Notes for the 10-18-04 Harmony in My Head Show. 

Good evening or whenever this finds you. Due to the crazy schedule this movie I am working in has me on, I was unable to get into the studio tonight and do the show. I will be in there next Monday or at least taping it on my day off on Sunday if Engineer X can do it which I am sure he can. 
I am sorry about the re-run but thats what there is. So, how about this, I have pasted in some articles I wrote and an online interview I did recently, its not music but its some reading you might like. Until next week, and again, I am sorry. Henry

For Tracks Magazine
A few weeks ago, I was in the cockpit of a C-130 Hercules heading north out of Kuwait to Iraq. We were approaching Baghdad and the crew started putting on their night vision goggles which attach to their helmets. One of them told me that this is the worst time to fly because its too dark to see any potential threat on the ground and too light to get much out of the nvgs. The natives get restless right about now, one of them said. 
We landed in Baghdad without incident. I stood with my USO representative waiting for our papers to be sorted out I listened to the gunfire in the distance. I asked someone about the incessant shots ringing out and he said it goes on all night.
President Bush tells me that people like Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr doesnt like the American presence in Iraq because people like him dont like freedom and seek to weaken our resolve by killing us and blowing off our arms and sending Americans home mutilated and sickened by horror. Its more and complicated than that but to even approach the topic with more than one sentence that isnt some jingoistic oversimplification can get you shouted down as a liberal/traitor or worsean intellectual. 
I spent the better part of a week in Iraq, visiting bases via Blackhawk helicopter. I met several hundred young Americans. I saw a lot of mind-blowing, humbling and heartbreaking sights. Baghdad could be a beautiful city in several years. What I saw was middle class and downward living punctuated by government buildings and the occasional palace which rose out of the polluted air like a ghastly shopping mall. I saw miles of devastation that was not the result of the invasion (War on Terror) but the work of Saddams brutality. 
At one base, after the afternoon mortar attack, I went out to look around. I went over to a Humvee and looked at the windshield. Right were the drivers head would be was a cluster of bullet scars on the bullet proof glass. I ran my hand on the other side and could feel that the rounds didnt get through but it was clear that these were not warning shots. Someone from a fixed position had tried to kill the driver.
The hardest to take was the high spirit of the soldiers. They are bearing up somehow. Its the most inhospitable environment I have ever been in. The heat is well past 120 by noon. The sun does not want humans in Iraq. Yet, the soldiers are hanging in there. Many of the ones I talked to didnt seem to understand their purpose of being in the region but since they were getting shot at daily, they were more than happy to have an opportunity to return the favor. I asked many of them what they thought of the Iraqis who werent shooting at them and leaving improvised explosive devices on the road and many of the soldiers said they sincerely want to help the Iraqis have a better life, but the heat, hostility and danger were making this a pretty worthless sentiment. 
By the time I left for Kuwait days later, my thoughts were conflicted and confused. There didnt seem to me, to be a win situation in Iraq. You could either nuke it or leave but there was going to be no win. It seems to me that as long as our troops are there, they will be the targets of Iraqi aggression. 
Please vote this year. Who you vote for is not my business but please value your voice and the chance to exercise it. If the draft comes back, please remind our leader that he has two very draft-worthy children who, Im sure would be proud to give something back to America, even if a hole has to be dug. 
My name is Henry Rollins. I am not a journalist, political know-it-all or Salon.com hipster. Just a concerned American who loves his country and hates weaklings who sell out the strong.A thing for a Van Halen book
I will always consider myself lucky for being teenage when the first Van Halen album was released. I had heard about it before it came out. Someone told me about a song called Runnin with the Devil and that it was really cool. It was probably getting some airplay and I had not heard it yet. I was in California at a skate contest I think it was and heard a song with that lyric over the PA system. It had to be them. It was. I bought the album the first chance I got. 
