Tom Neely’s indie comic Henry & Glenn Forever has an amazing premise that made it an instant classic: the very very well known punk/metal singers Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig are a couple in a long term romantic relationship, living together in a house next door to Daryl Hall and John Oates, who are perennially robe-clad members of a Satanist cult. Rollins was as tickled by the premise as one would expect, characterizing it as one of his favorite uses of satire. Also predictably, Danzig was not amused, and he expressed as much to a Decibel writer for an article which, alas, is no longer online, forcing me to link here to God damned Uproxx.

That premise has yielded much fruit—the original 6x6” book in 2010, four serialized comic books published between 2012-13, and a 2014 trade paperback that collects the comics with a generous amount of additional material, and which coincided with an exhibit at L.A.‘s La Luz de Jesus gallery. This year, the series’ publisher, Microcosm (we’ve told you about them before) is puling out all the stops on the conceit, releasing Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever: The Completely Ridiculous Edition, which includes under its wonderful Tom of Finland parody cover all of the foregoing, plus even more previously unpublished material, and a foreword by ROB FUCKING HALFORD OF JUDAS FUCKING PRIEST.

Also on the horizon is the wonderful Henry & Glenn Adult Activity and Coloring Book. Like it says on the cover, the book features 132 pages of coloring fun by an assortment of artists, plus other activities including mazes that look like intestines, paper dolls—“Marriage Equality Glenn” is a winner—and a word search. You don’t even have to be familiar with the comics to find this all utterly hilarious. Though the book doesn’t come out until November, Microcosm let us pick through it to share several of our favorite pages with you. All art is by Tom Neely unless otherwise specified. Clicking an image spawns an enlargement.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go! has become the traditional graduation gift of our generation. It’s June, and people are graduating, so Funny or Die decided to enlist everyone’s favorite hardcore hunk, Henry Rollins, to sit a spell and read from the beloved volume.

Henry’s more of a literary figure than you might realize—he’s been publishing books for years on his 2.13.61 imprint—personally, I’d like to see a Dr. Seuss treatment of Pissing in the Gene Pool.......
 

Nice kid. Can we get an Einstürzende Neubauten homunculus on there?
 
Fortunately, it turns out that this isn’t just Rollins “reading” Seuss, it’s Rollins “reading and deconstructing” Seuss, which means that the video consists less of Theodore Geisel’s winsome versifying and much more of Rollins’ fervent crabbing about the silly-ass text.

And we’re all for that! Click and enjoy.
 
Henry Rollins Reads Dr. Seuss

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Nick Cave meets Dr. Seuss

 
Richard Kern was a big part of the underground cinema of the East Village in the 1980s. Among other things, he directed videos for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ‘69” (which featured Lydia Lunch, of course) and King Missile’s ”Detachable Penis.” Kern was very much a part of the same scene that was more or less defined by Nick Zedd. He made many experimental and sexual movies on Super-8.

According to Richard Kostelanetz in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes,
 

This fascination with the dark side of looking—with the dynamics and aesthetics of voyeurism—is Richard Kern’s theme and it runs through his films and photography. In many ways, Kern’s work is a culmination of self-referential approaches to depicting the artist’s relationship to his “subject.” And his subject is a kind of seeing. ... In many ways his movies are responses to popular film and commercial culture as a whole.

  
One of Kern’s early movies was The Right Side of My Brain, a 23-minute black-and-white experimental movie that is unabashedly about sex, violence, and control. This movie is about as NSFW as anything we’ve ever presented on the site.
 

 
The whole movie is told from the point of view of the character played by Lydia Lunch in a dreamy and sexualized and insular mode that was well-nigh invented by Maya Deren in 1943’s “Meshes of the Afternoon.” Lunch’s character goes through a series of assignations that involve varying degrees of violence. Around the 10th minute an actor credited as Clint Ruin (actually the musician J.G. Thirlwell) shows up and he proceeds to dominate Lunch’s character somewhat, after which she gives him a blow job. Yes, you read that right, most of that highly X-rated act is captured in the movie.

