gave his key back to like a friend of his, but he was gone. Okay, and we just we show up to his completely airless, no sunlight bunker practice room, and one day uh we're practicing, and and uh I had seen Iggy who lived a few blocks away, and uh we're talking, and he goes, Hey man, I'll come down and see you guys, you know, I'll hang out at band practice. We're like, okay. And a few days later, knock on the door, and Iggy comes in, and it's uh it's all all of us in the room, and Iggy says, Hey man, this place is pretty cool, and we all look at him like you think he went, Oh, sucks, huh? We're like, uh yeah. You know, and it's a good for a practice place, but to be in there six hours a day, you're like, oh please, just give me some moving air. And we just started writing songs. We had civilized, so we you know made a bridge section and a chorus and all of that. And like on day two or three, we're just warming up, and you know, uh, Melvin is just doing some bass line, and I I think I'm funny, so I start talking over it like, hey, baby, you know, we're in love and everything is going great, and I love you and you love me, and you know why you're so happy and with this relationship, because I'm a liar, and everyone laughs. And we wrote a bunch of songs, and we booked ourselves to play at CBGB's under fake names. Like we're you know, we're hot animal machine. Uh, and everyone figures it out, the grapevine, and the show sells out, and they meet the new bass player, and we play this whole new set of songs, which went over really well. And you know, what are you gonna do for an encore? Like, oh no, we have we don't have enough songs for an encore. And I went, oh, we'll do that joke. Melvin, do that bass line, you know, do do do do like whatever it is. And I'm like, hey, baby. And the head of Imago Records and the um AR lady, they're at CB's at this show because they want to see the new songs, you know, because it's their money.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And Terry Ellis, he said, that that song, the Liar song, like, yeah. He said, that's a single. And we went, that's uh that's an encore joke song. Like, that's not gonna get recorded. He went, oh yeah, you guys are recording that. So we suddenly have to write a verse in a court, we have to write a you know, a form for it. Because when we played it, like it was just a joke where I'm a liar. We played the like, ha ha, funny, good night. Like it was just you know, and we did it like two times like that with no arrangement. We just kind of half-assed it. And we we wrote an arrangement for it, and we took all of those songs. Teo said, let's record in a very unconventional place. Like, let's rent a house, bring in portable gear, live in the house with nobody bothering us. And so we found a house somewhere, where are we like California, Nevada? Um, you know, management takes care of all of this now that we're big established rock stars, and we bring in all the tech stuff, and Teo's an engineer, he wires everything up, and we recorded weight in the den of this big house. Yeah, and a buddy of mine in LA, a real nice guy named Joel, um, he was a professional cook. Like that's what he does for a living. He cooks for people, right? Comes to your house and makes, you know, makes you food for your family. I said, Joel, you want to come up here for like you know, three weeks and cook? He went, Yeah. And we had an extra bed, and we flew Joel up and got him a car, and he goes, Okay, what do you guys want for dinner tonight? And everyone calls out, you know, this, that. He goes, Okay. And he would go out to the store, buy the food, and cooked us three meals a day. And we would work from, you know, like the afternoon where everyone kind of gets up and you know staggers forth. Um, I'd go to the gym. They found me a gym down the road, and we'd start around, you know, afternoon, comfortable, and we'd go until like two or three in the morning, which is why we'd start in the afternoon. We would just go until, you know, your eyes are closing, and everyone would go tumble to bed, and you'd wake up at noon, rock star, eat, you know, drink some coffee and go, like, all right, you look, let's go. And we ended up, we flew in Charles Gale, the saxophone player, and we did all these songs with him, and those songs eventually came out on CD a bunch of years later.
SPEAKER_02Right, because he had like a session, he had like a he had like a contract or something, he couldn't release them, wasn't it like something like that?
SPEAKER_00Uh not that particular session.
SPEAKER_02No, okay.