I was stuck right in the middle of high school. It was a gulag. One of the only things that kept me going was the music I was listening to. Van Halen was in the mix. I remember the night before Van Halen II was released, they played the album in its entirety on WPGC FM in Washington DC, where I lived. I listened, we all listened. I taped it by putting my very bad tape recorder up to the radio and sat very still. It sounded horrible but I played a few times before I bought the album. 
I forget what year it was but I made my annual trip to the arena to see Ted Nugent. It was the best show you saw that year, every year. His band was lethal, Nugent had amazing tone with that hollow body Gibson. What a show, what songs, what a man. On the third voyage to the Nuge there was a great change. There was an opening band that actually stayed in the memory. Usually the opener was a blur but this time it was a band called Van Halen. I remember they hit stage and went into Runnin with the Devil after Diamond Dave made his drum riser leap. He acted like his band was the headliner and there was no other band on that night. I remember very well when Eddie performed Eruption and the whole place was in disbelief. At the end of it, he looked down at his hands and shook his head like he didnt know what came over him. It was amazing. The set was a monster. 
Nugent came on awhile later and a few songs in, people were chanting Van-Ha-len! over and over and waving newly bought VH t-shirts until the Nuge came to the front of the stage and Yelled, Fuck Van Halen!!! He then retreated to his cabinets and played the rest of the show looking down at his wedge monitors. Move over Ted!
In 1983 when I encountered Diamond Dave at an art Gallery in Los Angeles, I told him this story and he shot back the date, location and how many people were at the show. To this day, I cant think of a better interview to read than one where David Lee Roth is on full, which means any interview of his you can find will do. Hes the mouth that scored. You wonder how he keeps it all stored in there. Hes the most quotable man in the business.
To this day, perhaps some of my most played records that I own are the Van Halen albums with Dave. They still work. To transmit on a critical level for just a moment here, let me say this; Van Halens perfect synthesis of bone crunching riffs and almost Beach Boys backing vocals is one of the most irresistible and potent concoctions I have ever heard in music. Perfect for radio without selling out or being wimpy. How the hell can you do that?! Something for the guys, something for the ladies. Adding to that, the presentation was second to none. That was a show. Diamond Dave really needed an arena to realize his vision and when he got one, he wasted no time. Van Halen was like the Circus coming to town, like the biggest block party youve ever seen and youre on the invite list. 
The proof of the bands rock solid place in history can be found in all the bands that came immediately after VH broke out. All the Eddie clones, Warner Bros. attempt to make another Dave/VH with the ill-fated Bullet Boys, how guitarists changed their approach to solos. Every frontman in any hard rock band has a little bit of David Lee in him no matter what they say. Some of the stories around the band are the stuff of legend and are known the world over. Brown M&Msnuff said. 
The records themselves have lost absolutely no speed after twenty-plus years. Actually, now that I think about it, seeing where music is these days, perhaps those records have picked up a little speed! 
Hail the Mighty (with Dave) Van Halen 
--Henry Rollins

A thing for Magnet Magazine
It seems to me that the world is smaller than its ever been. My daydreamings been marginalized by pointing and clicking. Feeling far away and leaving things to the imagination seem to be almost fiddling while the empire burns. These days, I dont feel far away from anything. Im not trying to be a drag but for me at least, the Bush Administration has knocked the magic out of the night, the poetry out of seasonal change and makes me feel like a bum for reading fiction and doing many of the things that a forty-something should be hard at work contending with; concentrating on finding the humor in midlife crisis and the endless irony that comes with the onslaught of all the If I did that now, I would break my arm. types of realities I am forced to face.
I would like to do all that stuff. I would like to but I cant. Thousands of my countrys best are in a kiln-hot hellhole fighting constant skirmishes that are sending hundreds back dead, mutilated and mentally maimed. They are fighting a war that the President had no exit strategy for, no sound intelligence to act upon and thus, no good reason to send our nations best to go out and deal with. A war that the President doesnt hesitate to send young people into but seems to forget that his daughters are the perfect age for a stint in the Armed Forces. I however, am well aware and cant wait to see which way theyll goArmy? Marines? The Air Force has the best food and theres beer on base so their hands wont tremble on the stick. 