The bulk of the movie was shot in some claustrophobic NYC tenement, but in the sole outdoor sequence—possibly shot in Central Park?—Henry Rollins appears and follows the Lunch character. They too start making out and then the Rollins character has a kind of tantrum.
 

 
By the bye, when this was shot Rollins had the “SEARCH AND DESTROY” part of his back tattoo in place but not the rest. At one point Lunch is shown wearing a T-shirt with the Einstürzende Neubauten homunculus on it.

The images of sexual violence are, of course, disturbing; many ladies in the audience will enjoy the three smoking hot dudes in various states of undress.

The Right Side of My Brain is available on Blu-Ray in Hardcore Collection: Director’s Cut.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lydia Lunch’s sexy ‘Fashion Calendar,’ 1978
Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins: A tale of jealousy, rage and obsession

Greg, Anthony, Kira and Henry of Black Flag
 
Black Flag was the band that got me into punk, or “hardcore” if you insist (back then the terms were interchangeable).

My War is my go-to record to this day when normal life goes to shitsville. In what I hope wasn’t too fanboyish of a moment, I once told Rollins to his face that I’d gladly toss every one of the records in my (stupidly extensive) collection if I were allowed to keep My War—and I wasn’t lying. It’s simply a record that was there for me every time I needed it. Sometimes a record finds you at the right place and time in your life, and you make an emotional connection with it—for me My War was that record and Black Flag was that band.
 

 
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s I got heavily into the VHS tape-trading scene and was able to acquire pretty much everything that existed as far as live documentations of Black Flag—or so I thought. With the advent of YouTube, so much more has come to the surface. I’m constantly surprised by what bubbles up.

I recently ran across three killer live Black Flag videos I had no prior knowledge of. The videos are from May 31st, 1982 at “My Father’s Place” in Roslyn, New York; April 9th, 1984 in Richmond, Virginia; and October 19th, 1984 at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Shout out to Internet saint anonym0us2112 for uploading these and a number of other excellent music videos.

The quality varies a bit on these shows; the sound is OKayyyy for ‘80s video recordings, but the picture quality is decent. The Richmond show, in particular, looks as if it’s from a fairly low-generation source. These certainly wouldn’t be the ideal introductions to the group for a first-time listener, but for die-hard fans this is pure gold.

Black Flag’s guitarist, Greg Ginn, is notorious for having content removed from YouTube so watch these while you can—soak in every Rollins pelvic gyration and brow furrowing before the YouTube police get involved. Incredibly, these videos have been online for seven months, but as of this writing the three clips have less than 2,500 total views combined. I suspect that’s going to change today.

All three after the jump. Watch ‘em while you still can…

 
In the never ending mashup of cool nerds and music enthusiasts, a group of scientists from the University of Bristol in the UK and the Natural History Museum in London have named a newly discovered species of particularly muscular fossil fireworms after D.C. hardcore punk rocker (who has worn many creative hats throughout the decades), Henry Rollins.

During a study of the fossilized remains of the Rollinschaeta myoplena (fossilization is a rare event in nature when it comes to worms) the team was able to determine the species was a close relative of earthworms and leeches as well as a member of the “fireworm” (or “Amphinomidae”) family. All of which (unlike Mr. Rollins), have soft bodies. Comparatively speaking, this worm’s got a six-pack, in worm terms.
 

The fossilized remains of Rollinschaeta myoplena

According to Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum, (the co-author of the study) this was the first time that “any fossil has been identified by its muscle anatomy.” Sadly, the Rollinschaeta is extinct so we can’t all run out and start a new hardcore punk rock worm colony in our basements.

