not the
unyielding ogre his reputation may suggest. He is not quite as tall as
might be expected and, though developed to a muscular peak, his physique
is in proportion to his height. Additionally, his hair has grown out of
a close crop and today is brushed in to a boyish sideparting. When he
smiles, his grin is sloppy and lopsided, and it's as if the mask has
ddropped and you can see where Henry Rollins came from: the repressive
isolation of an only childhood and broken home. Back when he was plain
old Henry Garfield growing up under his domineering military man father
in Washington DC.

"I was raised as a typical middle-class American male," he says
at the end of a second day of talking with the Japanese press and media,
readying himself for a trawl through thebootleg emporiums of the city's
Shinjuku area.

"My parents divorced when I was very young. I went to a school
that was heavy on discipline. A lot of sit down, shut up, teachers
screaming, spit flying everywhere, push-ups in the hallway."

Early on Rollins figured out that the teachers who had driven
tanks for Patton and served time in Vietnam would waste no time in
turning me into mince meat." he seems to have subsumed the regimented
approach to life at the same time as erecting the walls of solitude and
independence, seemingly resolved never to rely on anyone, least of all
the parents who split up and let him down so early in his life. Are his
mother and father still alive?

"As far as I know. I've seen my father a total of less than seven
minutes since I