Henry Rollins on The Cramps, Gravest Gravy and Why Records Still Matter | The Sharp Notes Interview
There are records that disappear because nobody wanted them, and then there are records that somehow manage to wait nearly 50 years for the right moment to arrive.
Gravest Gravy belongs firmly in the second category.
In October of 1977, the Cramps entered Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton and recorded a body of material that would help define the earliest version of the band. Some of those recordings became the group’s first Vengeance Records singles and later appeared on Gravest Hits. Others remained unheard. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy returned to the tapes in 1989, mixed material for a proposed album called Gravest Gravy, chose artwork, and then, for reasons that seem to have disappeared into history, the record was shelved.
Now, in 2026, that record is finally coming out.
Helping bring it across the finish line are Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records, and Jimmy Maslon, a film producer responsible for some of the Cramps music videos, and owner of the Herschel Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman film catalogs, alongside none other than Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, working together as RAM Prod. on behalf of The Cramps Inc., which has revived Vengeance Records and begun digging into the band’s archive. Rollins and MacKaye went through the surviving quarter-inch tapes, compared multiple mixes, worked with engineers at Inner Ear Studios and Infrasonic Sound, and helped shape the material into the record that Lux and Ivy had once envisioned.
For Rollins, there is also a much more personal thread running through all of this. He and MacKaye first saw the Cramps together in Washington, D.C. in 1979. Nearly half a century later, they are helping ensure that another piece of the band’s history finds its way into the hands of listeners.
So this conversation is about Gravest Gravy, but it is also about something larger: what it means to preserve music without embalming it, what survives when analog tape is properly cared for, what gets lost when music becomes just another file on a screen, and why records, record stores, labels, liner notes and all of the strange little clues surrounding recorded music still matter.
Henry Rollins has spent most of his life listening closely, collecting obsessively, tracing music backward and forward through history, and thinking seriously about the physical culture that surrounds it.
That makes Gravest Gravy a very good place to begin a listeners journey into The Cramps’ history and into the musical lineage that preceded it.
hr: How does that (SM)58 sound when you're doing this kind of work?
ezt: That's a good question. I have gone through so many mics. At some point I said, "You know what, I'm just going to try a 58." I was talking to my audio engineering friend over here, and she said, "Yes, you've got a SM58 doing that." I said, "Yes, because it's kind of cool."
Henry: Wow. I've just never seen that. I wish I had $1 for every hour I've had a 58 in my hand in my life.
ezt: I know. The thing is, here we are in a record store. I'm in the mall. I'm in a New Jersey mall here. We get a lot of noise, traffic, and stuff. This helps to just eradicate that, and I can be in the space here. That's my thing. Wow. It's really a thrill to talk to you. I really appreciate you taking time out to do this today. Thank you.
Henry: Thank you.
ezt: You first saw The Cramps with Ian MacKaye in 1979. Nearly half a century later, the two of you are helping to bring these tapes into the world this year. Did working this closely with the original recordings alter any of your memories, any of those assumptions, any of those feelings that you had about the band that you saw all those years ago that night?
Henry: If anything, it makes me like the band more, and it makes me more sure of their great and uncanny talent. They really tapped into something. They didn't even know it, it seems. I'm not saying they were naive, but they were so committed to rock and roll and all of that. They really found a main line. When you get to hear basic tracks, like Ian and I have been working with multi-track tapes as well as the tracks for Gravest Gravy, which were already mixed, we're getting to hear the musicianship and just the thing they were after. It's just fantastic. If anything, I've become more of a fan.
ezt: There's a difference between hearing an unreleased recording and being responsible for deciding that the world should finally hear it. You've, of course, heard a lot of things that I'm sure were unreleased in your life. Did you feel any hesitation about opening up that Cramps treasure chest, that archive, or did the quality of the stuff just say-- it just informed you and said, "Hey, this is something that really needs to be out there?" How did that come about?
Henry: On this particular release, and we're talking about Gravest Gravy, which is tracks from the October 1977 sessions the band did with Alex Chilton in Memphis, Tennessee. The reason why we had not so much-- no hesitation, but we had confidence is because the band, Lux and Ivy, had mixed most of the tracks themselves. What they didn't mix, Alex Chilton did. They'd already picked out an album cover and an album title. There's quite a bit of intent happening here. It's not as if it's our grand idea. We're just finishing what Lux, Ivy, and Alex started in 1989.