No word on what Rollins thinks of all this, but he joins a growing list of musicians who have had animals speciesnamed after them like Lou Reed, whose name is now synonomous with a species of velvet spider known as Loureedia, David Bowie provided the namesake for a rare type of Malaysia spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, and Frank Zappa who had the distinct honor to have a jellyfish named after him, the Phialella zappai. 
 

 
Zappa has an even stranger claim to scientific immortality: a type of bacteria that causes pimples was dubbed Propionibacterium zappae:

 

Loureedia annulipes, an underground-dwelling genus of velvet spider discovered in Israel
 

 
‘Spider from Mars’: Heteropoda davidbowie, discovered in Malaysia in 2009.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘I Have Come to Kill You:’ Henry Rollins parodies Queen

 
Ghost on the Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club, directors Andrew Powell and Kurt Voss’s 2006 documentary about the legendary Los Angeles-born punk blues singer has no footage of Gun Club actually playing music, in fact it has no actual Gun Club music in it whatsoever and precious little footage of its subject.

One can surmise that Pierce’s family decided not to participate with Powell and Voss’s movie bio and the filmmakers were left to put together this “feature-length” documentary with just talking head interviews with former Gun Club members Kid Congo Powers, Ward Dotson, Terry Graham, Jim Duckworth and Dee Pop along with Henry Rollins, Lemmy, John Doe and Pleasant Gehman. Because that’s all it is, basically. Under different circumstances, it would have no doubt been a better film.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I’ve watched this 75-minute old movie twice and if you are a fan of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club, this modest film is a must. Obviously there is a lot of “myth” that’s grown around the person of Jeffrey Lee, who died at the age of 37 from a brain haemorrhage in 1996 and although this is more of an “oral history” than a documentary per se, it gets to the heart of the truth about the real Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who by turns is described as brilliant, tortured, loveable but mostly just as a complete and utter asshole and colossal, detestable fuckup junkie and drunk.

Although little of what the viewer learns about the life and times of Jeffrey Lee Pierce in Ghost on the Highway is particularly, er, complimentary, it didn’t really change my feelings about the man one iota. Anyone who knows anything about him knows where the story arc trends after the commercial break in this low budget Behind the Music, so it comes as zero surprise how many people thought the guy was a punk. Clearly he was an asshole, but he was also a great artist who made transcendent music. I only ever saw him from standing in the audience, so he gets a pass from me.
 

 
After the jump, a ‘Mother Juno’-era Gun Club set shot in Los Angeles in 1988…

 
In 1987, Henry Rollins, fresh from Black Flag’s breakup, released his first two solo records, Hot Animal Machine under his own name, and the six-song EP Drive By Shooting under the name “Henrietta Collins and the Wife Beating Child Haters.” I should probably specify that these were his first musical solo records—he’d already released two spoken word albums by then.
 

 
Both were recorded during the same month with the same backup band, but Drive By Shooting is by far the goofier record. It opens with the title song, a ridiculous travesty of surf-rock tropes. It’s not ALL silly—the album also boasts a great cover of Wire’s “Ex-Lion Tamer.” But then there’s “I Have Come to Kill You,” a send-up of Queen’s distinctive hit “We Will Rock You.” The EP, by the way, isn’t particularly rare, and the original vinyl can be found online at quite reasonable prices. It’s also included with the CD version of Hot Animal Machine
 

 
At first blush, the linkage of Henry Rollins, who came out of D.C.‘s straight edge scene—he’s obviously tight buddies with Ian MacKaye, the man who wrote the song “Straight Edge”—and Jerry Garcia, one of the most drug-friendly musicians who ever lived, seems more than a little bit odd. But maybe that’s just your square categories, maaaaan! Artists go where artists wanna go, and there’s no predicting where they’ll end up.