SPEAKER_00But um, we just didn't bother to put those songs out, and then years later, I own ever I own it all. I don't have to get the record company's permission. I just put it out, and you know, we mixed the songs, like you know, Teo mixed all the entire session, okay, and we recorded a whole bunch of music for that record.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And years later I put it out on CD, but uh in 95 or 96, I was living in New York, Charles Gale was there. I said, You want to make a record? He said, Okay. So he usually would, you know, record for a couple of hours and put that out because that's all the money he had. So I said, How about this, Charles? How about you just record? I'll pay. Just record all the songs you want. Just when I can stay an extra day, I'd be like, uh, dude, just do what you want. Like, I've got some money, it's not that much. He was just used to recording for like$15 or something, and it's not that much money. So he recorded like two whole days, and he ended up with like all kinds of music. I said, Okay, make your selections. He did, and he called the album Creation Changes. Okay, and it's really cool. Make came up with the order, okay. And then he was signed to Knitting Factory Records, and he said, Well, Knitting Factory says if I put the record out with you, then they will no longer book live shows for me. And without live shows, I don't eat, so I can't put the record out. I went, okay. I mean, I I wasn't all that put out about it. I went, okay. And I never I don't know if I saw Charles many times after that, and a few years ago he died, and I still have all the sessions, and they're all mixed. Yeah, I I I Charles and I mixed it. There's not much to it. Like, you know, there's piano, violin on some tracks, he plays violin, uh, saxophone. I mean, there's just not a lot on the record, so we made a pretty quick mix. It just it is what it is, and I have the multi-tracks, we could probably remix it and make it a little better.
SPEAKER_02Nice.
SPEAKER_00And but the edited master for that record is sitting uh in uh a climate-controlled storage uh space I have, um, and the multi-tracks, and there is us so much music from that session, and none of it has ever come out.
SPEAKER_02Oh my god.
SPEAKER_00And it's at this point 30, like 30 years old. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Damn. Uh do you have any immediate plans to put it out or no?
SPEAKER_00But you know, okay, fuck it then. I I just never think about it.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_00I mean, uh, I don't know if he has any kids. Uh, you know, who who who do you pay? Um who would buy it? You know, Charles and he was great. I I wanted to make a record for him, and we wanted him to play with us because we thought he was great. I would go see him anytime I could. I I thought I thought he was awesome.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00He's such a great guy. Um, but the guy never sold records. You know, he could do okay in Europe on the live circuit because Europeans can dig some jazz. Okay. But in the United States of America, you know, he's playing like clubs the size of your kitchen.
SPEAKER_02All right.
SPEAKER_00Not because it's not good, but that kind of outside jazz, you know, it it's a very rarefied listenership. I mean, you know, people like John Zorn, you know, they'll go. But you know, you're not gonna draw 500 people in Ohio for Charles Gale on a Tuesday night.
SPEAKER_02Alright, I understand. No, sure. So, like by the time you guys did Comin and Burn, the band was kind of over. I mean, that album was always kind of a favorite of mine. There might be some nostalgia connected to that. I don't know. But that then you guys kind of broke up, right? Shortly after that.
