#86, “Obscene,” Rollins Band (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #86, “Obscene,” Rollins Band (1992)

We’re back to my guy Hank again, and with a song that is, I think, the best thing he ever did musically. Which is a weird thing to try to explore, because Henry Rollins—while an important part of rock and roll history—isn’t exactly a musical guy.

By most metrics, Henry Rollins is not a good singer. He can’t hold, or even hit, a note. He’s not alone in that among singers who started in punk bands, but he had a longer career in music than most—about twenty-five years, first with Black Flag and then with Rollins Band—and he also spent that entire time strictly as the singer in his bands, never learning to play an instrument. His vocal style, for most of those twenty-five years, is to play his throat like it’s a washboard, yelling it raw. You can hear that on “Obscene” for sure, with all the breaks and scratches in his voice. He’s not bellowing from his stomach here, it’s all coming straight from the throat. You can really hear him shredding his vocal chords. For most bands, swapping out their singer for Henry Rollins would be a real downgrade.

But Rollins Band wasn’t most bands. Especially not in 1992, when they released The End of Silence. They certainly aren’t for everyone, but if you have an appetite for jazz-based heavy metal played with extreme technical proficiency (and if so, welcome to the party, fellow nerd), then you should be aware that End of Silence-era Rollins Band is one of the greatest bands ever assembled. The three musicians in the band—guitarist Chris Hackett, bassist Andrew Weiss, and drummer Sim Cain—were as perfect a rock and roll unit as anyone ever assembled, up there with Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta or King Crimson.

But there’s a thing with bands that are as technically good as Rollins Band was by 1992—they can get really boring, and it’s hard to find a singer who matches the virtuosity of the musicians. If you grab a vocalist who is as gifted a singer as the band is at playing their instruments, it sounds weird—if you took, I dunno, Josh Groban or somebody and threw him into this band, he could soar where the guitar soars, be as punctual in his delivery as the rhythm section is, and otherwise match the band perfectly. But that’s not what rock and roll is, and it wouldn’t sound right.

There are lots of bands that were extremely technically skilled. Rush, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Dream Theater. Some of them had incredibly skilled and talented singers. Geddy Lee had a three-octave vocal range as a natural tenor; Greg Lake, who sang in King Crimson and ELP, had a legendary vocal range. Dream Theater had a singer, but also recorded a lot of instrumental songs because sometimes that just made more sense for what they were doing. But more importantly: All of those bands are boring as hell, lacking an internal tension because everyone in them is off trying to explore outer space through their music or whatever. When you have a band that’s as good as Rollins Band was in 1992, you need some force to ground it, to serve as a counterbalance, or it risks collapsing under the weight of its own wankery.

Enter Henry Rollins.

“Obscene” is maybe the best song from The End of Silence, the one where the band is operating at its peak. Andrew Weiss, who really is otherworldly as a bassist—genuinely perhaps the best bass player in rock history—is so incredibly precise here, giving the song a complex bassline that rolls along with Sim Cain’s polyrhythmic drumming, while Chris Hackett keeps the song moving with a straightforward, groove-heavy riff that feels like it runs around in circles. There aren’t really other bands that sound like this. (Alas, this version of the band broke up after The End of Silence, with Weiss leaving and being replaced by Melvin Gibbs, another extremely gifted bassist, but one who didn’t have the same uncanny alchemy with Cain.) And then Hank comes in, and he doesn’t even attempt to match the band. Instead he just rides what they’re doing, providing an emotional context for the music by shouting his throat raw. A good singer could get lost in this song; a mediocre singer would be completely overwhelmed by it; one who is so amusical that he’s basically outside the spectrum of good-to-bad the way that Rollins is, on the other hand, is able to harness it.

Rollins was the perfect singer for this band because he is on a separate track from the rest of them. Despite not playing an instrument, he was—by his own account, anyway, though no one else in the band ever said otherwise—often the one who would come into rehearsal with a riff or a musical theme for the band to build off of (he would sing the rudimentary guitar part or bassline into a handheld tape recorder while walking to practice). Rollins spends the first half of “Obscene” riding the guitar riff, using a basic rhyme scheme to keep the vocals satisfying and rhythmically on-time—“I love you and hate you both at the same time / heal you and hate you and laugh as you cry,” basically just aggro-mopey ‘90s dude moon-june-spoon lyrics—and the way he does it really just makes the band sound better, rawer, more like something created by flawed humans.

For the songs the band created to work, you really need either the best singer in the whole world, or the worst one. And I know which one is more interesting.

When a band is technically perfect, another way to describe it might be to say that it’s singular. There aren’t really other bands like 1992 Rollins Band because they operated on a level that few other musicians could touch, writing these epic jams—”Obscene” is nearly nine minutes in length, and it’s only the third-longest song on the album—with a gritty proficiency that it’s hard to find anywhere else. And Rollins, as a vocalist, is singular, too, in his own way. He isn’t just an atonal screamer roaring through nine-minute jam sessions with such vocal intensity that he had to retire from music at 45 because he had done permanent damage to his vocal chords—he’s the best atonal screamer roaring through nine-minute jams while shredding his voice who ever lived. The match they made—the best band, the worst singer—was incredibly powerful, and a lesson that you don’t need to be abnormally gifted to belong in a room with the greats. You just have to be as potent a version of yourself as you can be, and maybe that’s enough.