It turns out that even though he desists from using drugs, including alcohol, Rollins doesn’t really identify as a straight edge. (In that interview, Rollins discusses the handful of times he’s used marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms, and it’s a pretty entertaining read.) Discussing his penchant for tangents in his spoken-word appearances—and the occasional necessity for the audience to guide him back to the original fork in the road—Rollins in a 2008 invoked the atmosphere at Grateful Dead shows as a comparison: “It reminds me of when I’d go see the Grateful Dead, and Jerry Garcia would make a mistake and everyone would applaud: ‘Yeah, nice one, Fat Boy!’ It’s a very friendly environment.” So Henry Rollins likes Grateful Dead shows—here’s hoping that he dispensed more miracles than he received!
 

Wartime (Henry Rollins and Andrew Weiss)
 
Rollins former Black Flag band member Greg Ginn told Rolling Stone in 1985 that he dreamed of the group opening for the Grateful Dead and Dead tee-shirts were reportedly commonly seen worn by Black Flag’s roadies. As a working musician in California, it’s wouldn’t be all that unlikely that Rollins would meet Jerry—indeed, he probably did. In 1987, while working on Life Time, the first Rollins Band album, his studio was in the same building as the space the Grateful Dead was using when they remastered their back catalog for CD, and they hung out a little bit:
 

I was in L.A., mastering my first band album, Life Time, at a place I believe was called Digital Magnetics. The Grateful Dead were across from me, working on their first batch of CDs. I was told that all the way down at the end of the hall, a member of The Doors and their producer, Paul Rothchild, were working on remastering the band’s catalog for CD. ... I had someone relay a message to Paul and company that I was in the building. ... Moments later, Paul came into my small room and asked if I wanted to come in and have a listen to what they were doing. Uh, yeah!

 

 
In 1990 Rollins and his longtime bassist Andrew Weiss (who, incidentally, producer of several Ween albums) released an EP under the name Wartime called Fast Food for Thought. The EP’s fifth and final track was a cover of “Franklin’s Tower,” off of the Grateful Dead’s 1975 album Blues for Allah. Since Wartime consisted only of a vocalist and a bassist, it sounds very different from the Dead’s melodic guitar jamming. But the lyrics are entirely unchanged, and, at around eight minutes in length, it’s nearly twice as long as the original album cut, and honors the Dead’s jammy legacy.
 

 
In 2009, asked in an email interview “What made you want to cover a Grateful Dead tune?” Rollins replied, “We thought it would sound good with a go-go beat.” As it happens, a block away from my Cleveland apartment is a building with the words “Franklin Tower” written prominently above the entrance, and I think of Wartime’s cover every time I walk my dog. Here’s the original cut and Wartime’s take on it. It’s not for everyone, but I enjoy it.

The Grateful Dead, “Franklin’s Tower”:

 
Wartime, “Franklin’s Tower”:

 
Henry Rollins has had one fascinating life. He was in one of the most important punk bands of all time, he played Vanilla Ice in a music video, he has been the voiceover actor for Infiniti, he had a talk show on IFC, he had a small part in Jack Frost.....

In the 1980s Rollins also produced a full album by Charles Manson for SST, which would have made the noted psychopath and cult leader, who wanted to bring about a race war, labelmates with Bad Brains. The release of the album, entitled Completion, was cancelled due to safety concerns. Only five copies of the album were ever pressed; two belong to Rollins and the other three apparently are Manson’s.

In December 2010, Rollins participated in an event at the Echoplex in Los Angeles to benefit the Santa Monica radio station KCRW in which he played a variety of ultra-rare tracks, including a live rendition of “Pay to Cum” from the second show Bad Brains ever played, the first-ever Fugazi demo (“Waiting Room”), several Black Flag rarities, and one of the songs from the Manson album Rollins produced for SST. When he played the track—the title of which has, to my knowledge, not been made public—Rollins joked, “I can hear you all listening to your hair grow.”

In 2008 Rollins told the NME of the correspondence with Manson that led to the recordings:
 

“He wrote me a letter out of the blue once and he said, ‘I saw you on MTV and I thought you were pretty cool’.