With other things that we are working on and actually have finished, absolutely, we think about it very hard. Ian and I, we work for Cramps, Inc. Cramps, Inc. is Ivy and Jimmy Maslin and Larry Hardy, who owns and operates In the Red Records. I basically am their audio guy. I work for free. Ian is my best friend of over 50 years. His ears are far more educated than mine. I don't do any of this stuff without consulting Ian. I think with things like this, it's very good to collaborate. It's very good and safe to not think your idea is the best idea or the only idea that matters.
With the Gravest Gravy tracks, there's a bunch of mixes. I picked the ones I thought were the best. I sent all of the mixes and my notes to Ian. I said, "Let's discuss and debate. If you think something else is better, I want to hear all about it." He agreed with me. I think the ones you hear on the album were the obvious keepers. With other things, I go to Larry because it's my job to go through the archives and pull up things that might be good for release. It is our job to look after the legacy of The Cramps.
What you're going to hear upcoming of The Cramps is going to be determined by us. We better get it right. I go into the tapes. I come up with an idea. I propose it. We send it around the horn, if you will. I send it to Ian. I send it to Larry. I send it to Jimmy. I send it to Pete Lyman, our mastering guy at Infrasonic in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. He's an extraordinarily talented mastering engineer. Am I high on The Cramps supply, or is this any good?
I hear everyone's very sober assessment, including an engineer who said, "Well, I can take it to this level with mastering." The short answer, sorry about all that, is yes, we are trying to be extremely careful. We're not looking for money. We're not looking for notoriety. If you've noticed, none of us are in The Cramps. We have to make sure nothing we put out drops below a certain level of sonic and performance quality because there's a reason why some tracks sit on tapes in vaults and warehouses for decades because the band heard them the first time around and went, "Nah." I don't know why anyone would think they somehow get better with time.
As a fan, I want to hear everything, but I think it's good to be careful and not wear out your welcome with listeners and not infringe upon the integrity of a band who did the hard work of establishing themselves. It's not for me and my colleagues to come dancing in and trash that because we're excited. We have finished another project. It's mastered. It's great. We're almost done with the next project, which is a multi-phase thing. I still have to work some more with Ian on that probably in September, and that's going to be a monster. It's so good. We go through this with that cold, sober, Lincoln-esque sobriety where we're just like, "Does this pass muster?" Because it's got to be great. Cramps fans deserve nothing less. The band's legacy deserves nothing less.
ezt: It's interesting, and correct me if I have my dates wrong, but this was recorded in 1977, partially mixed in '89, and now it's coming out in 2026. It's had this amazingly interesting-- I guess they kept returning to it, not sure about it, and here we are, it's getting ready to come out this year. That's interesting. Back to the archives and stuff, of course, you're a physical media guy. We're here in a record store today.
Did the fact that this project could survive, the tapes were in good shape, they were usable, this was something, is this something that was exciting to you from an archivist's point of view, from a physical media point of view? Is that something that you thought about while you were going through this, like, "Hey, this stuff really holds up, it all survives these years?"
Henry: Yes, absolutely. On all those levels, I was losing sleep. I had been gently urging Ivy to get those tapes out of her garage into a climate-controlled environment like the one I have. They're all in a climate-controlled environment now. We had to do a little bit of repair. I've been switching boxes out of the originals into archival boxes, so they're more stabilized. That they lasted the test of time just shows you how sturdy magnetic tape is.
Thankfully, the tapes were stored in California. If you store tapes in a garage in Wisconsin, you might not have the best results because of weather, the vicissitudes of seasons, as far as cold, hot, wet, dry, moist, whatever. Tape does not like that. On an archival, preservative, historical level, I had Ivy come over to my house in Los Angeles. I'm like, "Please, please, please, please." [laughs] She said, "Yes, well, I'll think about it." I said, "Think harder, my dear."
