I picked up my first Henry Rollins book in 1992 when Lollapalooza blew through the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the year after he had toured with the festival, and during bands like Lush and the Jesus and Mary Chain I settled back into Rollins' dense prose and poetry, reading One From None in small bites and feeling awfully thankful I was reading this dark, angry work while the sun was still shining.

In an interview at the end of the book, a quote struck me: "I must suffer from some kind of security or ego-mania... it's not good enough for me to write a book full of stuff and put it on a shelf, to be in a band and play in a garage. I have to go out and flaunt it." So says Rollins the poet, Rollins the songwriter, ex-leader of Black Flag and current frontman for the Rollins Band, who brought his spoken-word show to Berkeley on Wednesday, Jan. 22 for a knockout evening of stories, laughs, and none of the poetry and song that shapes the rest of his life.

From the moment Rollins strode out onto the stage of UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, water bottles in one hand, notebook in the other and a welcoming smile on his face, it was obvious we were going to see a different side of the muscle-bound mephisto. After considerable cheers subsided, he replied humbly, "Wow, I know what you mean. This is the nicest place I've ever been in in my life -- you know, to talk."

But talk he did -- in a rambling fashion, as a comedian or storyteller might, peppering his conversation with pantomime and verbal sound effects (many such tricks were the result of turning the microphone up really loud so when Rollins whooshed, screamed into or smacked the thing, the results were illustrative and near-deafening).

He began by talking about a spoken-word show he'd done recently in Orange County -- "In Orange County, they raise [kids] really weird," depriving and protecting children from every threat while taking them to Disneyland where you see "the kinds of things you'd only see on acid" -- in a dinner theater. "There were these little round tables, with the lamps bolted into the tables. The same people who always come to my shows were sitting at the tables, looking at me like, 'what the fuck?' And I looked at them like, 'what the fuck?' So we had this kind of mutual 'what the fuck?'"

As the touring man Rollins' life necessitates him to be, eventually the topic of travel came up. He briefly discussed why he refuses to play Santa Cruz -- after getting into two ugly near-fights with police and roadies during previous gigs there -- he treated the crowd to his rant on international travel.

A major portion of his travelogue was spent exposing his theory that all people (excluding himself) lose their powers of intellect and free will once they've been placed in a line, especially at the airport; for example, the expert businessman who can't figure out how to go through a metal detector without setting it off -- and whose idiocy has taken countless seconds from the lives of those behind him. "You have just robbed me of three minutes of my life," Rollins shouted at the imaginary businessman after much huffing, puffing and pulling out his stopwatch. "You have murdered me just a little."

Meanwhile, he admitted that the exhaustion of travel makes him "pissy and moany. I get very maudlin. The slightest thing will have me in tears." He'll write sappy poems and want to eat his words once he's had a decent night's sleep. The sheer imagery of a man like Rollins, who expends so much energy playing it tough, letting himself admit to vulnerable emotions was revealing. Although thoughout the evening Rollins portrayed himself as the king of angst, frustration and cynicism, he was poking fun at his own intensity.

The memory of two proud carpet salesmen in the lounge at the airport sent Rollins into a spin on women which had the ladies of the crowd cheering. "I know for a fact that women are smarter than men, stronger than men and more intense than men. I'm not saying I'm happy about it. I've asked tattoo artists who faints the most. Their answer? Marines. Women and blood: friends for life."

So, he asks, if women are so smart and so strong, why do they marry idiots like these two carpet salesman? "Why do you choose to spend your life... with these assholes? It really shakes my confidence in women. You could just withhold sex from them; you have so much power."

Rollins updated the audience on the progress of his career. For the past year or so he's been in New York, working with the band to record the followup to Weight; it's due out this spring. Rather than fly back and forth from New York to Los Angeles, where he usually lives, Rollins decided to find an apartment and become "a real New Yorker" for a year.

First he joked about the town, how the people will touch -- even manhandle -- each other whenever the desire arises; they're mashed together on the subway, they smack each other in greeting. "Drivers beep when they're waiting at stoplights, because they're mad that you're not running the red," he explains. The police, too, take a much more direct approach, humiliating traffic violators through their loudspeakers.

But the real test for Rollins was finding a place to live in the Big Apple. "You stand in line with 25 people ready to get into a fistfight over a tiny, roach-infested hovel for $1200 a month," he cautioned. After securing said hovel, he proceeded to discover he had little furniture and no utensils. "I realized what a little boy I was. I opened up my drawer to get the can opener and realized, 'oh, Mommy didn't buy me one.'"

After much ado he decided to go buy some of the basic necessities, but not without fear in his heart. "Do you know what it's like for a tattooed rock singer to have to buy a hand towel?" He asked. "Buying a can opener smacks of commitment. And you know how guys are about commitment." Still, he braved the adventure and seems a better man for it. His first night in the apartment was noisy to the extreme -- he wound up getting no sleep -- but in the end the record got finished and Rollins is back in California, exhausted still but always happy to talk.

Despite the accusations that Rollins has sold out for appearing on MTV, he remains steadfastly independent. His book company, 2.13.61 is alive and well and he'll be launching another tour once the next record comes out. But his spoken-word appearances are a real treat, a glimpse into the man behind the myth, the personality underneath the public persona, the human under all that muscle. Catch him if you can.

This article was originally published in Addicted to Noise.