“So we corresponded a few times in 1984; I’d just tell him about what we were doing with our new record and he’d send back semi-lucid responses.

“He made references to The Beach Boys stealing his ideas, which sounded like sour grapes, and told me to tell everybody else to take care of wildlife. That must have been the old hippy in him talking.”

Rollins outlined that he was very young when he started corresponding with Manson—who was sentenced to life in 1971 for the infamous Manson Family Murders which took place two years earlier.

“At the time I was very young and having him write me letters made me feel very intense and heavy,” he said. “I’d always know I’d have a letter in my PO Box from him because the woman behind the counter at the post office would give you this awful look.

“His letters would always have swastikas on them so they were easy to spot.”

 
According to a 2010 article in The Guardian, “A lawyer representing Manson wrote to SST, asking them to help complete and release a collection of Manson’s songs. Then as now, Manson was serving a life sentence for his role in the Tate/LaBianca murders. ... Rollins agreed to produce the songs but a string of death threats forced SST to call off the project.”

In the mind of almost everyone, Manson is first and foremost a homicidal lunatic. It’s quite clear that in his own mind, Manson is first and foremost a musician. During his detainment before his 1971 trial, Manson was “very anxious for his music to be heard” and enlisted his friend Phil Kaufman to get his music released. Indeed, an album called Lie: The Love & Terror Cult was released on March 6, 1970. As recently as 2010-11 Manson has released two albums of folk music on Magic Bullet Records called Air and Trees. Here’s “Gas Chamber,” a track from Air.
 

 
Melvins’ frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne guest DJ’d on Henry Rollins’ KCRW show last Sunday. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these two yap about music and life. Buzz describes his playlist as “musically schizophrenic.” I’m going to have to agree.

It’s definitely a fun listen. Hope you enjoy.

Set List

Albert King – Born Under a Bad Sign
Brainiac – Fresh New Eyes
Gang of Four – Paralyzed
Scientists – Set it on Fire
Judy Garland – Stormy Weather
The Fugs – I Want to Know
U-Men – Blight
Birthday Party – Fears of Gun
King Buzzo – Drunken Baby
Jimi Hendrix – Power of Love
Miles Davis – Black Satin
Tweak Bird – Spaceships
David Bowie – Quicksand
Bobby Darin – Beyond the Sea
Gun Club – Ghost on the Highway
MC5 – I Want You Right Now
Tom Waits – Bad as Me
Latin Playboys – Lemon ‘N Ice
Captain Beefheart – Glider
Bob Dylan – It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Buck Owens – Memphis

 
I’m a Rollins fan, but this “My Talking Henry Rollins!” doll fake advert by Down the Show is pretty darn funny.

Admit it, you want this to be real thing... I know I sure do!
 

 
h/t Cherry Bombed

 
Henry Rollins ain’t no George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. He takes aim at sitting ducks like people who shop at Walmart and he isn’t particularly funny and his insights are hardly revelations. But for some reason people really dig him. I don’t get it. I personally don’t turn to rock singers for their analytical thinking or wisdom. Not even the smart ones like John Lennon or Frank Zappa. They may be remarkable musicians but their satirical writings tend to be obvious and sophomoric.

Listening today to my old Mothers Of Invention albums, the stuff that seemed so outrageous and cool to me when I was a teenager seems trite to me now. Zappa’s targets were sitting ducks, too, but at least the ducks were relatively fresh. On the other hand, Henry Rollins’ rants seem tired and cliche-ridden. It’s easy to make fun of the defenseless slobs who work at Walmart or hipster douche-baggery, the military and frat boys. We did that shit back in the Sixties. So when I hear Rollins going on about the culture of greed and the idiocy that surrounds us it all sounds tired and worn out. We know this stuff already. It ain’t funny. In fact, at times, I think it’s cruel and hipper-than-thou classism. Rollins may consider himself some kind of edgy philosopher but I find him to be a dim-witted meathead with a slightly better than average vocabulary and a bunch of half-baked ideas who takes on subjects that have already been beaten to a pulp by superior humorists like the genuinely funny Bill Hicks.