SPEAKER_00Imago, the label, they they were funded by BMG. And basic basically BMG, and in those days, money in the music industry was like a freaking faucet. There's there was I call it splashy money. Like, hey, put a song on this movie soundtrack. Here's 25 grand. Thanks. That kind of thing happened all the time. Hey, we're gonna put 20 seconds of a song of yours in this movie. Sync rights, here's a bunch of money. Wow, okay, they're just handing it to you. You know, some bands more than others, but we got a little bit of that kind of fake money. And Imago just got a ton of money given to it to make records. Rollins band records sold okay, but nothing else on that label sold at all. And so we're gonna get together in '95. You know, wait tours over, late summer '94. We all take a break from each other. And you know, the snow melts, and it's 1995, and let's get to work. Imago loses its money, Imago dissolves. Suddenly we have no label. Terry Ellis, we it's a three-album deal. So Terry Ellis says, Well, you owe me a record. And I say, You don't have a label. You owned half of Chrysalis, you have so much money, you collect Picasso's. I know because I've seen them at your Upper West Side condo. You don't need me, you don't need the mere pittance and royalties I'm gonna make you let me go. And he went, no, I'm gonna sell your contract to another label. And I went, no, like you'll piss off, man. And so I signed to DreamWorks, and Terry sued me. So there I am in New York, wake up in the morning, put on my ill-fitting pair of trousers, my one button-up shirt, a tie, a lawyer loaned me, and I would get, you know, I look like a used car salesman, take the subway uptown in my stupid outfit, sit down and get deposed by a wise ass lawyer on Terry's side for like three hours, take the subway back down to the Lower East Side, change out, and go to band practice. That was my my life for a while. I'm getting lawyer bills. Here's the bill for Xeroxing,$16,000. You try it, and so it got very ugly. And Terry, he's just throwing money at it to basically kill me. And so the lawyer bill was basically the advance from DreamWorks, and for the most part, I paid for coming in burn, which hurt. Meanwhile, the band and I were just I thought, okay, you guys, uh, let's write some songs, and all they're coming up with is like jazz sprawl. I'm like, fellas, you're working with a singer who has like two or three settings on, off, and medium. You know, I'm not I don't have melody, I don't, you know, I don't have phrasing. I'm a cement mixer. I'm good at mixing cement. Don't make me do your roof. And so they're coming up with it all this music. I'm like, fellas, uh make something that I can do. And I would just sit with a microphone in my hand on the couch in this big practice room that we had rented that I'm paying for. I am paying their salaries. It is very expensive to be making this record because I'm paying for everything. It's like thousands of dollars a week and nothing's happening. Um and we're not arguing, but everyone is very kind of glum. And I'm like, fellas, all you need to do is give me something with a beat instead of like ding-ding ding-ding ding ding ding ding ding. Because that's where Melvin is not like a rock guy, he can play it for you if you ask him nicely, but he's an avant dude, and I think the hangover from you know, the weight, we had so much momentum coming off end of silence. Melvin kind of got into our bag of like first chorus, and then once we kind of did all of that with the weight record, it turned into our jazz rhythm section and our guitar player who likes the Mahavishnu orchestra, and a singer who really needs a Ramones kind of song to ever do anything. And they keep coming up with this music. I'm like, fellas, you I don't know what to do with this. And one day they start playing this riff, and I literally, and I would band practice would happen like five hours a day of like five hours of me sitting on the couch with the mic in my hand, going like I nothing happened today. We'd all like stare at the ground, cough, and we just know this isn't happening anymore. And so we became the square peg trying to go into the round hole. But there's a record deal, and we gotta we gotta keep going. And then one day they start playing this riff, and it ends up being the song Starve. And I stood straight up and went, that'll work. It's like James Brown on on Acid. And I went, Whoa! And and Chris, I'll never forget this. He killed me. I love that guy, but he killed me. He and I said, keep playing that, and they stopped, and he said, Why? It's so rock. I'm like, oh no, we've got a problem. This is a problem. If someone says that's so rock in a rock band, I thought we were a rock band, we're not? Oh no, because I don't know how to be, there's not much you can do with me. And so I said, Well, I hate to pull rank, but uh I'm paying you sons of bitches, so play that riff. So they're like, oh, aye aye, sir. So voila, we had a song, and you know, they have they have to come up with some like 9-4-3-1 time for the bridge section. I'm like, no human can sing to that. Yeah, if you could sing, you could sing to it. Like, well, I can't sing. That's the whole thing. That's the novelty of this band. The singer can't sing. And so we ended up with