HENRY ROLLINS Talks About Turning 50 In New Audio Interview

Punk rock icon Henry Rollins recently turned 50, and to commemorate his birthday, he's embarking on a spoken-word tour, dubbed — appropriately enough — "50". BackstageAxxess.com had a chance to catch up with Henry on the phone and talked with him about how he celebrated his birthday, how he manages to keep up will his numerous projects, and even how he stays in shape. You can now listen to the chat below.

When asked in a recent interview with Prefix what he feels he has to show by crossing the half-a-century age mark, Rollins replied, "Just basically experience, and I’ve had a lot of it in the last 30 years since I left Washington. I’ve toured and traveled relentlessly. Even without needing to be onstage, I travel just because I travel. Like September, I was in North Korea, which was odd, China Mongolia, Buton, Nepal, Tibet, and Vietnam…Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda. I see a lot; I see starvation, I see what a war looks like years later. I do a lot of work with the USO, everywhere from the Bagram air base in Afghanistan to Camp whatever in Baghdad to Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital looking at kids with their legs blown off. And I learned from these experiences, and that’s perhaps what has made me much different than a self-absorbed young person."

Regarding what he — after all his travels — supposes he would think of America if he were viewing it as an outsider, Henry said, "Next year, me and this organization I work with, we're planning on bringing a Southern Sudanese guy here, so he can speak at some universities and work on his autobiography. The guy was a child soldier, he fought for 20 years against Northern Sudan, and he's seen some really awful stuff, as you can imagine, and he's a really soft-spoken gentle guy with beautiful children, but his stories will peel the paint off your car. And I was thinking yesterday as I was driving to the supermarket, What would he make of all these paved streets, and faucets and hot water, all that relative ease? Coming from Sudan or Uganda or Johannesburg… maybe America would almost be psychedelic. It would be trippy. Everything is so big, the air conditioning is so cold, the lights are so bright, everything is cranked up so much, because we live in upper case, not only America, the West. There's only the immediate in a lot of countries, so when someone would come to America and hear about life insurance or a savings account, that might be a concept they would not be able to get their head around, because they have no concept of a future."