There are few media outlets Henry Rollins has yet to tap. He has slowly weaved his way into almost all forms of mass communication today, including books, movies, music and live performances. Despite his prolific and sprawling career, he doesn’t think he’s a Renaissance man.

Rollins sees himself as a curious person, out to change the world as much as he can as one person. After leaving his position as the frontman for post-punk troubador Black Flag in 1986, he went on to form his pseudo-solo project, Rollins Band. He has also recorded several spoken word albums, such as “Think Tank” and “Sweatbox,” and is a successful author, penning titles like “Solipsist” and “Black Coffee Blues.”

Rollins organized a benefit record, “Rise Above,” for the West Memphis Three, a group of men who were convicted of the 1993 killings of three young boys in West Memphis, Ark. Currently, he can be found touring the country in support of his latest book, “Broken Summers,” a travelogue and insight into the process of recording “Rise Above.”

On the outside, Rollins is a tough punk rocker. Inside his head, however, is a compassionate, amusing man who has lived a life he says he never expected to live.

He will return to Ames for his comedic and thought-provoking performance, “An Evening of Spoken Word,” at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Stephens Auditorium.

Rollins took time from his touring schedule to talk to the Daily about his contempt for the media, dislike of President Bush and Saddam Hussein and his aspiring career in acting.

Kim Bui: Since we were talking about it earlier in the office, why do you hate the media so much?

Henry Rollins: I don’t hate the media. I have contempt for a lot of music media. They’re not doing their job in that if you’re reviewing a record and you don’t know anything about music, shouldn’t you have a different job? And it’s interesting when you read a lot of contemporary critical sentiments of music and you realize the writer doesn’t really have any real background in listening to music.

They review records they get in jiffy packs sent from record labels and they take the CD down to the store and trade it for something they want more or a few dollars and that, to me, is missing the plot.

Years ago, you’d actually get into it with some music critics who could actually tell you something about Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker or [B‚la] Bartock like I can. Nowadays, you have guys who don’t even like music, it seems. And so that’s what I have discontent in, that and media that seeks to sensationalize something like The Globe putting the girl in the Kobe Bryant case, outing her face all over the place in her prom outfit, I think is disenfranchising the person. It’s a mean thing to do to some gal. And that makes me mad.

I would never want to shut down some media outlets because that’s Josef Stalin territory and that’s not me.

KB: Where do you think media went wrong?

HR: I think it went wrong when it went for rating over content, when the tabloid aspect of journalism got taken into the mainstream, like the Fox Network. I’ve you’ve ever watched that, you’ve seen these clowns like Geraldo Rivera or Sean Hannity.

A great way to really understand what’s going on in your country is to watch Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly and pretty much reverse out anything they say, and then you’ll get to the truth.

I’m not liberal, I’m not a conservative either. It’s just interesting to see how these guys, you know “war is good bush is great.” And anything, anybody who even asks a question is interrupted, shut down and called un-American, unpatriotic and they go for what’s going on with Kobe Bryant. Shut up, there’s Marines getting killed and you’re talking to me about a basketball player’s rape case.

I’m not putting down, trying to downplay the seriousness of a rape charge or whatever that thing turns out to be when it goes to trial, but there’s life and death on the line and to keep the viewers watching the show by dangling T&A or some of that. It’s like reading Rolling Stone and People — those two magazines have just become totally the same.

That’s contempt I have, where you watch the news. Like, if you ever watch BBC World News, it’s a very unvarnished look at the world. It’s very austere, not a lot of adjectives. It’s just the news. If you look at news footage and news reporting in Australia and other countries, it’s so not like what we have here. It’s critical of the administration. We don’t dare be critical of Bush in this country.

KB: Do you think there are any media outlets in the U.S. that are doing a good job?

HR: I think they’re all doing a good job. As with any information, you can slant it and spin it, and I think that’s dangerous in these times when you’ve got lives on the line. I don’t think they’re criminal and corrupt. I think that’s just kind of the way it is, in that you’ve got to keep the ratings up. Now that news is a 24-hour media medium, instead of Walter Cronkite at seven, now that you have MSNBC which is like 24/7, you have to keep the media Hacky Sack up in the air. And you do that by endless spin and self decision and assumption. They bring in a panel of men who have never seen a day of war in their life and they have them analyzing the Iraq situation endlessly. Who are you and where do you get off telling me info you know? I’d rather talk to a guy out in the field.