all of these kind of ambient mid-tempo songs with one or two sluggers like like Starve, but they sounded more like the song Shame, where there's riffs, but it's mid-tempo-y and it's kind of ambient. And we bring in this producer, and we go to Woodstock at Bearsville and we we do the record, and we go back down to New York City to do the vocals, and yeah, I I like the record. My manager, you know, he's a he's a good guy, he was very honest. He said, you know, this getting through this record, I'm like, oh, this this won't be good. He goes, it's a lot of work. Like these songs were a lot of work as a listener to get through. And that's probably the the most polite thing he could say. And so the record label hated the record. And I'll never forget this. The AR guy said, Can you write another song like Liar? I said, We are screwed, we're done. Like we are, we are we are effed. And so they put the record out. The every rock critic, you know, they never liked me much anyway. They went, Oh my god, we we hate this guy, and we hate this record. And the the tour went well, but those songs live, they just kind of hang around on stage. You can't really get behind him and just really lean into them like kind of any other set of music I've ever done. You kind of just play them and kind of float around in them, and the audience kind of stood there like, okay, what huh? Thank you, I think. And everyone kind of left after the shows, kind of scratching their head, like, yeah, man, well, maybe next time. And we did this long tour. I started having voice problems because the songs I just mean the songs just weren't mixing well, and it was a a very unfun tour. Because like it just wasn't the the songs did not get taken out and played live before recording. We that record was hydroponically grown. We wrote the songs and we kind of went into the studio and recorded them. And for the first time in my life, I used lyric sheets, which I'd never done before. Because why do you need them? You do the songs every night. Go do it in the studio. And so I think there's moments on the record, but it is one of those things where it is what it is. And so the tour, the big, big chunks of the tour comes to an end at the end of festival season in Europe, like late August. And everyone goes home for a break because we've been kind of together touring. And then there's one last set of shows in October in Japan. And the band hadn't seen each other for like six weeks. And so the band flies ahead of me for like three or four days ahead of me. And they go to Tokyo and they rehearse. And now we're acting like rock stars. The band will fly ahead of me and prepare. I'll walk in and go, hello, guys. And I I met them at the hotel. And then they go, yeah, we've been here a few days. They're all jet lagged, and you know, but but you know, the songs are ready. I mean, those guys are very, very apt and very able. And I practiced at soundcheck for the first show. We did two nights in Tokyo. Like, I think it was like four shows. No one came, no one showed up. Uh, the Japanese audience, no one liked the record. And so we're having this dinner at the end of the last night, and I forget where we are, Osaka. I I it's in my journal somewhere. And everyone, except for our guitar player, good old Chris from Hot Animal Machine, he goes, and he's like, okay, so uh it's October, and um, so we're gonna get together to start writing in what March? And I'll never forget it, Sim, our drummer, sounding like he was at a funeral. He said, Chris, we're breaking up. And we all knew it, except for Chris. Maybe Chris knew, but he had high hopes, but the rest of us knew, like, pal, this is over. But it was Sim who said it, and we ate dinner in silence because we're so sad. I mean, Andrew Sim and I uh had been touring together since 86, you know, when they were on tour with Black Flag, and it's now 97. So that's a long time where I had seen them every single year from night from 87 to 97. So that's like like 10 or 11 years. I grew up with Chris, I've known Chris since I was just out of high school, 1979. And there's Teo, who we met in '87. And you know, I we all have a great deal of affection for each other. I mean, like, they're these are excellent human beings. Like, they can have half of my sandwich right now. And, you know, it was it was an end, and it was really sad. And the next day we're all up bright and early in the lobby because we're all flying back to our respective places, and um we just kind of pissed off, right? You know, and it was very sad. Um, I I do remember kind of going, okay, well, that's over with. What's next? And I was qu kind of unsure, you know, what would be next after that for me.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00I that was the first time I wasn't exactly sure. You know, because the talking shows for me, after 1985, they became it's really lame to talk about money, but they made money to where I can pay my bills, yeah, being like talking guy.
SPEAKER_02No, you you you also, to my opinion, you made like one of most of your best works, like uh Think Tank, uh Eric the Pilot, and uh Rollins in the Rye. Those three to me, like light these are like late 90s, early 2000s releases. That's like to me, like one of the f my favorite shit. Oh thank you.
