Henry Rollins bringing 'Good to See You 2022' spoken word tour to Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall

Henry Rollins needs to talk.

The mesmerizing, Grammy-winning spoken word artist hasn’t toured since 2018. He had planned to tour in 2020 and 2021, but we all know what happened.

“We have all been through something and I am no different,” said Rollins in a phone interview. In just four days he would be opening his extensive 80-show North American tour. It stops at the Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead in Munhall on Wednesday.

It was a tour that was to include legs in Europe and Australia, but the pandemic wiped them out, he said.

“Covid just has this unbearable velocity,” said Rollins. “Suddenly, (in 2020) I’ve got no job, I’m relatively lucky to have a home to be locked down in. My life will never be what it was. So, I had to say goodbye to that.”

But Rollins is clearly not saying goodbye to touring. During his “Good To See You 2022” tour that began last Saturday in Royal Oak, Mich., and ends June 4 in Montreal, he has scheduled only six off days.

Rollins, 61, has a lot of pent-up energy and a lot to say about what has taken place over the last two years, including recent events.

“I’m still smarting, if you will. I had three legs for the tour for this year. Two of them have gone away. Europe went away right before Christmas Day and Australia went away two weeks ago,” he said. “I was supposed to be in Russia three weeks ago for a show in Moscow. That would have been interesting.”

Oddly enough, Rollins’ last live show before this tour was in 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city. He said it’s awful to think about it now “because there’s no one in my audience that night who isn’t living very differently than they were three months ago. Who knows if they’re even in Kyiv anymore.”

Rollins (whose original name is Henry Garfield) clearly is a man whose genuine empathy belies his tough-guy image. That image was forged from his days as the intense lead singer of the groundbreaking hardcore 1980s punk rock band Black Flag, who occasionally exchanged blows with audience members, and his follow-up, The Rollins Band.

His fans also remember his performance as primary antagonist A.J. Weston, a white supremacist, in season two of the FX original series “Sons of Anarchy.” They enjoyed his performance on that show so much that some fans would tell him, “I love hating you,” Rollins recalled.

However, in the interview, Rollins — who claims to still be an “angry person” in real life — gently prompts his questioner into sharing with him that he has had friends die of covid during the pandemic. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Rollins, who went on to say that’s the very reason he’s loath to complain about how the pandemic has impacted his life.

“We have common ground from this and me being the only person in the building with a microphone on any given night on tour, I have to be very careful with how and how much I moan about that. It can’t be ‘poor me,’ ” he said. “So, I’ve been very carefully developing material with all of that in mind.”

Rollins has always taken a meticulous approach to his material. He began touring as a spoken word artist in the mid-1980s while still a member of Black Flag. Over the years he has created mesmerizing albums including “Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag,” a 1994 double-disc recording of him reading from his Black Flag tour diary of the same name.

An excerpt: “When they spit at me, when they grab at me, they aren’t hurting me. When I push out and mangle the flesh of another, it’s falling so short of what I really want to do to them.”

Rollins ended up winning the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

These days, Rollins said he likes doing spoken word much more than being the lead singer of a band.

“I like being on stage alone because there’s no backup,” he said. “It’s truer than being in a band for me because there’s no snare drum to bail you out. There’s no guitar noise to cover the fact that you screwed up the chorus.

“When you’re on stage alone, it’s just you and you’re going to be evaluated on the quality of your material. You can’t phone it in. You can’t phone in a single comma. You can’t fool them.”

And how does Rollins prepare to give his audience the show he feels it deserves?

“Every tour I truly try and take it up a notch,” he said. “I haven’t done any of this damn material. It’s all veal. What I will do is constantly edit. Never be boring. That’s rule number one. And you get to the point where it’s ‘all killer, no filler.’ By the time I get out on stage, I’m about 97% there through weeks of preparation. By the time I see you guys (in Homestead), I’ll be Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon,’ greased and hitting hard.”

So, the man who takes the stage in Homestead Wednesday is not only a successful rock and spoken word recording artist, actor and radio and TV show host with stints at MTV, National Geographic and the History Channel, but a prolific author as well. During the pandemic, Rollins wrote three books, one of which – “Stay Fanatic!!! Volume 3” – he’ll be selling on his current tour.

“I’ve been working on a series of music books,” he said. “I’ve been collecting records since the Carter administration and I just decided to do crazy writing where you take one seven-inch record and you show every pressing of it, the test pressing, the promo sheet, where you just get so deep into the weeds … and they’re loved all over the world.”

Could Rollins ever see himself going back to performing in a high-energy band like Black Flag or The Rollins Band?

“That’s definitely in the rearview,” he said. “About 20 years ago, I woke up and I went ‘Wow! I have no more lyrics.’ It just hit me like ‘ding, time to leave’ and I told my manager, ‘I’m done with music.’ I called my bandmates and said, ‘Fellas, I got no more toothpaste left in the tube.’

“I don’t want to go on stage and sing something I wrote when I was 23. I might not disagree with the lyric, but my emotional register is not that of a 20-something. Things are different. You could offer me any amount of money and I could not do that.”

For now, Rollins is strictly looking at the massive tour in front of him and he said he’s really looking forward to coming back to the Pittsburgh area.

“I’ve done a billion shows in Pittsburgh and I’ve never had a bad time,” he said. “Pittsburgh has always been really good to me. It’s a rough audience. It’s a tough town. It’s cold. It can be pretty gray and the people are kinda born with a winter coat on. In Pittsburgh, they’re just dead honest. But if you really bring it, they’re like ‘OK, we accept you.’ ”