Henry Rollins and Alan Vega
The Rolodex and the Invisible Man
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in Smug Magazine Vol. II Issue#7 (1996)
Henry Rollins is on the phone. He stands in the middle of the New York office of 2.13.61 Records, talking. Ten minutes later, he hangs up and, not missing the downbeat, segues right into a discussion with Jim, 2.13's general manager. He is a walking audio book.
Rollins wears only the necessary clothing: a pair of those shorts, old dingy white T-shirt with, yes, a pen clipped to the top left inside, and black sneakers. Tattoos take up the space more clothing would have. He is tight, controlled, eyes quickly shifting to whoever and whatever needs his attention: his staff, Alan Vega, the fax machine, the heavy maple cabinet that needs to be moved. He is business.
2.13.61 Records has just recently moved into this modest lower Broadway office. With a colleague's recording studio one floor up that both Rollins and Vega now use, it is convenient besides small and practical, furnished with Salvation Army bargains. The most improbable of these finds is an ivory and sea green rug patterned with seashells. Black and white photos hang behind the simple black desk, the first a live shot of James Chance/White.
Photos from the Peppermint Lounge, re-releases of Gang of Four and Devo records, books by Exene Cervenka and Nick Cave: Rollins is collecting the early '80s like others collect Mission furniture. One piece at a time.
Rollins' most recent acquisition is Alan Vega, the jabbering half of late '70s/early '80s legendary New York techno-nihilists Suicide. Vega's eighth solo record and first for 2.13, Dujang Prang, is a chugging clangorous assault that perfects the anarchic chaos Suicide began years ago.
In seeming protection from the outside world, the striking Alan Vega of 1977 is hidden somewhere inside this 1996 Alan Vega, who is enveloped in layers of baggy clothing, with large dark glasses concealing face left below the brim of a low-pulled cap. Only his mouth, chin and hands show, compensation for his cohort's lack of clothing. He's the Invisible Man, Claude Rains Brooklyn-style.
The door opens. "Henry Rollins?" a messenger asks loudly. Before anyone can accept the package for him, Rollins has signed for the delivery. The messenger sizes Rollins up. "You the man that was in that picture by any chance?"
"I've been in a few," Rollins replies.
"The one with, uh--"
"Charlie Sheen."
"Yeah, yeah, there you go. Good stuff, man, good stuff! Have a good day!" Grinning, the messenger leaves. The package is from Mirimax.
Hollywood films. Records for DreamWorks. Owner of one label, 2.13.61 Records, that puts out "real music" like Vega, avant-jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, and new/no wave Bush Tetras; and another, Infinite Zero, co-owned with Rick Rubin, that is in the process of reissuing every album that has ever influenced the pair, Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime to Flipper's Sex Bomb Baby. So far, overwhelming for lesser men. But Henry Rollins is a greater man than you or I, and there's plenty more. Writing books, recording books (he's just released his second audio book, Everything--a chapter of his new book Eye Scream--on 2.13), spoken-word shows, editing and publishing books on his imprint 2.13.61 Publications, the latest of which is the autobiography of David Lee Roth.
"I like weekends the best because the phone doesn't ring as much. I can work more," Rollins says.
Rollins' unrelenting work ethic is shared by Vega, though Vega has an different method. "You should see this guy," Vega points at Rollins. "I like to every now and then take a cigarette break, a coffee break . . . a little humor, a little talk, a little stupidity, you know. But not him, no. It's beautiful to see it though, really, he's amazingly intense. That's why he gets so much done."
The phone rings. Rollins' body reacts automatically. He jumps up in his seat, looking around to see if anyone is answering it. Of course, the two person 2.13 staff is here, but they had let it get to two rings.
TWO SIDES / SAME COIN
On the surface, Rollins and Vega, and their musics, seem like the inverse of the other. But underneath it's evident they are really two halves of the same person.
Vega is the subconscious. His music is New York personified: subway screeching underground, traffic roaring overground, generators pumping, jackhammers ripping, brief snatches of melodies drifting over from a radio on a stoop down the block. Over drum machines and synth loops, Vega burbles and yelps like the crazy guy sitting next to you on the A train.
Rollins is the ego. Structured, left brain, clean. He speaks in complete sentences, without ums or uhs. If interrupted, he'll continue his sentence around the intrusion. He uses military terms. At the beginning of Everything, Rollins says, "This is my job: to tell everything," and he does, continuously. But he edits before he speaks, not afraid of a second of silence while thinking through the next phrase, unlike Vega, who prefers an unedited, steady wash of sound.
Slurring his words together with just the barest hint of consonants to grab on to, Vega has a brain that clocks 180bpm coupled with a Bensonhurst-issue mouth. Sentences are dropped after a few words as the next thought is patched right in. Oddly enough, you understand him perfectly.
