Joe Rogan - Henry Rollins on How He Started Doing Spoken Word

Speaking of sustainable, I hear you have a Showtime special coming out tomorrow night. Wow, that was a great segue. That's pretty good, right? That was a fantastic segue. I should be on radio, dude. I should get a real radio show. Yeah. Yeah, Joe, non-segue to Rogan's. I should keep ripping on Ted, you don't know where we're going. I like Ted. Yeah, so do I. Showtime special tomorrow, Friday, what's tomorrow? The 11th? The 10th, sorry. Friday, August 10th, 10 p.m., East Coast, West Coast, Showtime. It's called Keep Talking, pal. And so the, there it is, 10 seconds on that. They said, what are you going to name it? And I said, keep talking, pal. They go, what does that mean? It's just how you talk yourself in and out of trouble. Like you're about to get punched out, like keep talking, pal. If you don't get a laugh, you're not getting out of this bar. And that's kind of how I came into talking shows, was being, as a young guy, skinny, unriddled, not a good fighter, not a good fighter at all, you know, just not into it. And you know, the local bully, I've said something snarky or funny, and you know, all of a sudden he's got me by the scruff of my shirt with a fist in my face. And the only thing you can do is like imitate him so much that everyone else laughs and like he has to drop you because he's now like drop, well, drop your collar, not your body, because you're now making him laugh. And so when in doubt, keep talking, pal. And the fact that I have a quote, comedy special on Showtime is so unlikely from some guy from the minimum wage working world. I don't believe it myself. And so they said, what are you going to call it? And a lot of these, you know, people, they have a lot of confidence. I'm going to call it like destruction in my mighty Wang take this. I don't have any of that. So I keep talking, pal, because I know I'm really not supposed to be there. So how did you do your first show? Like what made you do your first talking show? $5. 1983, a little venue on Hudson right off of like about 10 paces north of Santa Monica Boulevard. It's like a street that dead ends on to Santa Monica Boulevard was an art space there called the Lhasa Club. And there was a local promoter in town amazing guy, and he would get like 25 people on stage in one night, everyone gets five minutes. And it'd be the singer of that band, the drummer of that band, that artist, that poet, like real artists who speak for a living. And then the guy with the funny tour journal, or the guy from the band that we all like, and he's going to be an idiot for five minutes. And these shows were really fun because it just people on or off stage all night long, like running off stage. And the bass player in Black Flag, Chuck Takowski, fantastic intellect, he would get invited on to these bills, I would go with him because we were beach guys, we lived in the sticks, and the gigs are in Hollywood. So we'll go into the big smoke, we'll go see the big city. I'd go with him because he had the band van, he'd go into town, I'd tag along. So he'd read out of some notebook his apocalyptic rantings. And one night the promoter said, you got a big mouth, next week you five minutes or like whatever seven minutes, five bucks. All I could think of was the five bucks. And like what I could go, we're starving as any band was. And so the next show I got on stage at Lhasa told a story about what had happened to band practice the day before where a white supremacist in a car tried to run over our guitar player because we had brown skinned people at our band practice. And so he yelled, he accused our guitar player of being a beep lover and tried to run him over on his way to the liquor store to get some orange juice. So our guitar player comes back a little shaken. I nearly got run over by a neo-Nazi and let's go back to practice. And so for us, that was this Tuesday in the life of Black Flag. For an audience, they're like, oh, you hear jaws hit the ground. Then I read something I'd written. I go, well, my five minutes are up or whatever it was. And I left the stage and it felt right. I felt like a fish dropped into water for the first time. Like, hey, I'm a fish. Like I didn't have a band, but I had no stage fright. And this me and a microphone, it felt more natural than music ever felt, which was cool to do, but never felt natural. This felt like it's this thing is in me. It's got to come out. I'm serving a monster where the talking shows like, yeah, this is me. And after the show, people came up and said, what's your next show? I said, well, I'm leaving on tour. They go, no, no, no. When you're just talking, I said, well, no, that's a one off. I got this $5 bill. I'm out of here. And so the agent, the promoter guy said, OK, you're very good at that. You're a natural. So how about this? I promote all these different poets and performance artists. I'll get you all. I'll give you 20 bucks. I'll do 20 minutes opening for this guy. OK, so I did 20 minutes. And then after a handful of those shows, those poet types were opening for me because the black flag aspect kicks in like the dude from Black Flag. People show up and I guess I was good enough. And so those poets weren't that happy like I'm now opening for this guy. OK. And that was 83 turning into 84 by 85. I had gone to Europe for some poetry festival, which I kind of blagged onto in Holland. I had done a cross country tour, 12 to 50 people a night sleep on the promoter's couch go buy Amtrak and started my little book company, 83, 84 self published to this day. That's awesome. And it went from strength to strength. And now it's a 14 month tour that takes in 20 countries, multiple nights in cities at nice theaters. Do you only use yourself for your publishing company or do you publish anybody else's books? We used to. Many years ago, people I knew who I thought were great writers, I put them out. We licensed Nick Cave's books from his publishers in Europe. We licensed a few different titles. We did photo books and a couple of novels, short story collections. And it's very hard to have a book company. It's hard to sell a book in the world unless it's like Stephen King or Danielle Steele like mega at the at the cash register at the airport store. If you're selling poetry books, different kinds of literature, you are nothing but uphill. My books did OK. They still they always do OK. Everyone else's books is like trying to sell dead animal guts. You know what I mean? No one's that interested. They'll look, but they don't want to take it home. And so we stopped signing new writers, sold through the press runs, let the licenses run out. Everyone got to keep their masters. And then we just concentrated on me because I keep the whole staff busy with all the stuff I've got going. And so we publish, but we publish me and I've done a bunch of books. How many books you're in? About 27. Holy shit. That's so crazy. I got nothing else going on. All but two of them. We I want to do a photo book a few years ago and Heidi, who runs all my company, she's the smart one. So I showed her the manuscript. She goes, OK, the book is great, but let's not do it on our company because it's a lot of startup money for a photo book. It's just a lot of setup cost. Let's get you a literary agent and do it somewhere else. And so it's a smart idea. And so we got a literary agent and we did get a book deal with a very good Chicago Chicago company Chicago Review. I'm forgetting. And they put out the photo book and that was a learning experience, like working with an editor like, well, here's the cover. They were going to have a meeting about that. I'm like, you're having a meeting. It's my book. It's my book cover. So I'm used to owning my own machine. But when you work with other people's money, everyone has a big opinion. So that that book came out and did and continues to do very well. Many years ago, I did a kind of a best of if I have any best of material, I did a best of for Random House many, many years ago that you still see it's in print. And that's a lot of people's first book of mine because it's in stores.