[laughter]
These things take as long as they take. We were able to get the tapes out. It was Larry, our good pal, Larry Hardy, who made the discovery. He was extracting the tapes from Ivy's garage. He came upon the seven quarter-inch reels that inform Gravest Gravy and said, "What's this?" She said, "Oh, it's this thing that were going to do, but we didn't." It was going to be the last Cramps album, if you want some quick history.
ezt: That's interesting.
ezt: Was the original plan, right?
Henry: By the great Stephanie Chernikowski. Everything was done. Ian and I came up with a running order, but the tracks were mixed by the gang. We just did some arrangement. Anyway, it was going to come out as their last album, the farewell, and thank you to the fans, in 2008. Then Lux, his health started to decline. He passed away in the early part of 2009. Ivy, as a very sad person who misses her man, unsurprisingly, shelled the project and just never got back to it until Larry said, "Hey, what's this?"
We can thank Larry for showing her the tapes and her explaining, which kick-started the whole thing. We would have eventually probably put out a version of this, but with Ivy giving us the details, we were able to find the photo. Extracting the photo from Getty is like extracting molars from a living person with no Novocaine. It's just a painful, long experience. Anyway, that's how that record came to be.
The rest of The Cramps stuff, that's going to be up to Cramps Inc., Larry, Ivy, and Jimmy, with Ian and I doing the legwork on tape maintenance, editing, mixing, lacquer cutting. That's all of our stuff. Ian and I, not that it matters, we do all of this for free. We just want to do the good work. I think we're pretty good at it. When I first saw The Cramps in April '79, the first time, Ian was standing next to me. It's an experience we shared. For the two of us to be working with this band's music, it's such a great thing. 50 years later, we're still best friends and still doing this really cool work.
ezt: Interestingly, Alex Chilton, who produced these sessions originally, apparently told them to play everything they knew, play all the music you know, play all the songs you know, and figure out what was worth releasing afterwards. There's something almost anti-modern about that approach. You get the musicians in the room, you record the performances, and you see what happens. Do you think contemporary recording has lost some of that willingness to capture those accidents, those happy accidents, I guess you would call them, and discover the record after the fact? Would anybody think to put a record together like that nowadays?
Henry: That's a really good question. I think the answer, for the most part, is no because of many factors. I'm not exactly spitballing it here, but you threw this at me, so I'll do the best I can. I think modern technology in the studio allows you to fix a lot of mistakes. Like the drummer just played, send him home. We'll get the kick drum together on the space bar. We'll just get a click track, and we'll fix it. I'm not going to tell you the huge band that had their live album redone. Anyway, that's how it can be done these days.
Mistakes, you can't say to a big artist, if the drummer clicks his sticks when he's going over the toms, like, "I don't know, that's the human aspect of it." Someone in the food chain is going to go, [chuckles] "No." In Pro Tools, that will get removed. If that sound is attached to another sound, a cleaner sound, we put it in its place and you, the listener, will never know. The idea of like, "Come on in and play every song you know," I highly doubt any producer is going to say that to any band because they have some A&R guy breathing down their neck saying like, "Time, money, time, money, expectation, and we need to video this because we're going to be putting it up for clicks later today."
I think just a lot of that is just the world has changed. The music world is a far more calculating, micro-marketed environment where Alex Chilton-- The Cramps came in saying, we want to record TV Set, the great Cramps song; it starts Gravest Gravy. It also starts Songs the Lord Taught Us. It was going to be First A Side. That was the mission: record that and some other tracks. I don't know what those other tracks are. Information lost to time.
Alex is the one who said, "No, don't worry about it. Just relax, New Yorkers. We're just going to play." I think Alex worked on a really organic, I wouldn't say primitive, but a real natural flow. The band is cooking. A couple of years later, he had them at Phillips Studio in '79 to do Songs the Lord Taught Us. The band were apparently really nervous to be in the place that Sam Phillips built. I think it was either him or maybe Jim Dickinson went in there, and he said, "Loosen them up. Have them stand on their gear and play."
There's photos of Lux standing on a tower of amps, singing with sunglasses on. He just said, "Shake them up. They're The Cramps. They're not some stiff studio band. Let's rock." I think that's more where Chilton was coming from, where The Cramps were relatively inexperienced when they went into the studio when they did Gravest Gravy. They had demoed before, so the studio wasn't an unfamiliar environment. Doing their thing on stage, being just wild and fun.