Here’s Rollins in his perfect setting as a cartoon character…
 

 
Fun photos of Henry Rollins (and Ian MacKaye) back when he worked at a Häagen-Dazs, circa 1981.

Apparently Henry was a model employee at his Washington D.C. area Häagen-Dazs franchise. He was promoted to assistant manager!

More images available like this in the book Punk Love by Susie J. Horgan.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Listen to Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye’s 2-hour DJ set on KCRW
 

 

 

 

Via BuzzFeed

 
It’s always a treat to see Henry Rollins interviewing anyone, even more so when it’s one of the early architects of rock ‘n’ roll. Hank’s hosting skills are exceptional. Clearly a fan, he’s very proficient in the relevant rock history, and he knows how to keep an interview interesting. But Jerry Lee Lewis? I mean, hey I love Jerry Lee Lewis’ music, but Jerry Lee Lewis is just as well-known for being a dirtbag as he is for his amazing music.

I don’t expect Rollins to give a damn about petty ethics, of course, but he’s a man with a reputation for being just a teensy bit self-righteous and rigidly moral. It’s weird to watch him interview an artist who very publicly married his 13-year-old cousin, as if there’s not a giant pervy elephant in the room. (And before you go all cultural relativist on me, cousin-marrying was not more common in the south than anywhere else in the US, and while marriages average younger in poorer communities, I can assure you, an adult marrying a 13-year-old would still be considered fucking creepy by every old redneck I know.)

Still, Lewis has great stories about Sun studios, and intergenerational rock ‘n’ roll kibitzing is always a fascinating thing to watch.
 

 
Bryan Ray Turcotte, author the classic chronicle of punk rock handbills and posters, Fucked Up + Photocopied, has one of the largest private collections of punk rock-related ephemera in the world—he’s a one-man Smithsonian Institute of the counterculture, truly a maven’s maven.

When I got advance notice that one of the world’s most prominent archivists and historians on the matter of punk rock’s graphic design had made (with Bo Bushnell) a film about Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon , I was expecting something pretty great and… it’s excellent!

It went live this morning. I got the link a little while ago and promptly sat down and watched the whole thing:

On the first episode of “The Art of Punk” we dissect the art of the legendary Black Flag. From the iconic four bars symbols, to the many coveted and collected gig flyers, singles, and band t-shirts, all depicting the distinctive Indian ink drawn image and text by artist Raymond Pettibon. We start off in Los Angeles talking to two founding members, singer Keith Morris and bass player Chuck Dukowski, about what the scene was like in 1976 - setting the stage for the band’s formation, as well as the bands name, and the creation of the iconic four bars symbol. Raymond Pettibon talks with us from his New York art studio. Back in LA we meet with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about how the art, the music, and that early LA scene impacted his own life and career. To wrap it all up we sit and talk at length, with Henry Rollins, at MOCA Grand Ave in Los Angeles, about all of the above and more.

What’s so compelling about this piece is how filmmakers Turcotte and Bushnell tell you a story that you haven’t already heard a gazillion times before by focusing in on the graphics and how important an iconic logo was back then for outsider kids to rally around, wear on their chests or have etched into their flesh.

In the film, Flea makes, I thought, an especially valuable contribution, because he was young enough then (like Rollins himself was, of course) to have been in the audience and he speaks to how seeing a group like Black Flag could change your direction in life. From what I have heard from a number of people, Flea’s supposed to have an absolutely first rate modern art collection. He’s really inspired when he speaks here.

A production of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. New MOCAtv  episodes exploring the visual identities of Dead Kennedys and Crass will debut soon at the MOCAtv YouTube channel
 

Above, Flea in his Pettibon-festooned bathroom
 

 
Thank you Tim NoPlace!