#100, “Shine,” Rollins Band (1994)

150 Favorite Songs: #100, “Shine,” Rollins Band (1994)

I don’t think I’d be who I am today if it weren’t for Henry Rollins.

I was, in a lot of senses, a late bloomer. As a teenager, I didn’t have a very strong sense of identity. I had friends, and places where I fit in, more or less—sometimes much less, sometimes a bit more—but the role I played in terms of social dynamics was kind of like the role Flava Flav plays in Public Enemy. Someone else was the leader, I was the one who went “yeah, boyee!”

That changed around my senior year. I kind of broke up with most of my friend group around that summer, and found a new one—not a great one—with some other kids I worked with at the pizza place. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because it was kind of a building block—albeit mostly in pretty different ways—for Alex’s backstory in The Fight For Midnight.) I realized that wasn’t where I wanted to be either pretty quickly, and then my whole life blew up: My parents moved to Texas, I did not, I got fired from the job I’d had for two years. I was pretty adrift. I wasn’t much of a student, so school wasn’t really much of an anchor. I knew I wouldn’t be going to college, so I was kind of just… there.

There was a comic book and game store near school, though. They had a back section for people to play Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons, and the owner would let me hang out there after school, reading comics I didn’t have the money to buy and playing games with the other people who hung out there, who were mostly guys, mostly a little older than me. They were probably only like 22 or 23, but that’s a world of difference when you’re seventeen, and they were happy to serve as these sort of big-brother figures. I was very grateful for them, and then one day, one of them introduced me to Henry Rollins. I don’t remember how, exactly—it was probably either a copy of Get in the Van, the book he released collecting his tour diaries from being in Black Flag, or maybe he let me borrow his copy of Live at McCabe’s, a spoken word/comedy record. Whatever it was, it stuck. I wanted direction, and ol’ Hank’s whole deal was talking and writing about how to live in a way that I was very ready to hear.

Eventually, I graduated and moved to Texas because I didn’t have anywhere else to be. Despite my grades, I had done well enough on the SAT to get into community college, so I started school, way down on the border. I was no more interested in college than I was in high school, though. I wanted to learn different things, in different ways. I wanted, basically, to learn the way that Henry Rollins wrote about in Get in the Van. So I dropped out a couple weeks later, got in a car with a friend from high school who also wasn’t in college, and drove around America for a few weeks. By the time I came back to Texas, I had some new perspective. I would—well, I would pretty much rip off Henry Rollins’s act, performing spoken word the way that he did it. I found it much easier to communicate with people that way, talking at them from behind a microphone, than I did in making friends by meeting them and having one-on-one conversations. And this pretty much became how I lived for the next five or six years.

I was a fan of Rollins’s before I got into his music. The music is, er, not for everyone. I’ll have more to say about it in future entries, because I think there’s actually a lot of artistic merit to what he did as a singer, but he’s not, by most metrics, good at singing. But in the way that a teenager can just be a sponge, I pretty much used up the talking records after a year or two, and I needed something new.

“Shine” is pretty much the purest distillation of Rollins’s appeal. It’s not the best song in the Rollins Band catalog—it’s basically a simple blues groove, a little bit funky, while Hank does a sort of… yell-rap? over the music—but he’s never more on in his role as philosopher/drill sergeant than he is here. It’s an instruction manual for how to live, which is what I needed at the time in my life where I found it. He fairly barks those instructions at you, a didactic guide for the sort of lost young man I was: “If you think you’ve got 100 years to mess around, you’re wrong / this time is real, your time is now / it’s hero time.” He explains how that philosophy steered his own life: “If I listened to everything that they said to me, I wouldn’t be here / if I took the time to bleed from all the tiny little arrows shot my way, I wouldn’t be here.” He warns against what he sees as time-wasters. “I’ve got no time for drug addiction, no time for smoke and booze / too strong for a shortened life span, I’ve got no time to lose.” Ultimately, he insists, “it’s time to shine.” Well, shit. Of course I was going to drop out of college.

I’ve listened to “Shine” a thousand times since I was eighteen. My relationship to Henry Rollins’s work has been complicated over the years—when someone influences your life in such a big way, part of the process of growing up involves rejecting and distancing yourself from them—but even now, decades later, when I need a boost, I can put this song on and feel a little extra nudge out the door to do something.

I was lucky in that when I was seventeen and lost, Mike Colson introduced me to Henry Rollins. I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t had Hank shouting in my ear “get up! get up get up get up get up!” the way he does in the outro to this song, but I think it’s likely I would have ended up on a different path. Maybe I’d have drifted through community college the way I drifted through high school. Maybe I’d have found something else to inspire me. If I had been seventeen in 2017 instead of 1997, it’s entirely possible it would have been Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate or one of the grubby little YouTube hustlers who is out there now trying to spread very different kinds of messages to young men in situations similar to the ones I was in—I can’t say that I’d have resisted that appeal, though I’d like to think so. But I had Henry Rollins, instead, and it made me want to do my best to shine.