Interviews are weird! When I was learning to do them, I was mostly interviewing people in small indie rock bands, who were not used to being interviewed, and who were kinda weird and shy and awkward. Every so often, I would interview someone and connect really immediately, and get kind of sad about it — because we’d have this really interesting conversation for half an hour, talking about all sorts of things, but we weren’t actually friends. (I’m sure that this is a strange, lonely thing for the person being interviewed, too.) So many of the interviews I do for arts/entertainment places are ones in which I am the 9th person they’re talking to that day, with another 8 to go after we hang up the phone. I’m much better at this in person than on the phone, but I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it over the phone, too, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to earn a living. I’m always super awkward when it’s time to hang up, though.
Anyway: Henry Rollins. This was the first interview I’d been nervous for in a really, really long time. Because there is not a figure who looms larger in my life, outside of my actual friends and family and people I love, than Henry Rollins. When I was eighteen, I read Get In The Van, his memoir of being on tour with Black Flag, and it made me immediately drop out of college and pursue writing as an avocation. I taught myself how to perform on stage by ripping off his material at open mics. His work shaped a lot of how I viewed the world at the age when I was figuring all of that stuff out. I’m a person who engages verbally, and more than anyone else, it was Henry Rollins’ words that I engaged with, especially in those formative, post-high school years when I really had the opportunity to figure out who I wanted to be. For at least a few of those years, I wanted to be him.
I grew out of that at some point. His books stopped being interesting to me, and I had to poke holes in his persona just in order to be my own person and not a dude who wanted to be Henry Rollins — kill your idols, etc. Some of his stand-up recordings started to get exhausting, running on for 3 hours, though I still am pretty sure I’ve heard every single one of them he’s released as of 4/28/11. It stopped being a personal identification with the guy, in other words, though it didn’t mean I wasn’t a fan anymore.
Last week, I got an email from a publicist I know at National Geographic Wild informing me that Rollins had a special about to air on the channel about snakes, and that he was available for interviews. I had been in touch with an editor at a site MTV runs called Clutch, which is a lot like my old gig at Asylum.com used to be, and it seemed like a good one to pitch. He was really into it, and so I set up the interview.
I didn’t say anything about the fact that I had every single one of his records, from Damaged to Henrietta Collins and the Wife-Beating Child-Haters to this weird EP he put out with some Australian band where they covered “Franklin’s Tower” by the Grateful Dead right on down to The Only Way To Know For Sure, his final live double-album with the much-maligned Mother Superior lineup of the Rollins Band. I didn’t tell him that I got the guts to say that I didn’t want to be a student, and I didn’t want to try and pick out some career, and I wanted to try writing all the time and traveling around the country telling stories to people with a microphone, because of things he had written or examples he had set. (I didn’t do that for the same reason Troy didn’t want to meet Levar in person; what if he was disappointed that I’d taken that example and was doing phoners for MTV? You can’t disappoint a picture!) I decided that the best way to talk to someone who meant that much to me would be to do so like a professional: we would talk about snakes.
And we did! That is literally all we talked about. I picked up on something that I’d felt before in other interviews, but which was really clear to me in this one. And that is — the person you are talking to, often, does not know who you are or if you know what you’re talking about. They don’t know if you’re familiar at all with the work they are trying to promote. I have been present for group interviews where I had some pretty detailed questions for the person being interviewed, and some TV idiot would be there asking, “So what’s this movie about?” A smart person who values his or her time, therefore, will treat all interviewers as though they aren’t familiar with the material in order to avoid having to offer endless clarifications.
It took about five minutes — two or three questions — before I put this together properly, and asked a question that he actually engaged with, that he hadn’t answered five times already that morning, and that he seemed interested in talking about. (It was about what happens in Florida if there’s a hurricane and people are evacuating and these snakes get out — it didn’t make the final cut.) Suddenly, everything changes about the interview. The person you are talking to starts to treat this as a conversation, instead of as responses they are giving to a questions-asking robot. Questions that they would have been bored by before suddenly get thoughtful answers. It’s a moment of connection, and it’s what makes this job actually rewarding and interesting.
And, in this case, it was really important to me. Because Henry Rollins has loomed so large for me, and talking to him was really a strange experience. Finding that point of connection — even if we only ever talked about snakes for twenty minutes — was really nice. I mean, I could have asked him really detailed questions about all sorts of things. “So, on your 1992 Japanese-exclusive live EP Electroconvulsive Therapy, you do a 27-minute version of ‘Move Right In’ that leads into ‘Obscene,’ and you lead the band through a riff they borrowed from a Beastie Boys song — did you ever consider recording any of the jam-based material you would play on stage during that period of your career in the studio?” But mostly, it was just a cool thing for me to have a decent conversation with the guy, without trying to prove something to the person I’d been a decade ago. So sure — why not talk about snakes?