I read the reports of the dead and mutilated coming back here. I read the articles about the bombs that went to the wrong place and made a mother carry her childs body parts down whats left of her street as she howls in unfathomable misery. I try to imagine if that was my friend carrying her child and how that would feel to even be that close to such horror. I react to the information like a lot of people do, I get depressed, angry, hopeless and frustrated, knowing theres not a lot I can do. 
Then I can turn on the television and watch Sean Hannity tell me that the world is a safer place with Saddam gone, that our efforts in Iraq is the War on Terror, that Saddam and Osama are as close as Chang and Eng and were doing a great job winning this war. This is a guy who has never seen anything more intense than a football game. I hear that Michael Moore is just a damned liar and all hes doing is spreading hate and propaganda. Bill OReilly will send me a Boycott France bumper sticker if I write in and hes right about everything this Kerry guy, geez, what a flip-flopping loser. 
I read an article about how the microfilm that held Bushs military records seems to have disintegrated and now well never know about his whereabouts during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. A day later, I seek to drag that article off the internet so I can make notes about it for my radio show but it seems to have fallen off the grid. I guess thats because its being swept under the rug by the Elite Liberal Media. No problem, I found information on Al Jazeera. Wheeeee!
It might be about now that someone reading this might want to tell me to get the hell out of America if I hate it so much. Thats just the problem, its that I love it so much that I get so angry at whats been happening in the last few years. America is hard at work isolating itself from the rest of the world, America comes off as a cold, forbidding and uglylike Dick Cheney in nothing but a thong. In my opinion, quite the opposite is true. Americans are a great people and we have done so much to be admired, its amazing how easy it is to forget that. People in other continents are having a very easy time but I guess thats because theyre cowards, liberals or intellectuals. President Bush isnt much on reading or watching the news or attending meetings that last too long. Castro reads voraciously. That hardly matters, I was just being cute. Like when Bush did that little skit in the Oval Office where he searched for WMD under his desk. If he looked down the road, he could see young people getting buried in Arlington. You can see a lot when you look around. 
I have been doing work for the USO for some months and its allowed me to see aspects of the war that I would have never been able to from the confines of Sean Hannitys one bedroom brain. So far, Ive visited Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. The more trips I make and the more troops I meet, the more trips I want to make and the more troops I want to meet. The more trips I make and the more troops I meet, the madder I get. These boys and girls are well trained and valuable, why are they being sold out? Why is methyl tertiary butyl ether still in gasoline? Why is a psycho like David Hager in charge of the Reproductive Health Drug Advisory Committee? Why is the President saying hes optimistic about the economy when his daughters children are going to be bailing America out of the fix hes putting us in? Why are all the neighborhoods that were beatdown when I was a kid still beatdown? Why is Americas prison population so huge and BLACK? Why does President Bush get to sell his Harken stock shares, not file with the SEC and magically escape even a scolding? Is it because Whoopi Goldberg said something naughty the other night at a fundraiser? Is it because I say that I cant wait for the day when Dick Cheney is in a prison cell one down from Slobodon Milosevic any time theres a live microphone in front of my face? Is it because I see a country that eats too much, smokes too much, takes too much for granted, worships little girls who lip synch through sold-out concerts, pay a days wage so they can buy a shirt that says Sean John on it, get run over, work way too long and way too hard for way too little and have nothing to show for it but credit debt? Is this why Americans are getting shot at, beheaded, hated and underpaid, so a guy who barely got through college can try and put an amendment onto the Constitution that will treat some Americans like theyre somehow not deserving of happiness? 
America is the land of the free and the home of P-Funk, its time to get up for the downstroke. Please vote this November. --Henry Rollins. 

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Thanks for listening. 