The Transcript

Henry Rollins on the Art and Business of DIY Media

Voiceover: This episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by Authority Rainmaker. It’s a different kind of online marketing conference; for one thing, Henry Rollins is keynoting. Get all the details at authorityrainmaker.com. And yes, it’s that Henry Rollins.

Brian Clark: This is Brian Clark, and welcome to the show. Today’s guest is musician, writer, journalist, publisher, actor, television and radio host, spoken-word artist, comedian, and activist Henry Rollins. Did I mention that he just started his own podcast and is kind of a personal hero to me? Yeah.

The reason why Henry is on this podcast, and more importantly, why he’s doing the closing keynote at our conference in May, comes down to this quote from an interview he did. I think he was on tour in New Zealand at the time. Here’s what he said: “Everything I do, writing, touring, traveling, it all comes from a punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression — from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go.”

Now, I’m not comparing what we do as DIY media creators to getting in the van and touring with a punk band. Truth is, with all the tools we have, plus the open Internet, we have it pretty damn easy. But it’s the attitude that matters, and the work ethic, and that’s exactly why everyone should be listening to what Mr. Rollins has to say.

Henry, thank you so much for joining us.

Henry Rollins: No problem at all.

Why He Started a Podcast, and How He s Producing It

Brian Clark: So, first of all, I was delighted and maybe even surprised a little, given that you have a radio show, and you’ve got a television show, and you just started a podcast called Henry and Heidi. From listening to the first episode, it’s clear that you blame Heidi for the whole thing, but why don’t you shed a little light on that relationship and how that came to happen?

Henry Rollins: Heidi came to my publishing company as a new hire about 17-point-something years ago. On her first hour there, we were already arguing — not in a mean way — but she basically said, “Are you always like this? Because if you are, I’m outta here.” I’m like, whoa.

We agree on most things, but she finds it necessary to discipline and school me fairly often.

She’s come up with a lot of ideas that we utilize at this company, the publishing company. We do books; a lot of the ways we do things are her ideas, and a lot of the ways we edit books and the ways we go after work for me are Heidi’s innovations.

It’s been a really good lesson for me over the years to learn to collaborate with someone and learn to listen when I want to argue. It’s very difficult for some of us to shut our mouths; it s very hard for me, but I’ve learned that Heidi often has the best idea. In fact, you can count on that. When she has an idea, I just learned to shut up and take notes. So it’s been very interesting.

Everywhere we go, we’re always nattering at each other, and people ask us, “How long have you two been married?” We’re not married at all or related in that way. We’re very good friends, obviously, but it’s been an interesting relationship.

And as technology furthers and makes things more accessible to plain old folks, we’ve also been discovering different platforms, more recently like the podcast, which was all Heidi’s idea.

She said we should do a podcast. I said, I need to get a different bit of gear, because I only have one box for doing my voice-over for auditions and my radio show. She said, Get a different box, then. I said, Okay, so I did that. My engineer buddy came in and set it up and gave me some lessons, and we made our first podcast, I’d say, a couple weeks ago, and the thing is incredibly successful, which both of us are still quite confused by; I mean, it does very well.

But that was all Heidi’s idea. We just do our thing; right in the office, we have two microphones and whatever this gadget is that gets us into a WAV file.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting to me, full circle; I remember the first time I heard Black Flag was when I was 16. It was Damaged; I didn’t even know that you weren’t the first singer of Black Flag, that you came from the audience.

Now I want to talk about that a little bit. You did everything yourselves, and then, of course, you’ve been in films, and you’re in radio and television, and now you ve come full circle to where you sit in your office and do it yourself again with your longtime co-conspirator. How does that feel?

The Secret Weapon Behind His Entire Media Business

Henry Rollins: It feels great to have such autonomy and be able to keep doing it year after year and to rely on your inspiration and hard work and the fact that it pays off. When I say that word — pays — I’m very careful with anything that sounds or smells like money. For me, paying off is the ability to do it next year, and the year after, and the year after. Something that is able to be sustained — a sustainable, innovative work environment — is sort of all I’ve ever wanted. And you’ll find that with a lot of DIY companies.

I just want to keep the lights on and keep the ideas going, because I enjoy the ideas more, and executing them, and realizing them. And then ultimately, let’s say you finish a book — the best part about finishing a book is you get it off your desk, and all of the sudden you have an empty desk that you can fill up with a new idea. It’s like building a big ship over and over again; it’s right there when you crack the champagne over the mast of the ship, because that’s what they do, and you set it out, but then you have an empty harbor, and well, let’s get busy, and you get inspired all over again.

