Society System Destroyed His Life.

Last year I bought and read Broken Summers, a book written by the well-known Henry Rollins. The book is a look behind the scenes of the making of his Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs To Benefit The West Memphis Three CD and the world tour that followed. The book is written in Rollins’s typical combative in-your-face style including a decent dose of pretentious self-pity, masochism and a better-than-most-of-you-attitude. All of his journal entries are pretty entertaining though and remind me a lot of those in Get In The Van, only written by someone older and wiser, but definitely -and fortunately- not less confronting and pissed-off. His anger and frustration concerning the fate of the West Memphis Three is heartfelt and -dare I say?- righteous. If you are into going through your little sister’s drawers in order to find her secret diary and being that much of a voyeur that you really want to read it, try reading a journal of someone who wants you to read all about himself instead, also if you are into what Henry Rollins is doing in general, into Black Flag or into William Shatner you should give Broken Summers a shot. It’s a good read. The reason for me talking about the book is actually something totally different. When reading Rollins’s books I always have some sort of activated sensor to alert me whenever a hardcore legend’s name pops up in sentences, usually said-dude’s Ian McKaye, but all of a sudden on page 168 of Broken Summers I see ‘Springa from SS Decontrol’! Sirens and red alert! Hold on a minute? Is he gonna talk about Springa? THE Springa?! Let me grab a pen and paper so I can make notes! Who can I share this exciting news with? Who will be stoked to hear about what Henry of Black Flag has to say about Springa of Society System Decontrol in 2003? At the time when I was reading this book I couldn’t think of anyone who would be, but I always kept the passage in my mind. And now, one year later, I realized that I might find some kindred dorks who are into stupid stuff like this as well, dorks who are into reading blog sites of insignificant dudes like myself. Ladies and gentlemen, behold, Henry Rollins on Springa:

06-15-03 Boston MA: […] I had a disturbing incident earlier in the day. I was backstage working online on business stuff and the one and only Springa from SS Decontrol came in and started talking a mile a minute. He looked totally insane. He seemed to be talking to himself or something. Oblivious that I am working, he goes into this thing about coming out from Chicago to bury his father who never did anything more for him than chain him up in the basement. He repeated that about three times and then he said he was thinking of auditioning for some kind of acting troupe that was going to tour in the summer. He went on and on, it was nuts. Finally someone from the venue came up to him and tried to throw him out because they thought he was some guy off the street. Springa asked me if he could come to the show and pulled out a few crumbled one dollar bills and said that’s all the money he had. I nodded the guy to ok it and told Springa I would see him later. He went on about some other spacey shit and then the guy said he had to leave and he just shuffled out. I never saw him again. The backstage manager told me that earlier Springa had come up to him and told him that I said it was alright for him to have a ticket and if he didn’t get one, “Henry was going to be very angry.” This is long before I saw him. The last time I saw Springa was years ago in Chicago and he came barreling backstage walking around the room, sweating like he was on something, going off on some insane tangent. I don’t know what’s up with the guy. We used to play with his band and they were good. […]

Check out these sites to find out more about some of the things I talked about:

http://21361.com/
http://www.wm3.org/splash.php
http://xclaim.com/
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/lyrics/ssd_kids.html