Henry Rollins turned 52 today, February 13. The Rollins Band hasn’t toured since 2006, hasn’t released an album since 2002′s Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three, and a lot of people don’t really even consider the second lineup to be the “real” Rollins Band.
The original Rollins Band—featuring guitarist Chris Haskett, bassist Andrew Weiss, and drummer Sim Cain, the latter two recruited straight from Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn‘s instrumental side project, Gone—formed in early 1987, less than a year after Flag’s August 1986 implosion. The first Rollins solo project, the album Hot Animal Machine, was recorded with Haskett and a different rhythm section, but when it came time to hit the road, the band congealed fast.
Those first three albums—1988′s Life Time, 1990′s Hard Volume, and 1991′s The End of Silence—were some kind of Platonic ideal of blending punk rage, metal power, and elements of jazz, funk, and No Wave skronk. Chris Haskett was frequently photographed wearing an Art Ensemble of Chicago shirt, and the band got seriously exploratory in its live sets, perhaps best documented on the Japanese-only live album Electro Convulsive Therapy and “Joy Riding With Frank,” the 40-minute bonus track from the original CD edition of Hard Volume, which started out as a cover of the Velvet Underground outtake “Move Right In” and became an expansive go-go/metal jam.
Anyway, here’s a complete live set from what I have to think was the band’s first full tour, recorded June 3, 1987 in St. Louis, MO. Rollins is still right up in the audience’s faces, in Black Flag mode; he hadn’t graduated to playing stages that rose off the ground yet, or developed the metal-samurai persona he’d adopt throughout the 1990s. The set list encompasses tracks from Hot Animal Machine and Life Time, plus a few covers:
Black & White
What Am I Doing Here
Lost & Found
Followed Around
There’s A Man Outside
Ghost Rider
Lonely
Hot Animal Machine #1
Gun In Mouth Blues
What I See
Burned Beyond Recognition
Next Time
Happy Trails
Video after the jump.