SPEAKER_00I I never listen to those, I make them and I I I never look back. So I don't even re I I remember the Eric the Pilot story, but I don't remember the contents of the rest of them. But okay, I I was doing a lot of film work in those days, and voiceover work was becoming more of a part of my life, right? And it ended up being a big thing for me, voiceover, uh, animation, documentary, commercials, right? And so fiscally, I didn't need music, right? So I just started doing like more film, more you know, more of the other stuff, which did very well, yeah. And then I decided to do more music, and I did more music, and that was cool, but emotionally um 1996 and 1997 were exceptionally difficult times because of the lawsuit, the fact that the band, I just it never felt like we got this. It was like, yeah, I don't know. And maybe the band should have broken up after the wait record, but the only way to find out there's really nothing more to say is to go to the practice room and find out.
SPEAKER_02Oh, definitely.
SPEAKER_00And I think we did, and I think that record is a band that is everyone is playing in their own separate corner together. Right. It's uh it's an interesting record, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's good.
SPEAKER_02But what about uh get uh subgo again and nice? Did you produce both of those records?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um I was producing the guys that became the band, they were a trio.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I was producing their records. Uh, the mothers of period. And I said, let's write some songs. They or they said, if you ever want to write some songs, I went, I got a riff right now. And we're standing in the practice room, the same practice room that I started practicing when I was in Black Flag. We're in the exact same room I was in 1981. I go, you know, this room is, you know, I I go back a long way to this room. Anyway, um I said, I and I hummed them the riff and the bridge and the whole thing, and that's the song Get Some Go Again.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And you know, we it's it, you can it's like a two-chord song, and suddenly, like in three minutes, we we just played it. And I go, here's another riff, and I forget uh I think uh the song On the Day, and they were like, Cool, and now we're playing that one, and that led to two uh studio sessions and a bunch of songs, and um DreamWorks put that out, and as I remember, they hated that record too. And that was one of those things where we owed them a record, they said okay, and the record came out and they kind of had dropped us as the record was coming out.
SPEAKER_02After nice, you mean? Are you talking about nice now or the second one? Say what? Are you talking about the second one? Nice.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, uh, get some go again. They had no interest in the record, oh no interest in me. Right. And so the record came out and they said, Well, uh, good luck. And I I never saw any of those people again. Uh there was a little bit of a press tour, like, yeah, here's a two interviews, see ya. And they put the wrong songs on the CD. You're like, wow, no one cares about this record. And so we did that one, and um we did the nice record, and I I uh that came out on an indie, and I I pretty much financed that. I got a small advance, but I pretty much paid for it. Okay. And then we did the Rise Above record to help the West Memphis 3. Right. And I financed that. Okay. And that was uh we recorded in 2002 and toured in 2003, and we came to the end of that tour, and I said, Fellas, uh, we're done. And they went, okay, and they they're all very talented. They all went back to well, the drummer immediately joined the blue man group and toured all over the world. Uh, the guitar player started playing bass with Daniel Lenois and playing sessions with like Alice Cooper and all these people. He's one of those guys. He can play your entire record collection by hearing it once. He's incredible. Nice. And he's still with Daniel Lenois, like like last year he was on tour with him. Like they're still playing together.
SPEAKER_01Oh, nice.
