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The softer side of Henry Rollins | page 1, 2
Toward the end of "Smile, You're Travelling," he starts lobbing out crusty old chestnuts of bumper-sticker wisdom -- "Live or Get Lived." "If You Wanna Know, You Gotta Go." "Knowledge Without Mileage Means Nothing." He stops just short of saying, "Be ... All That You Can Be." "The world is your oyster," he said, irony-free, making even the slobbering, Rollins-enslaved, teenage fan boys groan with dismay. "The way I see it, you get about 65 good laps around the track, and after that, somebody has to help you shit." Oh Christ, a lot of us thought simultaneously, he's gone Oprah. The audience was so well Oprah-trained that whenever he said something Human and Uplifting, some Oprah cue-monkey accustomed to the TV routine of clapping every time something dully inspirational is said would pock out a couple of claps and then realize where he was and get embarrassed and stop. The whole thing reminded me of a billboard in my neighborhood aimed at teen gangland drug addicts -- a bunch of tough, tattooed young dudes are sitting, talking in a small room around a foldout table. The caption reads: "Now He's High on Support." Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives
According to the press material, "Smile, You're Travelling" is a strictly solo, all-Rollins venture -- he has no director, no editor. He needs both, a lot, but even at his most windy and self-indulgent, Rollins is a fuckload more fun than 96 percent of all other small-stage offerings. The fact is, Rollins is smart, and he's funny, and he's quite likable and amusingly sexy in a sweaty dirty boy kind of way, and -- get this -- he's kind, so you can sit there through the incredibly long stretch of cliché-studded ranting and it's kind of like listening to some nicely beer-inspired Life of the Party Raconteur. He's flapping around pretty well under the attention spotlight and doing all the conversational work so you can just sit there and grin on the couch. All in all, it's a pretty pleasant ride. Our Henry's calming down. He's realizing his own mortality and foibles, groping toward humility and trying to let us see him under the tattoos, just like he'd have to if he were a normal, non-Rollins human being. Weirdly enough, at this phase in his kicky life, we -- the audiences of the world -- are Henry's wife, we're his bitch, we're his home, where he generates his energy and gets his love and feedback and tolerant understanding. It's pathetic, in a way, but also very endearing. You end up feeling like his friend. He's a cute and lovable monster.
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