To be able to do that year after year, that, to me, is the goal. It is the thing that gets me up early in the morning and has me obsessively working right through the weekend without really noticing, working through holidays. I’m somewhat driven, but it’s not like I’m driven because of the stockholders. I’m driven because I have a lot of ideas and only so much time. Life is finite. Ideas are seemingly limitless. All of my DIY pursuits all come from one basic idea: I want to do this. You have ideas? Well, I have ideas, too. You have to wrap them in steel and take them into the battleground of the role, because you’re not the only person thinking of things.

What Most DIY Media People (Business or Punk) Miss

Henry Rollins: One of the things that a lot of DIY people don’t take into account is that there’s other innovative people who wake up early just like you, and their ideas are good too; you’re all, in a way, competing for a certain bandwidth. There’s only so many people in the world who can be anywhere near what you want to do or what you want to bring them, and you only have so much time, money, and attention that they can bring to any one thing. So it’s you and five other people or more.

What It Takes to Succeed in Business (and Rock)

Henry Rollins: You get a record company; we have really great bands. You know what? There’s a lot of good labels and a lot of good bands. Why should I take your record? All of your getting up early in the morning comes from trying to answer that question. I go into that basic question with the same basic thing I’ve gone into everything, from being on a record label that was owned by the band or owned by members of the band to starting my own company, which I’ve had since 1983, and they still keep going.

It s that single idea of wanting to do something, and you find that you must put every single thing you have into that idea; your DNA, every amount of affection, everything you’ve got goes into those ideas, to where you had no idea you could be that tired and still work. You push yourself, quite often, past any rational threshold of exhaustion or sanity, and realize, Oh, I can do 19 hours. I can still function at 19 hours. It’s not good for your health to sustain that, but you find out you could do some amazing amount of percent more than what you thought. I learned that by being in Black Flag.

What Black Flag Taught Him about Working Insanely Hard

Henry Rollins: I always thought I was a hard worker. Then I joined Black Flag, and then I realized what hard work was, because the people around me — Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski — were these work mavens who made me look like a lightweight, so I learned very quickly. It was not easy, and it was a very hard adjustment to make.

Brian Clark: That’s hard to imagine, as hard as we know you’ve worked over the years. Let’s go back a little bit to Black Flag, because you’ve done a lot on your own since then; of course, you sang lead in a band before you joined Black Flag, but it was the whole idea.

In Washington, D.C., where you came from, you’ve got Minor Threat; no one wants to sign Minor Threat. They should have, but they didn’t know. Go to L.A.; no one wants to sign Black Flag, Greg Ginn starts SST. You guys produce and distribute your own records, and you set up your own gigs and your own tours. Was that the learning experience of DIY, or did you already have the mentality before your joined the group?

How He Financed His First Record Label

Henry Rollins: I had a baby version of it from watching Ian MacKaye, who is from Minor Threat, Fugazi. I watched him build Dischord pretty much at his mom’s kitchen table. He was like, Okay, it’s going to look like this; we’re going to do this, and suddenly he’s got a mailing address. There’s mail order. He has to sell things, and how are you going to do that ethically, fairly? How do people get paid?

I watched him navigate all these obstacles that keep you from being a fair and decent person. He’s quite good at it, but it’s his inherent goodness that he brought to the table, and what you see with Dischord and all the bands and all the music he’s produced, which is just unfathomable, the amount of records Ian has produced — it’s kind of crazy when you see how many records have his name on the back — he comes at it from the same basic core.

I’ve gotten the hang of it; I’ve got my own little band, and the second record on Dischord was my band. I financed that record myself; Dischord didn’t have the money, and my band mates didn’t either. I’m the one who had the full-time job. I financed the recording, the pressing — all of it was me, all $800 of it. But in those days, that was a lot of money. When you’re working for $3.65 an hour, that’s a lot of money, but you just do it.

By the time I got to Black Flag, I had an idea: got to have a mailing list, got to be able to get to your people, and all of that. But SST was more formed; Ian got inspiration from SST. He used to get on the phone with Chuck Dukowski and get crib notes. I remember that he was like, “I called Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag today.” I said, “You did what?” These people were from Mars to us. We were like relative hicklets. I said, “How’d you do that?” He said, “I looked them up in the directory.” I said, “You can do that?” I wouldn’t have even thought of that.

You know Ian; he’ll meet anybody. Nothing really blows his hair back. He could meet the president and go, “Oh hey, I voted for you.” Nothing really gets at him. So he called Chuck and said, “Well, here’s what I’m doing,” and sent him a couple Dischord records; I think that’s how Black Flag first heard me. We sent him my little record.