SPEAKER_00And uh Jim, Jim Wilson, he's a wonderful guy and like uh an insanely talented guitar player. I think he he tours with Emmy Lou Harris. Like, you know, he he goes out with these big, big old bands. And I I never really thought about music again until uh like 2006. Chris said, Hey, let's get the band together again. I'm like, oh, come on, man. So I said, How about this? All of you are New Yorkers. You go get a practice space and you practice, and I'll come out and listen when you guys are ready. I flew out there and you know, I walk in. I hadn't seen these guys in a long time, and you know, within half an hour, all the old jokes are going like, hey, and we play, I don't think anything from coming and burn except one or two songs, and we play songs from wait, and it sounds good, you know, because those guys can play very well. So I said, okay, well, if you guys are into it, I'll do a tour. But I need full commitment. You know, if I'm gonna go out on this, I I don't do anything halfway. Like either I have blood in my mouth or I don't show up. And they went, no, no, we're into it. I went, okay. And so we went out and did six weeks opening for the legendary LA band X, uh, who can be mercurial as far as you know getting along with them. Uh the one of the band members is very, very difficult. The rest of them are nice enough, but one of them is a real piece of work. And we played very well, but it was one of those things where we're gonna go out for 45 minutes and do those songs, and then we're not gonna talk to each other until the next day a sound check, and we would just go back onto the bus because we're the opening band by like 9 p.m., we're done. And you know, I I hadn't been an opening band on a tour for a lot of years, and it was kind of interesting, like, wow, it's dinner time, and I'm finished. Usually, like, okay, you know, I'm gonna be on stage for a long ass time, it's gonna hurt. I'm gonna finish the show, go backstage, and pass out for 10 minutes, which I would. I would just lie down and kind of lose consciousness. That happened quite a bit, especially on the really hot nights. I would just go backstage and have a lie down and just like have no memory of lying down. Anyway, um, we would be done. And after 45 minutes or so, like you're still very frisky. You're like, okay, huh? Now what do we do? And I would just go into my bunk and listen to music, and we didn't hate each other, it's just that we we had nothing to say to each other because uh we broke up in 1997 in Japan. And so we got to the end of the tour, and we we never did a band photo. Like, there's no we never did like, okay, here's our press photo. There's no, I think someone in one of the opening bands, one of their girlfriends, said, All right, you ugly bastards, get together. We did a photo for her camera, or maybe like her cell phone. I don't know, I don't know. And I've never seen it. And I remember the last show was in Los Angeles. Road crew is gonna take the band back to their hotel room, they're all flying away the next day. The road crew is gonna deal with the equipment. I drove my own car to the venue. I finished the show. I did not say a word to anyone in the band. I literally walked off stage in like, you know, it's a pair of shorts. I put on a shirt, I grabbed my gig bag, which I had already pre-packed, I swiped a couple of bottles of water, I walked to my car. People hadn't even thought, let's wait for Henry in the parking lot. They're just people was like just going to their cars or whatever. I got into my car, I drove home alone, immediately took a shower to get kind of get the thing off me, the evidence. I put the gig clothes into the laundry, and I did the laundry, like, you know, four pieces of clothing. Just I'm done. And I can't remember. I saw I've seen Melvin one or two times since, because he comes to would come to my talking shows in Brooklyn. And it's always good to see him. Teo would come to my shows in Eindhoven, Holland. Um, just you know, hang out, you know. Hey Hank. Um Chris would was living in Holland at that time because he follows his wife around. She's a PhD, and she's always like studying or doing something somewhere. And he just kind of her and the kids follow his very smart wife around. And they've moved to Australia. So on the 2023 speaking tour, Chris and I hung out at the hotel I was at in Melbourne, or Sydney, I guess. And that was, and and so I seen these guys all other than but I haven't seen Sim since that tour, and I have no idea where Sim is. New York, New Jersey. Uh I hope he's okay. You know, he's I don't know. I hope Sim's okay. Um that's not I I I have no idea. And uh I can speculate, but I I won't out loud. Anyway, uh I I hope he's good. Uh he's a he's an amazing guy. Anyway, um I've never ever ever thought about music ever again. Um I've gotten some really amazing offers from bands I like, like, hey, come and do a vocal. Um I did, I was, I I went, I flew to New York in 2015. Damn, it's a long time ago. I'm old, to to watch Dinosaur Jr. do five shows at a venue. I'm such a fan. And on the last night, they said, You gotta do a song with us. I said, Okay. So I I sang with Dinosaur Jr. That was fun, really fun. And the audience