Punk rock royalty is about to muscle its way into town.

Tonight, legendary singer, writer, actor, talk show host and general figure Henry Rollins will take the stage in front of a sold-out crowd to add another spoken word performance to his lengthy résumé.

The Black Flag alum was able to take a break from his self-described “eight day work week” to talk with the Northern Star about his work, his time on Sons of Anarchy and the current state of hardcore punk.

NORTHERN STAR: I understand this is not your first time in DeKalb. I know that you did a spoken word performance here in the early ‘90s and I thought I heard something about Black Flag doing a set sometime in the mid-‘80s. What do you remember about your time in the city?

HENRY ROLLINS: Nothing. Nothing stands out as far as if there was a Black Flag show there. I’d have to look it up. I have the shows written down in a file somewhere, but that would be like ’85-’86; that’s kind of in the dim rear-view. As far as the show I did there in the ‘90s, nothing really jumps out.

NS: I’ve seen videos of you doing interviews on YouTube, and people seem to get a real charge out of messing with you, and trying to get a reaction out of you. Why do you think that is?

HR: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that was…an interesting sound bite for them or something. Are you going to try and do that?

NS: Absolutely not. Your recent career has focused more on outlets like writing and spoken word and appearing in movies and television. What caused you to shift away from music for the time being?

HR: At a certain point, I had been doing a lot of music pretty much ceaselessly, with a great deal of urgency and frequency, and at one point, it kind of stopped being this thing where I was learning, where I was making discovery. It was just this thing that I was doing, and so I wanted to see if there was anything else to do. At my age now, at 50, when I see some of my peers or people of my age kind of out there doing it, they play older music. It just kind of looks strange, or it looks like they’re in ‘maintenance mode,’ like they’re trying to keep some nipping dogs from attacking them rather than…just doing new things. That might be, somewhat, part of rock music, because I don’t necessarily see it in jazz music or blues or bluegrass or country…where it seems to age better. But in rock music, there seems to be this “use by” date, and when I see [Rolling Stones singer] Mick Jagger out there singing, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction,’ perhaps I’m cynical, but I go, ‘Really? You’re Mick Jagger. You can’t get any satisfaction? Give me your bank account…let me manage it for you and I will show you all kinds of satisfaction on every possible level. Unless, maybe it’s time for you to quit music and go do something else and get some satisfaction, because after a hundred million records sold and 80,000 fans a night, if you can’t get any satisfaction, buddy, then you’re looking in the wrong place.’ So, when I see these gentlemen and gals [say], ‘Here’s one that your parents liked’ and roll into some song…that’s fine for them, I just don’t want to do it. So, years ago, I said, ‘Well, let’s see what else happens if I stop doing music; see if there’s anything for me.’ Now, I’m working about eight days a week trying to keep up with it all, and so it is quite interesting. The talking shows more correspond to how I’m living now, in that I’m going out into the world and I’m taking a lot of photos, I’m writing a lot of articles…and the talking shows are more of a relevant vehicle for me to get this kind of information across, where the band thing…it just feels like it’s a younger man’s pursuit, or a younger person’s pursuit. I don’t mind going to gigs where everyone is much younger than me, I just don’t feel like I want to be up on stage doing it.

NS: As far as [the FX television show] Sons of Anarchy goes…what was it like playing a character like [fictional white supremacist] A.J. Weston?

HR: It was relatively easy, in that the person’s emotional range is very kind of hemmed-in. He’s not one of these guys running around having a big emotional display. He’s a sociopathic ideologue. He’s like someone who watches some kind of intense, extremist news program and derives his world view from that. This guy wanted a white America. You don’t have to look at things if that’s your conclusion; that we’d be better off as just white people. You’re not really doing much homework there, and so it was not a complex character. The thing that…made him interesting [was that] he was a good dad. There is a pulse. He really loves his kids, and that was the challenge: to make him this awful person who had this interesting character kick. So, that’s the weird conflict that I tried to really work on. But, the rest of it was kind of one of the more easier characters I’ve been employed to do. I’m not much of an actor. You can look at anything I’ve done and in five minutes come to that conclusion. But that Sons of Anarchy thing was like, the biggest acting job I’ve ever been given. It took half a year. It was really an amazing experience, because for six months of my life, that’s kind of all I did. I was either on the set or about to go to the set…I was in my world there for half a year. Good times…well, it’s not fun being a neo-nazi, but it was enjoyable work, and the cast are just incredibly nice people.

NS: Do you have any thoughts on current hardcore music?

HR: I can’t be specific with bands, because it’s not really a genre that I follow all that closely. I’m not putting it down at all. To me, it is a function of youth. What if some hardcore band kind of, sort of sounds a little [like] that which came before it? That doesn’t bother me. To me, if you can find a few chords on a guitar that really allow you to put out how you feel, and you can attach a lyric to that, and you’re 18 or 17, or whatever the age, and that kind of music is really working for you, I say, ‘Rumble, young man. Rumble.’ It doesn’t necessarily have to be original. It’s about feeling your time and wrestling your emotions, and so I think hardcore music…is kind of where it’s always been. It’s filling out that function, where I think that young people should have instruments in their hands, or [be] going to a gig. It sounds a little fascist, like, ‘Here’s what you’ll do with your summer,’ but I think it’s a really great thing for young people to be socialized with music. You’ve got some great summers of your life coming if you go the music route. Just [as] a casual fan of going to music, you’ll meet some great people, you’ll have some great times, and I think that ‘youth + music’ is one of the greatest equations ever, and so hardcore music…my only hope is that it’s everywhere, and pervasive as hell, in every country where there is electricity and going non-stop. I hope that’s the state of it. For me to get closer up on it, for me to tell you what bands I think are great or whatever…I couldn’t tell you. I just hope it’s around. These days, I must confess, I listen to some really weird music. The older I get, the more far-out…and eclectic my tastes are becoming.