Rollins' obsession with the creative process makes this human Word-O-Matic an excellent study for him. Vega's improvisational ability ranks him, at least for Rollins, in the elite corps of jazz musicians--the ultimate Rollins compliment. "To me, he's like a be-bopper. He's just so connected to the music he's in it. He's transparent. He's invisible in the mix cause he's so close to it. Like Coltrane. He's not even playing music. He's just playing Coltrane."
Vega's water-main-break gush of creativity is mind-blowing to methodical perfectionist Rollins. "I go about the songwriting process way more traditionally. I sit down and write songs on paper or at band practice. Then I revise them and edit them. Like Tom Petty, like Bob Dylan. Pretty normal." And Vega? "When we had to get the lyrics for a song off his last record, I called up Alan and said 'send over the lyrics for "Hammered,"' and he went, 'uh, get me a tape of the song, I have to play it, 'cause I don't know what I did.'"
"Naw, I'm not that bad!" counters Vega. "I did know what I did, it's just I forget everything as soon as I do it."
But that seems to be part of the plan. "I don't wanna sing the same way every night, it's boring," admits Vega. "That's the kind of music I write so then when I have to gig it, I can sing a whole nuther thing and it'll still fit cuz at least I know the rhythmic thing of it. When I'm out there, the adrenaline's pumpin', brain goes into an overdrive place, and I just manage to do it, that's my style.
"Other than that, Henry and I are very similar."
When Rollins was eighteen and living in D.C., he and pal Ian MacKaye found Suicide's 1977 debut record in a cut-out bin for three bucks and bought it because it looked maniacal. "We dragged it home and listened to it up in Ian's attic and just tripped out listening to 'Frankie Teardrop.' I remember never having a record have that kind of impact on me. I was sitting at attention. Scared the hell out of me."
Suicide and Alan Vega have been in Rollins' mental Rolodex since, along with others who have pulled the rug out from under him. The influences stay with him through the years and so does those Rolodex cards. He comes across an opportunity and out comes a card.
"Henry called me six years ago," Vega relates. "My wife said Henry Rollins wanted to speak with me, right, and I'm sitting there going, what possibly could we have in common?" True: the two men at either end of the maroon and brown cowboy couch (another Salvation Army score) couldn't seem more different.
"I'd seen Henry a couple times in the Black Flag days in New York, I really liked the band, but I'm going like, man, these guys are a bunch of neo-Nazis or something, they way they looked. Coming from where Marty [Rev, Vega's partner in Suicide] and I were coming from, in a political sense, we thought they were diametrically opposed to what we stood for. Even though I didn't really hear what he was singing or anything."
After tracking down Vega's 1990 Europe-released Deuce Avenue in Germany, Rollins, obsessed with the music, tracked down Vega himself in New York. Confronted with Rollins' charm ("Look! I really want to meet you!"), Vega acquiesced to a visit. "We thought it was gonna be like a half hour thing," says Vega, since Rollins' intent was to propose a book of Vega's lyrics (Cripple Nation is now one of 2.13.61 Publications' best-sellers). "We just started tawkin' and tawkin'--five hours, six hours, we're totally the same. We realized we're politically the same place, aesthetically the same place."
Since Vega had released albums solely on European labels (all now available on Infinite Zero) save for two records on Elektra in the mid-'80s, the perception of him is, says Rollins, "Oh, what ever happened to that guy? He doesn't have any records out, he must be some burned-out junkie somewhere. And then when you go to his apartment, there's sculpture, there's painting, there's two records he's working on, there's video art--the guy's on fire. He hasn't stopped since '74. If anything, his metabolism's picked up."
THEY HATE IT / THEY HAVE TO DO IT
"The reason I fell in love with Alan's music was, this is necessary music," explains Rollins. "When I heard Suicide, this music had to be done by these guys. It was an essential record." (Rollins and Vega are working on reissuing those early Suicide records.) "Song music coming from the guts and real need to express. Not to make money, not to look good. You hear someone who's gotta make this music: 'I have to make music, otherwise my head will fly off.'"
"I have a hard time writing," says Vega. "I know he writes and writes. I really hate it. Maybe that's why it comes out like crazed. Because it's anguished. I wait until really late at night, until I'm completely out of my mind. I'll write and write and write and write, then I'll just put it away. What I have to do is go through stacks that are this big of stuff I've written. It's like a term paper for me."
Rollins, also tormented, agrees. "It hurts to create. I hate writing. I can't spare myself from it. Like my last book, proofreading that thing was excruciating. It was like peeling my skin off. I couldn't take it anymore. It's very painful stuff. I have to write it, though. I write to rid myself of writing."
