POP MUSIC REVIEW : Raging for Dollars: Rollins Grinds On

“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” Henry Rollins said in a recent magazine interview--the words printed across a photo of his intense face.

He may be right. It’s hard to figure out someone who contradicts himself at every turn.

As former singer for Los Angeles punk groundbreakers Black Flag, enterprising spoken-word artist and leader of the Rollins Band, he has turned himself into a tortured, larger-than-life embodiment of pure anger.

After a decade and a half of raging, he now fits quite nicely into the more turbulent end of mainstream rock, and his profile is suddenly high--guest veejay on MTV, Details magazine cover boy, a chatty visitor with Jay Leno on the “Tonight Show.” He’ll play Woodstock ‘94, sharing the stage with acts that are the antithesis of what he started out to be.

The question all that raises is whether Rollins has become a parody of himself--an angry shell that spouts on about his alienation but acclimates quite nicely to being pop culture’s figurehead of male rage.

Or does he still really feel it?

On Saturday at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, Rollins wailed for a solid hour about loneliness and failed greatness, his neck seeming to become as big as his head with each scream. The barefoot, shirtless and heavily tattooed Rollins stayed in a crouch for most songs, flexing his muscles and occasionally making a face as if he were lifting extremely heavy barbells.

The Rollins Band’s three musicians played big, fat metal with a scattered jazz and funk edge. It was thick and claustrophobic and inescapable, and song structures seemed to collapse under its onslaught.

Through it all, it was hard to sense any variations in Rollins’ bulldozing anger, let alone any other emotions. Rather than climb higher or drop to a different depth, he emanated grating, surface frustration--and the mainly male, mainly shirtless audience ate it up.

When Rollins led Black Flag, which has influenced half of today’s grinding rock bands, there were more dynamics to his menace. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in his screams anymore--they just seem more convoluted, no longer providing a straight line into his soul.

His forceful, provocative remarks between songs proved almost more interesting than the songs. He boomed about the dark abyss of loneliness, and zeroed in on such targets as strip bars: “If you have to go into one of them, first, you are afraid of women, and second, you hate them.”

That was just before some guys pulled the shirt off a woman near the front of the surging crowd. It shouldn’t surprise Rollins that an audience attracted primarily by his testosterone-powered anger would be oblivious to the fine points of his message. Rollins needs to use some of his formidable power to dismantle an image that has become a cage.

Also on Saturday: Second-billed Helmet has recently traded in its precision pile-driving for the crushing, anesthetized feel of such bands as Alice in Chains. The New York band still sounds good, but has lost some of its defining identity.