In the studio, they probably had no idea that could be captured if you have the right producer. If you go in with expectations, "Two songs and we must do this," you might choke. If you play 15 songs, you might forget to be uptight. That's a really good instruction to a young band. Just like, "Forget about it, play." If you listen to the record, the band was really together. Lux, very young guy as far as getting to the microphone, and in a lot of ways, a very shy guy. He really found himself as Lux Interior.
In interviews, he's very halting at times. He was so fully formed by October of '77. There's so much confidence in those vocals. Also, great phrasing, great breathing. The guy can really sing. Of course, the band is great, but he really carries it. For a young, new band, they just really had a lot of momentum, which they just invented for themselves. Chilton, I think, really saw the component parts, and as a great producer will do, he'll figure out how to make that sum greater than the sum of the parts, the overall.
ezt: If this had quietly just appeared as a collection of online files or just a streaming album or something rather than this carefully mastered, sequenced package that you guys are putting out, what are some of the essential things that would have been lost without the physical aspect of this? I'm sure you're excited to take this record and put it on your shelf in your own personal archive in the C-section, or however you organize your records. I'm sure that means a lot to you. What would really be lost, particularly to younger people who maybe don't know the whole story, don't know the whole package about the band that are just learning about it for the first time?
Henry: As a 65-year-old man, welcome to Medicare, Henry. It's not for me to tell a young person, "Sit down, shut up, and listen to this." I think they should be listening to bands who are playing in clubs and selling T-shirts right now and have those great summers before mortgage sets in. There is a story. The reason some music sounds like it does in 2026 is because of The Cramps and The Stooges and the Bad Brains and Fugazi and on and on, Sonic Youth.
There's bands who've been there before you, and bands are playing a certain way now and they don't even know they sound like whoever. I'm not saying they're clones, but everything comes from something. The Cramps are a great story. Also, if it was just an online thing and there's lots of interesting Sonic goodies on the internet as far as rare things, you'd be losing a lot of frequency response.
These tracks were mastered from the analog master tapes very, very carefully by Pete Lyman. I was there for the mastering. I was there for the lacquer cutting. I'm not an engineer, so I sat on the couch and went, "Sounds great." That was my input. The care that we took, so when you play it on vinyl, and it is a beautiful vinyl experience, The Cramps are an analog vinyl band, you get the full idea of what the band wanted you to hear.
When you hear it through your phone into your wireless ear things, you're going to hear the music, but you're not going to maybe hear all of the great sounds and subtleties. The fact that we found the cover, we found the title, we worked really hard on this, that effort, I think, comes out when you play the record, you hear the care. With the internet, you're going to get a very compressed lo-fi experience by comparison.
ezt: Of course, you're a longtime physical media person. How do you react to this resurgence of physical media vinyl, but even CDs they're talking about now? We sell cassettes over here. How do you react to that as holding the torch for so many years for this physical media and now seeing it much accepted in the mainstream culture at the current time?
Henry: I can't say I'm surprised because you, as a living, breathing human being, you're an analog creature. You're going to hear Led Zeppelin 3 on LP; your body's going to take that in emotionally as an analog thing. When you hear the CD, your body will go, "Oh, that's music." Your mind will entertain it, but you're not getting the humanity. When some people go, "Oh, vinyl people are just elitists."
No, let me sit you down in a comfortable chair and play you your favorite song if it came out on vinyl, and let's A, B it. I think you'll start to see what you're missing because it's not subtle. It's not like you can't tell the difference between vinyl and CD. The difference is often really profound. Humans are born to listen to vinyl and cassette, analog, and that a young person hears songs they love on record, and they see just the manual aspect of put the record on, take the record off, don't scratch it. Put it away carefully.
Don't stomp on it. You'll break it. Maybe there's something human about that. I had records as a little kid, which I just completely mauled with my little General Electric record player. It was punk rock and minimum wage pay and how much of an hour it cost to get a single record by The Clash that made me really be careful with my records. I've had some records for damn near 50 years now, and they look like the day I bought them just because I remember 3.75 an hour and the pain. We vinyl people, we're into vinyl for the expense and inconvenience, as we laughingly say. That kind of care, which your cell phone, you can get another one. All your music's in the cloud, man. I like the fact that physical media is yours to degrade and so you take care of it.
ezt: Yes. I had a friend in high school who had a dubbed copy of one of The Clash albums, and we were playing it on a cassette in his car, and I remember him turning to me and saying, "This is how it's supposed to sound. It's supposed to sound like this."