I think anybody with a wide eye for BS can look at the news and can get good bits for it. I think there’s a lot of alternative news outlets, like on the Internet… Tom Tomorrow has an interesting column. It’s called The World Today, there’s a lot of alternative news Web sites.

Salon is interesting, where you can see a different version of the news. And yeah, you weigh it and make your own decision. Of course, I would never endeavor to even get a, not even a, cursory understanding with just CNN or just Fox or just MSNBC. I prefer the media mix and I make my decision and come to all my own conclusions.

KB: On your college tours you tend to talk a lot about student apathy…

HR: It’s a good seven minutes, but it’s nothing to beat up someone for a quarter of an hour about. You see it so much.

KB: Do you think the apathy will continue, seeing as students have gotten decently involved in anti-war rallies and the whole generation dean thing?

HR: I think seeing young people at an anti-war rally is great; at least they’re thinking. At least they got up off their ass and they made it down to the sidewalk and they’re doing something with their Tuesday afternoon rather than kicking back. I like that. Even if this was a pro-war rally, which I’m not into, but I’m into someone getting off the couch and being somehow proactive. I’m not pro-war, but I’m at least definitely anti-couch.

And so I think there is obviously a consciousness in young people. And I think young people are not going to be as easily fooled as people from my generation or perhaps my parent’s generation, you know, coming out of World War II and Vietnam. Coming out of Vietnam, people grew up kind of cynical and kind of going into Carver and — bam — Reagan. I think a lot of people — after Watergate — a lot of people changed how people looked at our government, but you can also say that about when Kennedy was assassinated.

But I think young people these days, there’s a lot of spin. There is a lot of things to look out for. I also think a lot of young people are more complacent than I was at that age, but maybe I’m just a spaz.

KB: OK, Tell me about the New book, “Broken Summers.”

HR: It’s basically a travel book that takes in the making of the “Rise Above” benefit record that we put together for the West Memphis Three — the three boys in Arkansas. And it also takes in the subsequent tour that just finished a few months ago and all the of the stuff in between. It’s several visits to several countries and the, uh, gathering together of the Iggy Pops and Lemmys and Mike Pattons and thrown into this record. What an arduous task that was, and in the middle of it, my pal Dee Dee Ramone dies. A lot of photos in it, a pretty cool read.

KB: Why did you chose to help those boys? What made you think “There’s something I can do for them?”

HR: Well, I think that’s your job as an American, to find something you disagree with and make it better. If you agree with everything that’s going on, I think you’re sleeping on the job. Because quite obviously, not all is well. It’s pretty damn close, but we haven’t quite hit the three-point shot yet.

If you want to make things better, then you better look at the squeaky wheel and go with your grease gun. You know what I mean? It’s up to us to make it better. If you’re going to stand around and think everything is going great, trust me, you’re blowing it on that front.

So when I learned more about the case, when I sat down with the West Memphis support group here in L.A. and found out how evidence was collected really poorly and the court trial was done in kind of a slipshod manner, how the judge did not know the definition of forensic ontology, which is the study of… prints of a corpse.

It didn’t seem to me — maybe the trial wasn’t unfair, I wouldn’t go that far — but it wasn’t all it could be. Justice had not completely been served and since we’re not living in Stalinist Russia, even the grossest pedophile needs his day in court. I hate the idea, but it’s true. I don’t think these guys got that and that was the thing that irked me the most. A., I don’t think they’re guilty and B., I don’t think the court system served them.

And if you’ve ever been a juror or been in a court room, all of that stuff is very sacred. And if you’ve never been a juror, they brief you all day on what a very important task you’re doing and it really hits you — it’s like someone standing on your chest. You really feel the weight of it, and by the time you’re in there it’s almost a next to God because you are in a way playing God. And I don’t think that was taken seriously enough in that case. So you can’t save the world, but you can sure try and contribute to change in a small way and that’s what we decided to do.

KB: “Solipsist” has to be my favorite book of yours.

HR: Oh, thank you.

KB: You’re welcome, it’s absolutely fantastic.

HR: The weird one?

KB: Yeah, the one where everyone’s like, ‘that’s really dark’…

HR: Yeah.

KB: I actually didn’t ever connect the Black Flag/ Rollins Band side of Henry Rollins with the publisher/ writer/ spoken-word side of Henry Rollins for quite a while. How does that feel — to know some fans see you as a hardcore rocker and others a dark poet and yet others a muscular teddy with more than a few stories to tell?

