What we have learned today is very sad in both the punk rock scene and music industry. According to an article on Yahoo 7 News, Henry Rollins has announced that he has decided to retire from making music. The former lead singer of Black Flag states that the reason he is not into music anymore is because he can no longer summon the desire to get up onstage and perform. Here’s what Henry had to say:
“I stopped doing music years ago, I stopped being played by music. Music used to compel me to play it, so I never had an easy night onstage doing music, it was physically an ass-whooping. It was really hard, insane and very painful. I would train for weeks getting ready for tours and you’re playing in places like (fabled New York venue) CBGBs and it’s, like, 115 degrees Fahrenheit [46 degrees Celsius] and there’s no real breathable air … it’s gonna be a really long evening and afterwards you’re gonna be pretty brain dead. And that was five to six nights a week for months at a time and every night I’d have to nerve myself up to go out there. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me and what I didn’t wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud… You cannot fool an audience. As painful as it was to leave music, I had to be as reverent to it as when it was still putting fire into my veins, and so, as a respectful Samurai, I had to re-sheath the blade and walk away.”
Henry’s decision to retire from music also indicates that he has no plans to team up with any of his former Black Flag bandmates, or revisit his past on a nostalgia tour, explaining:
“Some of my peers, for one reason or another, can’t seem to walk away when it’s obviously after the fact … It’s their lives, I’m very busy with mine. I’m not that dead yet and so that’s why I do not do the past, really … I don’t need to be 18 again. If all of a sudden I felt the need to write lyrics, I would heed the call, but if you told me right now, as like a homework assignment, to write a song tonight, it would be like I’d never written one before. I have forgotten so much. When it left it was like an animal dropping me from its jaws and I really don’t remember what it was like to see or hear or feel something and be compelled to stop what I was doing and write a song.”