Former Black Flag front-man Henry Rollins has, over the course of his career, achieved notoriety as a punk-rock pioneer and prolific spoken-word performer – but in recent years he’s also become an advocate of slow, humble, close-to-the ground international travel.
Though Rollins’ 1994 band-tour memoir Get in the Van contained hints of his shoestring-travel instincts, I truly became aware of his vagabonding chops in 2011, when World Hum ran a terrific interview with him upon publication of his travel-photography book Occupants. “I beg young people to travel,” he told interviewer Jim Benning. “If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown.” In that interview he went on to share a brilliant strategy for breaking the ice upon meeting people in faraway countries:
People come up and ask, “My friend, what are you doing here?” My icebreaker is, “I’m here to meet you.” Which is true, and also sometimes cracks them up. They say, “Me?” I say, “Oh yeah, man, I’m Henry, what’s happening?”
Henry has reiterated this social strategy alongside travel tales and life-philosophies on podcasts like Ari Shaffir’s Skeptic Tank and the Joe Rogan Experience, and I always get a kick out of listening to him.
This year Rollins has taken his travel stories on the road as part of his Travel Slideshow Tour, a two-and-a-half-hour act that showcases photos and anecdotes from places like Russia, India, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Mali, North Korea, Iran, Haiti, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Antarctica. I attended his show at Wichita’s Orpheum Theater last weekend and found it thoroughly entertaining.
He started the night by talking about his earliest overseas travels, which he called “not really a vacation so much as a temporary absence” that involved watching HBO in distant hotel rooms. But as a spoken-word performer he eventually realized that if he was going to be onstage telling stories about the world he should probably familiarize himself with the non-Western part of the world – and he’s been traveling the world slowly and mindfully (what he calls “going on a journey”) ever since.
Here are six random Henry Rollins travel insights I jotted down during the show:
1) On why you should travel now
Let me give you some advice from a man who’s leaning on sixty. If you’re in your twenties, life goes one day, then another day. In your thirties it picks up some speed because your responsibilities get bigger. From forty to fifty is like a week and a half, and it feels like losing at Three-card Monte. What I’m saying is, it goes really fast. So if you have a list of things to do, “someday” does not exist, because suddenly you’re my age. If you have a list of things you want to do, destinations — Tokyo, Paris, Budapest, Istanbul — just get it done. Get your passport, get the stamps in there, and go.
2) On the fact that the world is safer than you might think
I’ve been to damn near 100 countries and I’ve almost been killed three times. All three times in America.
3) On visiting open-air markets as a travel strategy
If you ever visit a country or village that has an open-air market I encourage you to go there for all the color and smells and activity. If you go in the morning you’ll see one group of people; if you go three hours later all those people have gone because they’ve sold their goods and they’re replaced by other people. I often go to open air markets several times a day just to clock the different smells, letting my natural curiosity lead me. I’ll walk up to a vendor and go: “Hi, what is that, can I have some?”; “What’s that spice, smells interesting how did you get it here?”; “How long have you worked here?” I’ve got a million questions for people who live in a non-Western environment. I want to see how people get along in parts of the world I’m not familiar with. I’ve never had a bad time in the market.
4) On seeing a bootleg Black Flag t-shirt for sale in Yogyakarta
Only through capitalism does Black Flag get to literally rub shoulders with Avenged Sevenfold at a t-shirt stand in Indonesia. That skips like, what, two generations? To me capitalism is a massive hot tub with the same old water year after year — but all of us have been in it. So we’re like in each other’s juices anyway – why all the fighting? Why can’t we get along better? We’re already swapping spit, let’s just go the rest of the way and get along.
5) On the merits of traveling America and meeting Americans
America is up to its eyeballs in really cool people. People you might disagree with, but ultimately these people will give you half their sandwich, they will pull you out of a burning car. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, we’re kick-ass people. But the impression we make in the world is often not who we are. People see the McDonald’s and Coca-Cola part first but they don’t see us. Every once in a while, when I’m out in the world, someone says, “One day I want to come to America.” I tell them I wish I had extra money, I’d fly you there myself. I’ll name like 80 cities you’ve got to go see. I’ll say, “You’re gonna love it when you come. Bring your friends! You’ve gotta see all of it! Don’t go to Las Vegas with your money, you’re gonna get screwed. But come to see us, you’re gonna love America.”
6) On the way travel ends up becoming a never-ending process
The best thing about coming to the end of your travel to-do list is you flip the piece of paper over, and it’s blank, and you can fill it up with more things to do. This is why I travel; I try to stay out in the world as much as I can.
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