HR: I don’t really think about it much. I just think a lot of performer types — and rightfully so — they kind of depend on an image. There’s the guy and he’s kind of the angry guy. He plays his angry music. Little does anyone know he misses his cats while he’s on tour but he doesn’t want to tell anyone, lest record sales slip because he’s not the cartoon prophecy.

For me, I’ve never had a problem with trying to show a bigger picture, in that someone says, “Well, wait a minute, you’re on the stage with the band and it’s very intense. And you go on stage on your own and it’s very funny. Which one is the real you? And, like, obviously one of those is fake.”

And I go, “How do you, how do you make that conclusion just because you’re the intense rock dude? That’s it? And the other one is bogus?”

That seem pretty short-sighted to me and kind of limiting. I wouldn’t want to be the guy in the band. That would be really suffocating to me.

I admire people like Henry Miller, Man Ray, who were alive; therefore, they arted out. A guy like Man Ray, he wrote, sculpted, wrote films, fought — and same with Henry Miller. He wasn’t quite the cinematographer. He painted, wrote, traveled and brought the art to his life and his life to his art rather than just being in this one little category for consumers.

KB: Just kind of a personal question out of curiosity — are the scars you refer to more than a few times in the books real or emotional?

HR: With some of the more psychotic stories?

KB: Yeah.

HR: Some of it is true. If you read back cover of book, the concept of the book is to basically take a grain of sand and blow it up so big it’s a planet. If you take that one strange second of your day and it’s an eternity, everything becomes, like, heavily distorted and saturated, almost overwrought. And in a way, you find truth through fiction. Through exaggeration you find real clarity. Like, through hyperbole, sometimes it’s only hyperbole that gets you to make someone feel something. Like you can say, “I was in love with her so I flew at, like, a million miles an hour to get to her house.”

Well, obviously you didn’t go a million miles an hour. It just shows the reader, the listener, how much you wanted to be with that person. It just shows the desire. In that book I basically just went and found something really insane where I was just kind of pulling back and went, “No, no, no. Don’t run away. Run to it and see what happens.”

I kind of cast my line out to it and came out with that book. It was easily the weirdest writing experience I ever had. I worked on that thing for, like, three years. It was just a strange ride.

KB: When you were starting out, did you ever think you’d be where you are today, dabbling in more forms of media than most musicians?

HR: No. I never thought I’d be even able to pay my rent. When you’re younger — I mean, I’m older than you and I’m older than I was when I was 20 — you see less because you’ve been through less, and so your world is smaller and in a way a more simplified place. And so you think of like, “I am hungry. I am broke.”

And so you solve what is immediately around you. And so I never thought anything past “play the show, get some sleep, eat.” And then as you get older see more added to your life through good things and bad things, you start to see that there’s a whole lot of stuff you’re going to deal with. And now I don’t really look back all that much and say, “who would have thought.”

Because people, they ask those impossible-to-answer questions like, “if you didn’t join Black Flag, where would you be now?”

Well come on, I don’t know. I can assume. I can look at people I grew up with who didn’t leave town and join a band. I can extrapolate from that, but um… No, I never thought I’d be doing any of this stuff, like 20 years ago, no.

KB: What do you think of people calling you a renaissance man ?

HR: It’s a little much — that’s a lot of syllables. I like “jackass of all time.” I like “low budget renaissance man.”

I just have a fairly unquenchable curiosity, and a lot of enthusiasm where I’m in a band just because I’m really a fan of music more than a musician. I’m so into it I got my own little band. Like the guy who likes the Schick razor so much he buys Schick. I kind of bought into my interests. I love literature and reading so much and I had such an alternative lifestyle to some of those I grew up with, it makes for a good story. And so in order to put out a book, I started a publishing company. So it’s just kind of… I just follow my interests. It’s basically that. So renaissance man? No. Super interested man? Yes. Relentlessly curious man? Absolutely.

KB: So personally, what do you think of the world right now? Presidential candidates?

HR: I think that it looks very bad for Democrats since there’s so many of them and they all just seem to be bickering amongst themselves. That doesn’t play well with voters, I think. There’s so many of them and they’re all trying to get over the wall and instead of extolling the virtues of their plan, they’ve got to trash-talk other guy, which apparently is a necessity. You’ve just got to do it because it’s going get done to you — so you have to do a preemptive media strike against those around you, which I think is too bad.

