Henry Rollins was running an ice cream shop when Black Flag asked him to sing
In 1981 Henry Garfield was assistant manager of a Häagen-Dazs in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. After he jumped on stage with Black Flag at a New York bar, the band auditioned him the next day and offered him the job. He quit, sold his car, moved to Los Angeles and became Henry Rollins.
Born in Washington on February 13, 1961, he was three when his parents divorced, and his mother raised him in Glover Park. An all-boys prep school in Maryland, Bullis, gave him discipline and a work ethic, and it was there he began to write. He lasted a single semester at American University before leaving in December 1979 for minimum-wage work, including carrying kidney samples for the National Institutes of Health.
Hard rock gave way to punk when he and his friend Ian MacKaye heard the Sex Pistols. Roadie work for local bands led to a chance at the microphone when the Teen Idles' singer kept missing rehearsals, and in 1980 he fronted State of Alert. Its practices had an odd venue: the drummer's father was a senior admiral whose family shared the Naval Observatory with the vice president, so Secret Service agents let the band in. The group played about a dozen shows and made one EP, paid for partly by his ice cream wages.
He had been writing to Black Flag's bassist and even put the band up at his parents' house on their December 1980 tour. What he did not know was that singer Dez Cadena wanted to move to guitar. Founder Greg Ginn wanted a vocalist whose tastes reached beyond three-chord punk, and Rollins fitted. He played his first show with them on July 25, 1981, in Costa Mesa, taking a surname he and MacKaye had used as teenagers.
After Black Flag split in 1986 he founded 2.13.61, named for his birthday, to put out his spoken word albums, and led the Rollins Band. Acting followed, including the villain Zaheer in The Legend of Korra, alongside radio and television hosting.
Source: Henry Rollins