"The well never gets empty," says Vega.
"Sometimes you wish it would so you could just--"
"--take a vacation--"
"--from yourself. It's so claustrophobic sometimes."
In the runaway-train life of compulsives, the next project steamrolls right over the current one. "After finishing an album, man, it leaves you with more questions than you have answers," laments Vega. "You're starting to hear something else that you created by making that record in the first place. You created another problem."
The process for Rollins, who works "by committee," is more like problem solving than raising. "The guys will play some kind of chord progression and all of a sudden the Rolodex of song ideas in my head opens and it goes 'you want this one for that riff.' Then I'll go for a long walk that night, and all the lyrics will usually come within a mile. It's always been that way for me because I'm musically stupid. I don't play an instrument, I can't read music. I'm a bat, I can't see it, but I can get there 'cause I can hear it. I have a sense, my own way of getting to it. Like an idiot savant thing."
Vega protests Rollins' self-deprecation. "C'mon--"
"Well, it's not musically cultured. The lyrics for me aren't hard, it's the idea. Like Escher said, the drawing is mechanical, the idea for the drawing is what's hard. The rest is words." His voice drops.
Vega continues to protest. "He's amazing . . . so good with them . . ."
"What's an idea that's good enough to rip your heart out about for four minutes? That's hard to do. Without repeating yourself."
Harder for some. In the last fifteen months, the Rollins Band has produced twenty songs now ready for recording. In the same period, Vega has geysered two new albums, Trinity and Cubist Blues (with Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn). It could be that, with no history of committee work, Vega is used to just doing what he wants.
"Through the evils of the recording industry in America, [Vega] has been left alone. All through the '90s, he didn't have a record out in America. He was unbothered by people going, 'Alan, we think you should bring in the chicks as backup singers.' Alan's been left alone just to be pure Alan."
Pure Rollins is something harder to achieve, especially now that the Rollins Band records for the Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen label, DreamWorks. "I have to fight it off," Rollins agrees. "I have people coming to me every day with Good Ideas."
One of those ideas, albeit presented to him by Vega and not some industry suit, is a Rollins/Vega album. As inconceivable as it is to imagine Rollins in front of such a backdrop, it will have synths and beats. "Man, I'm ready!" Rollins exclaims. "Cause I've been doing nothing but guitar music all my life. I've done over twenty albums of guitar, bass, drums and vocal. I'm not bored with guitar music, I'm just hot to trot with something else."
UNDERGROUND / OVERGROUND
Collecting Early Punk is actually part of a larger campaign.
"Pay back your heroes. It's like re-con. Go back in, grab these guys--not because they're pathetic and can't do it themselves, it's just 'cause the industry has turned into a beast that has forgotten about art and is crassly going after the dollar."
Rollins views the 2.13 imprints and Infinite Zero, and his life in toto, as infiltration. "It's like [whistles], 'I'm over the wall! Come on!' I'm on a major label for my band, I get major label money, I do major company movies. I know how to deal with people. I get an in: come on! I mean, that's what you gotta do. You just gotta put the grease paint on your face and sneak in."
Many people no doubt would interpret this as "selling out."
"Oh, I get the sellout thing nailed on me all the time," snorts Rollins. "Are you kidding? I'm infiltrating, I'm getting us in. To me, it was always about getting the underground overground."
Vega jumps to his defense. "The money he makes he puts it back in here."
"This is it!" Rollins says, hands held out. "You're sitting in it!"
"Most rock stars--" Vega corrects himself, "or supposed rock stars--" It's still not right, and he apologizes to Rollins, then tries again. "I mean what I was gonna say is that you hear these other kind of rock stars who always talk about doing something, but all they do is buy bigger houses and faster cars."
"Every penny I get goes into recording someone, buying up someone's master, or getting faster computer gear. To keep throwing my little monkey wrench into the big machine. It's a howl in the abyss, but this is punk rock. Punk rock hits middle age. People say 'you sold out.' Man, if you knew how much I am on your side in the trench, you wouldn't be saying that about me."
"They always say that stuff, man," Vega commiserates. "I wasn't two minutes away from signing a contract with Elektra after fifteen years in the biz, right away everybody's like 'you're selling out.' We're all working real hard. I work constantly. I could never just go on vacation. My head is always going. It never turns off. The older you get, it gets worse."
Rollins concurs. "I don't have a girlfriend. I don't even think about it. Book project. Record project. To me, Tuesday is the same as Saturday. Sunday night, I'm working. Sunday, I'm working. It's the disease. The more you get done, the more you think that you gotta get done.
"A vacation would be useless to me. I'd sit there on the beach and go 'is there a fax machine around here?'"
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