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Imagine meeting a friend you have not seen for years.

One with whom you shared a strong bond only to have life take you in different directions. Then, suddenly the two of you meet up and you are sharing your life’s travels when you realize the person sitting before you sharing their journey has grown into the person you had imagine they would become.

Now imagine that you did not in fact know that person at all – only through his music as the front for Black Flag, or the ornery coach in Jack Frost, or the Neo Nazi shot in the bathroom during the second season of Sons of Anarchy.

That is Henry Rollins.

The man, who through his spoken word shows Friday and Saturday night at The House of Independents on Cookman Avenue, carried an audience of hundreds on a rollercoaster of his most intimate moments, travels around the world, and self-education.

“One of my favorite uses of text is Abraham Lincoln,” Rollins said. “In times of tribulation I look up different passages of Lincoln like people go to a religious text or to their guru or some spiritual place to get a little bit of clarity. For me Lincoln was the soberest, bestest, clearest thinking president we ever had. His use of the English language even at an early age was monumental.”

The audience’s laughter through the glints of Rollins’ admitted fearless approach to life was a nod of kindred spirits who had within hours of his shows’ announcement this summer – purchased all of the 550 available tickets.

Dressed in simple black Dickies and a black T-shirt with no water to quench his thirst during his over 2-hour screed against those without tolerance and acceptance, the ignorance of global warming, and beauty of learning just how indigenous people live in Sri Lanka, Iran, or Ecuador, Rollins laced his words of a post-political age with doses of humor and self-humiliation.

“I don’t believe in ‘we’ anymore,” Rollins said. “Don’t take that to be negative. I’m just saying we shall not overcome anymore. We had many chances to overcome and we had many good people teaching us the ways to overcome but we weren’t interested…However you will overcome and I will overcome – we, we are doomed. You are going to be fine.”

During Saturday night’s show, we traversed through his early years listening to the likes of Isaac Hayes, Janice Joplin, Gladys Night, and Dionne Warrick on a small GE record player to his defiant upload of a comprehensive free music library to kids in India, Iran and Utah.

“At an early age I realized that music was going to be a thing for me – in that if you get depressed, if no is your friend, at least you have Led Zeppelin’s second album which in high school became my Friday night album. The chains of high school incarceration are off,” Rollins, 54, said.

In the end, Rollins’ wit spoke to the basic level of humanity. We took note as he described the Antarctic region penguins’ putrid smell cast against their regal beauty in the water to conversing with a non-English speaking Cuban bus driver as they drove to meet the tour group Rollins missed.

“It was one of the most impactful moment I’ve ever had in my life,” Rollins said. “Me and some guy in Cuba on the side of the road working out the problems of the world by just shaking hands a few times with two broken languages.”

His parting, was a simple, direct summation of the two-hour journey:

“Thank you for enduring me, I’ll see you down the road,” he said.

[Photo courtesy of Jim Connolly]

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