Henry Rollins has announced a new memoir about his challenging childhood and early life, to be titled Bait Dog Boy.
The book will focus on the former Black Flag frontman’s difficult upbringing in Washington, D.C., a time in which he moved between his parents and came into contact with abusive and unreliable adults.
It will go on to cover his meeting with Ian MacKaye, who would go on to front Minor Threat, and how their mutual discovery of punk changed their lives and gave them a way out.
Bait Dog Boy will be published on March 2 next year via Random House in the US and Little, Brown in the UK. Fans can pre-order their copy here.
The publishers have said: “What happens when a child grows up in an almost total vacuum of love? That was the reality for Henry Rollins, pioneering punk frontman of the seminal groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, who came of age in an environment seemingly determined to break him.”
“For the first time, Rollins tells the story he spent most of his life trying to avoid, taking us through his childhood and adolescence – from a volatile Washington, D.C., childhood spent shuffling between indifferent parents, to his encounters with a seemingly endless parade of abusive adults, to his eventual meeting with Ian MacKaye, and their ultimate discovery of punk rock, which would become a lifeline. Rollins tells what it was like to live a life colored by the experience of constantly absorbing pain, like a bait dog.”
The memoir’s title refers to Rollins’ description of absorbing pain like a bait dog. “I have no desire to be a survivor,” he has written. “I’d rather accept, absorb, adapt, fight and break that which seeks to break me.”
Rollins has self-published a number of memoirs in the past, beginning with 1994’s Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag, which went on to win a Grammy for its spoken-word version.
The musician first fronted the D.C. hardcore band State Of Alert before joining Black Flag in 1981. When they split in 1986, he founded his own label and publishing company and formed the Rollins Band.
Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye unearthed the previously unreleased 1977 album ‘Gravest Gravy’ by The Cramps. Produced by Alex Chilton, the re-release will be out on August 21.