Henry: He's not half wrong. There really is a thing with analog and digital. I remember when CDs first came out, I was fascinated by the lack of surface noise. I went big on CDs, bought a lot of CDs. I bought the first CD player I ever saw, a Gold Star for $230. Anyway, I just remember putting on a Nick Cave CD, one of the first CDs that I ever saw of an album I liked on CD. It almost startled me when the music came out because I was so used to the sound of the crunch before the song starts, and suddenly the music came out. I was like, "Ah."
I thought it was really amazing. My friend, Ian MacKaye, said, "No." He spent so much time in the studio. He was the first guy I ever met, went, "I don't know." He never plays CDs. He has some, and maybe he might whack one into the hard drive and listen to something, but he was never taken by digital. I didn't know. Touring so much, digital playback is often what you got.
I have a CD player, and I play it about two or three hours a year. When they do a big fall box set, like The Fall, the band, they'll do a big seven-CD thing. I got to hear that. I'll fire up the CD player. I play it so little, I actually rotted out one of the computer boards in the CD player. The repair guy said, "You don't play this very often, do you?" I said, "No." He goes,
"Well, that's how you could lose parts by not." He said, "At least turn it on now and then." I'm like, "Well, no."
[laughter]
ezt: I don't want to.
Henry: I don't want to.
ezt: It's funny, too. I've been wanting to ask you this. I've, of course, heard your story over the years and listened to you talk about your collection and buying. I know you do a lot of online buying. We're here in a record store. I'm sure you've been to your fair share of record stores, no doubt. How do you compare the two experiences of buying online versus in person? There is something fun about buying stuff online and really finding it and catching that moment. I'm sure you've had a lot of crazy eBay auctions and things like that where it's very exciting. It's a much different experience. Could you talk a little bit about those two different experiences of buying records?
Henry: Sure. One of the great joys of my life is walking into a record store hoping today is the day. Even if you walk out with nothing, it was totally worth checking it out because you never know. I've walked in and walked out with something like, "No way is this thing in my hand." This has happened, and I hope it happens again and again and again. I buy records online for at least two different reasons. Convenience, and with a lot of new vinyl, if I go to Bandcamp, I also get the download.
I'm on National Public Radio as well. I need the digital files. I'm sure at my state of notoriety and elevation, I can write the label and go, "Hey, man, I bought the record. I got a show on this KCRW station, and can I get some tracks?" I'd rather not. I'd rather just get the record and get the download that comes with Bandcamp. However, on tour, I try to go into an independent record store every single day if I can. Sometimes they will actually hold the store open for me after the show, and my road manager will go into some record store like 1:00 in the morning. You got to buy something, the poor guy.
Anyway, I try and buy an independent record in an independent record store as often as I can. Quite often on Discogs, I am buying from a record store. Only I'm getting kicked in the guts with $8 to get it mailed to me. I love seeing a record at a store, picking it up, and having it in my hand. That immediacy is the coolest. A lot of the records I get at this point are the collector type, acetates, test pressings, a rare picture sleeve from wherever, where me and three other men with no lives whatsoever. We're all grimly throwing money at it as the beads of sweat condense on our upper lips as we reside in our mom's basement. Those are my people. I make fun of them, but I am one.
ezt: We're all there.
Henry: I'd much rather go to the record store. These days, a lot of vinyl doesn't come with a download card. If you want to be on my radio show, I need the digital representation to get you on the air. I really do want to get that band on the show.
ezt: What else can you say about Gravest Gravy that we haven't covered, or maybe something that was left out of that press release that is something that you were surprised with or particularly happy with? Again, I keep thinking of you just completing the C-section on your shelf with this record and feeling a deep sense of satisfaction that you were part of the team that brought this to be a mainstream release.
