Henry Rollins is publishing a new autobiographical memoir next year. Bait Dog Boy is described by Random House as “a searing memoir of a broken childhood and the hope of escaping it” and as “a coming-of-age story with the teeth and truth of a great punk anthem.”
The timing of the book announcement is a reminder that I wanted to invite Rollins to the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival at the Victims of Communism Museum this October. Rollins is best known as a muscular and loquacious punk rock icon, the lead singer for the band Black Flag, as well as an actor (Sons of Anarchy), a radio show host, and a sometime journalist.
The full schedule of the film festival will be posted this week. You will be able to register for free. Henry Rollins fits into this because, even if he’s not a conservative, Rollins has expressed a lot of wisdom about communism. “Capitalism is fantastic,” he once said in an interview, “as long as it’s regulated. It rewards me for my ambition. I don’t want communism. I’ve been in communist countries, and they suck. Capitalism rewards me for working hard, which is what I like to do. But when it has no rules and when the corporations can dictate the politics, there’s no level playing field and there’s gonna be, like I said, a few winners and a whole lot of losers. And a lot of losers are global, you know. Africa — the continent will probably be the No. 1 loser.”
In another interview he put it this way: “I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave – it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.”
To those of us who grew up in D.C. and its suburbs, Rollins is a local legend. He famously attended Bullis, a lush private school about two miles from where I grew up in Maryland. A synopsis of Bait Dog Boy reads: “What happens when a child grows up in an almost total vacuum of love? That was the reality for Henry Rollins, pioneering punk frontman of the seminal groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, who came of age in an environment seemingly determined to break him. For the first time, Rollins tells the story he spent most of his life trying to avoid, taking us through his childhood and adolescence — from a volatile Washington, D.C., childhood spent shuffling between indifferent parents, to his encounters with a seemingly endless parade of abusive adults, to his eventual meeting with Ian MacKaye, and their ultimate discovery of punk rock, which would become a lifeline. Rollins tells what it was like to live a life colored by the experience of constantly absorbing pain, like a bait dog.”
Rollins has joined USO tours to entertain troops serving abroad even if he doesn’t always agree with U.S. foreign policy. “Soldiers don’t start wars, they don’t dictate policy — they take the orders,” he said in an interview. “So getting mad at a soldier about a war is like getting mad at the lady behind the counter because your flight is late.”
According to Random House, Bait Dog Boy contains this line: “I have no desire to be a survivor. I’d rather accept, absorb, adapt, fight and break that which seeks to break me — to be that which remains.”
Consider yourself a VIP for the festival, Henry.
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