It just makes these guys look like angry eighth graders, and it opens them up for all the Chris Matthews’ and Bill O’Reillys and the Sean Hennitys who just, it’s like those baby sea turtles waddling toward sea break and the seagulls come down. These guys serve themselves up to the Sean Hennitys of the world. It’s like a plate of sashimi and I think it does not bode well for the democrats — and I think Bush will be our president in 2005.

KB: Does that make you depressed?

HR: Yes it does. I just don’t agree with a lot of the guy’s policies. The fact that he made Michael Leavitt the new head of the EPA. If you go to some admittedly radical environmental Web sites, like Earth First, and look at the dirt they dug up on him, he’s such a Bush-type crony. He’s like Bush, where he just plays up to corporate dudes that got him in. And he doesn’t make any waves, he just kind of goes that party line.

Bush also put a guy named [David] Hager in charge of reproductive health drugs agency [the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs] and that concerns someone like you, a young woman in the world. Here’s a Christian guy, and I have nothing against Christianity, here’s a guy mixing religion with science, in a place that has no room for religion or judgment. That’s life and death. God isn’t in on this one. Not in the lab and not at the pharmacy and not in your brochure and not in your ovaries and this to me is really un-American and it’s a cheap shot and it’s basically sucking up to power that got this guy in office.

And for me, this Iraq thing?

I hate Saddam Hussein. Everyone hates Saddam Hussein and his dead sons. No one likes torture, unless you’re a guy that likes torture, none of us like it. I truly don’t think that Bush woke up in the middle of the night with icy veins and thinking, “Oh my god, those poor Iraqis, we’ve got to liberate them.” Nor do I think he woke up on another night at 3 in the morning thinking, “We’re gonna get nuked by Saddam Hussein.” Nor do I think he wakes up any day and thinks, “It’s America’s job to go and kick ass over there.”

Those are the reasons we went: To protect America, to liberate Iraqis and to depose this evil guy. I don’t think those are the real reasons we are there. I don’t think those are the real reasons.

KB: What do you think are the real reasons?

HR: I think if you’re going to have something that’s going to $87 billion and a Republican in office and not think you’re going to get a huge backend off that deal.

There’s no way a Republican politician would throw that much money at something and either get all his friends paid like Halliburton or get something for the American people on the back end, like a bunch of free gasoline or cheap gas, and so I think we’re all united in that we want our troops to come home and think everyone in America is bummed out when they see the news and two more guys dead, 13 guys dead. And I think everybody in the country hates Saddam Hussein.

But why were we there? I don’t know if I think that’s one of those things where if you say anything, some conservative calls you unpatriotic. I’m so far not convinced that we went exclusively to depose and liberate Iraqis and have some preemptive strike that no other Arab country is afraid of.

And the idea of installing a democracy in the middle of the Arab world to me is laughable. It’s like making Iowa fundamentalist. It ain’t gonna happen.

KB: You ever get sick of doing cameos and small parts in movies?

HR: No, I’m not really an actor. I’m a total BS artist and all the studios are down the street from me. For me, it’s between tour work. And having the curiosity and low threshold for boredom and the complete sense of, you know, irony, I go for some parts now and then. I don’t consider myself an actor. I think I’ve pulled off what parts I’ve gotten.

I don’t think there’s any director in Hollywood that’s like, “Call Rollins on this one.” I don’t think that’s happening. I don’t think that’s going to happen and I’d be quite surprised if it did.

I literally live 5-15 minutes from all the studios. I live in Hollywood. My office, I’m sitting right on Hollywood Boulevard as we speak. For me, if I’m going to be home for six weeks, I’ve always got a mound of office work, but I always get that done pretty quick. And if someone says, “be on the Drew Carey Show for three days,” OK.

The part looked interesting and they’re all nice people and Drew’s a cool dude. And they’re all actually really cool. “Here, audition for this mega blockbuster Bad Boys II thing.” OK.

Too hilarious. Me in a Will Smith film? Get outta here. So you know, to me it’s funny and he was very cool and everyone there was really great, actually. It’s not necessarily a movie I’d go see, but it’s definitely funny for me to show up in.

So, no, I’m not looking for a career in Hollywood.

KB: Which do you think will last longer — the music or the spoken word?

HR: For me? The talking and the writing.

KB: Why?

HR: It’s something you can do with a whole lot of gray hair and a limp, where I think the music is probably better done by people with more green in their grass.