Henry: The hyper nerd in me being one of those people from the last century who traded tapes, that was a very busy network. Super fun. Anyway, I had early tapes of The Cramps that were traded. They're still probably being traded. A lot of them are vinyl bootlegs now. In The Cramps' early sets, you would hear them do Hungry by Paul Revere and the Raiders, a band I know next to nothing about. The first time I heard that, it was like some show in Washington, DC maybe, or Max's Kansas City or CBGB's up in New York. I said, "Hungry? What's that?" I had to do some research.
When I was listening to these mixes and all of a sudden the studio version of Hungry comes out. I was like, "No way do we have a studio version of The Cramps channeling Paul Revere and The Raiders. It's a great song, but even Chilton saying, "Play everything you've got," you're going to play a Paul Revere and The Raiders cover? Well, they did. For many years on my little radio show, I play a live version of them doing their version of Rocket in My Pocket. Jimmy Lloyd, 1956, '58. I would say, "Dear listener, I'm so sorry, but there's no studio version of this. Here's a great one from Radio Broadcast from New York."
I'm listening, and there's a studio version of Rocket in My Pocket. I'm like, "Are you kidding me? I had to wait 40-some years." The first night I saw them, "I went staggering out of the venue with Ian MacKaye and Nathan Strejcek, the singer of The Teen Idles Dischord One. I said, "I like that song, Rocket in My Pocket, and Human Fly, and Rockin' Bones. Two of those three are covers. Two of those three are on Gravest Gravy. I said to Nathan and Ian, "Well, that wasn't punk rock, was it?" That's how new to all this I was.
Nathan said, "That's rockabilly." I said, "Okay, what's rockabilly?" I had no idea. Ian and I were talking about all this as we do every Sunday we talk. He said, "The Cramps are a real gateway band." Then we started talking about how The Cramps got us into rockabilly. Suddenly, we're listening to Link Wray and Charlie Feathers and, and, and. As far as some real degenerate music, like, "Mom, Keep Your Kids Away from that band," punk rock is-- it's for wonderful degenerates like me.
It's the rockabillys who are like these really dangerous, in jail by the time he was 13, the rolled-up pack of filterless Lucky Strikes in the sleeve. It's like, scum. "Oh, he's got a band? Oh, I'll buy that record." I'm not into bad behavior, but I definitely want to hear the music. Lux and Ivy pointed that out in an interview I read or heard somewhere many years ago. They said, "You want the real outlaw music. Punk rock, it's cool, but it's the rockabillys who can't read. They play three chords because they can't count to four."
This is real, direct to the main source kind of music. It's funny to say, yes, they're all delinquents, but a lot of them were. He wrote that song in his parents' shack. They can't afford a trailer home. It's an interesting way to assess music. I never would have thought of rockabilly in that way. This is, I think, the signal Lux and Ivy were getting. This is a main line that gave you rock and roll, that gave you on and on and on. Those are records I don't think I ever would have gotten to as quickly had it not been for The Cramps.
They're a band that brought me to other music. There's very few bands like that in my life that made me go, "Oh," then I need to get 20 compilations at least to get my foot in the door. Brian Eno, who I love, never did that. I'm a Brian Eno fan, but he didn't get me into this, this, this, this, and this. It was people like Diamanda Galas, the great avant vocalist. She got me into music concrete and all kinds of avant classical stuff just from me borrowing her records. As far as a band, The Cramps really brought me to a lot of other music.
It was Ian that pointed that out in one of our Sunday talks weeks ago. I'm like, "Wow, now that you think of it, they're the band of our lives who brought us to," and he said, Link Wray. I'm like, "Oh, yeah," because Link Wray is a total, amazing rock and roll outlaw. We would have eventually gotten to Link Wray, I'm sure, but it probably would have taken a while, but The Cramps just got us right into that. I bought my first rockabilly compilation record after that Cramps show about three days later. The King-Federal Rockabillys, cut out, $2.99. It's all I could afford.
ezt: That's it. That did the trick. Maybe the reissue of this album will trigger folks who hear it to explore in their own way. Maybe it'll guide people on that journey of their own.
Henry: Wouldn't that be great? There's a lot of great music to hear. Again, I think young people should really hear music that's being made by their peers so they can really understand they are part of something that needs to replace the older guard in politics, in art. I'm not saying eradicate. I'm just saying replace. You be a Congress member now. His ideas are old. Your ideas are new. We got to go.