liked it because it was short. You know, you I wasn't on long enough to bomb. And then I did Rise Above with Cyndi Lauper and her band for a benefit, right? And it was it was great, you know. Like there I am standing next to Cindy Lauper. Like, I I did not see that coming. And it it we pulled it off. It's okay. Uh now that people are dead, I I can talk about it. Keith Levine, he was in some band called Public Image Limited. He and Jaw Wobble contacted me, and that's just one of the most, you know, lethal duos of musicians I've ever heard. And Levine wrote me and said, Hey, you want to go in the studio and mess around and make some noise with me and Jaw Wobble? I'm like, I I can't, my ability, all I would be doing would be wasting their time. But wow, what an offer! Like, geez, the talent of, I mean, there's just nothing like those guys together or separate, they're amazing. I'm not, I'm not amazing, I'm just hardworking. And I said, no, thanks, I'm done. And that was the right thing to say, because you know, no one needs an encore. And I really believe in being done with things, like going, okay, you know, as James Brown said, you do it to death. And I did. And I I as an older guy, I'm very much about what I I think you and I discussed it before, or I told you about it before. What I call the hard out, which is, you know, that's I didn't make that up. It's just like, you know, at 8 p.m. the show ends as the hard out because the next radio show starts. I have a hard out at 7.59 and 59 seconds. I believe in doing hard outs. Like, stop doing music. Not in the middle of the tour, like complete your obligations, but when you say you're done, be done and be done. And like, look, you have nothing to do, which is one way of looking at nothing on your schedule. Or you can go like, well, let's try something else. Like, let's try this hot air ballooning, yeah! Or suddenly you're the new guy doing something else, and I'd rather be a freshman, you know, a ninth grader in American school terms, like a new guy. Up to an intermediate or fairly seasoned, you know, I can get by. To become a seasoned pro at something, it's just not for me. And it's I'm not putting it down. That's what makes, you know, like some people really amazing musicians, like Flea, the musician. You should hear his solo record. Okay. That's musicianship on an Ornette Coleman level. He is from another planet now. He's a seasoned bass player, like the guy is so good, it's terrifying. Like Melvin, like that. That's great. But I don't want to work at something for so long I become that. I'd rather, and I'm not putting it down, it's just not my metabolism. In the same amount of time it takes to become that, I would have rather done three other things to a degree where, okay, and I with music, I did it till there was nothing left. I think I probably should have stopped a bit before that. And so there's things I've been doing in my life where I'm like, okay, I I see I'm getting to that a little like 65%, you know, out of the hundred. Okay, I'm still good. Why stick around so people go, oh man, you should have seen them 20 years ago? And so I'd rather just go, okay, uh how about this? I'd rather do nothing than do something poorly or do something mediocre. And I know myself very well at this point because I've just been living in this for a long time. And I know my gut and I trust it. And if I'm not 101% into something, I stop doing it. 100%? It's the 0-1, it's the 1% over that makes all the good stuff happen. It's why the person wins the gold medal at the Olympics. Because all the other people who lost by half of a half of a millionth of a second, they're 101% too. But it's that that 1% wasn't as good as the other person's 1%. And so I'm into one thing that I'm working on now that I'm 101% at. And one day I'll stop doing all of those as well. Because if I'm not on if I'm not obsessed with it, I can't do it. But in my just my opinion, if you want to get somewhere, like Black Flag coming to an end in July of 86, and by May of 87, you're back on the road with a record in the store and a band in a van. That takes determination and seeing one thing in front of you to where someone goes, hey, you like I can't hear you. I'm only looking at this dot. Oh, you're a pretty headstrong guy. Yeah. I I have five people whose salary I must somehow invent every week. And a band with no reputation. So excuse me if I'm concentrating on the dot.
SPEAKER_02Just so you know, we've got we got 45 seconds left of the interview before it shuts off, just so you know.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, it's that kind of intensity. It's the only way I get things done, and it's how I approach everything from books to my radio show. And that's it. And that was the story of that band. And I learned all of that intensity from being in Black Flag. I learned all of that from Black Flag.
unknownNice.
SPEAKER_02Henry, like I appreciate you so much. Your writing, your music, your spoken word has gotten me through good times and bad times. And I really do appreciate everything you've done and your voice and coming on and spending time with me. So all the best to you, sir. Hopefully, see you in the future. Take care, man. Okay. Bye.