With music, hear whatever is happening this summer 2026, but you got to listen to John Coltrane. You got to check out Sun Ra. Bob Dylan. There's so many. There's so many. The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, Television. We could be here all day. All of those bands and all those records, you're awake. Put on a record. Listen to a lot of music. That's how I was raised. My mom had a record on all the time. By the time I was 10, Miles Davis, Bartók, Stravinsky, Barbara Streisand. I heard a ton of music as a little kid.
ezt: It's funny you bring that up because we talk about that here a lot, especially selling reissues and things like that. We have a lot of young kids buying Dark Side of the Moon, which is fine, but sometimes there's a concern that they're not checking out, as you say, music of their time and of their generation as well.
Henry: Yes. I would hope a young person has three favorite bands that are coming to town this summer. If the band is worth their weight, they have nowhere to sleep after the show, so you're going to put them up. I slept on a lot of floors in my life and relied on the kindness of strangers. I've turned that around many times. I've put up a lot of bands at different places I had where I go to the show, and I know it's going to happen next.
I've already bought the food. I already have the towels out. I go to the T-shirt booth. The band is there. I'm like, "So, gang, where are we sleeping tonight?" They're like, "We don't know." I said, "Okay, follow the blue Mazda 6. When you're done, I'm ready." I've put up so many bands for years and years and years. Maybe you'll get to do that. Some young person can like, "Hey, mom, can we--" or in your friend's house. This cool band can crash on the floor and buddies for life. You're now part of this great independent music story.
I don't have anything against these bands that play at halftime shows at the Super Bowl. Long may they wave. It's just not the music for me necessarily. It doesn't mean it's not good. I'm an old guy. I go to shows, unless it's a Tuesday night and they go on at 11. I'm often the oldest guy at the show. I stand in the back so the young whippersnappers don't break my hip when they run by. I still feel it, and I still see the value of, like, get your friends together and go to the show. You're going to meet other people.
Back in the Washington, DC music scene I come from, the way we would talk after shows, you'd get a reading list. There's three books you have to go. Albert Camus? Okay. You would meet your people. A lot of those people from the small Washington, DC scene I'm from, I'm still in touch with those people. To this day, I go to DC, Ian sets up a luncheon. We all gray-haired men get together and go like, "Back when you, me, and Mark Twain went to that show," because those were great alliances we made when Jimmy Carter was president. I think young people should have that. David Lee Roth. The great David Lee Roth once said to me, "You know why you go to a football game with your friend?" I'm like-
ezt: Why Dave?
Henry: -"I don't know what's coming next." I go, "No, Dave, why?"
ezt: Why Dave?
Henry: He said, "You go to see the game, but why you really go to the game is so 10 years later you can sit at the bar and talk about that game with your friend." I was like, "Wow, that's good, man. That's really good." You're building stories. You're building a life. It's great to be an older person and look back and go, "Man, we really-- those three summers, 18, 19, and 20, man, we ran it hot. We went to every damn show and just had a great time. Now I work at a bank. Look, life has changed." I think young people should really-- music, just my opinion, music should be a huge part of their life. Not drugs, not violence, not sloth. Books, art, culture, music. Going to the show, feeling a band in a room, smelling other people, it's humanity.
ezt: Human experience.
Henry: You won't freak out on a subway when someone's hair touches your cheek. Like, "Oh, that reminds me of 80,000 shows I've been to." I think it makes for a more civilized society when we're culturalized. It comes from, "Hey, let's go to the show." You just see so much youthful intensity and all the great hits and misses of youth. I think there's no monetary value you can put on it. It exceeds all value you can pay for.
ezt: Listen, I really appreciate your time and insight today. I want you to know how much I resisted, As I said, I'm in a mall here in New Jersey, I resisted setting up in front of the Häagen-Dazs to conduct this interview. I really wanted to do that.
Henry: Oh, would it make me feel. I would have missed home.
Interviewer: I thought that would have been worth a few yucks. Anyway, Mr. Henry Rollins, I really thank you for your time today. This was really a lot of fun to talk to you.
ezt: Thank you. Say hello to all my good friends in Trenton.
