Creatively, Henry Rollins is a bunch of guys. Fire-breathing frontman with hardcore-punk legends Black Flag and alternative-rock’s Rollins Band. Actor in major film and TV hits like “Heat” and “Sons of Anarchy.” Author of essential reads like his book “Get In The Van,” and an insightful radio-host and talk-show interviewer.

For 40 years, Rollins has also been doing one-man shows — what he calls “the talking show,” where he tells stories from his travels, career and life — in between band-tours, acting gigs, writing projects, etc.

Rollins is currently on the road with his latest talking show, titled “Good To See You.” On Oct. 15 the tour hits Mars Music Hall 7 p.m. at Huntsville, Alabama’s Von Braun Center. Tickets start at $32 plus applicable fees via ticketmaster.com or the VBC Box Office, address 700 Monroe St.

Whether it’s a vocal, prose, role, broadcasting, or onstage performance, Rollins is known for his intensity, sharp succinct wit and paramilitary discipline. During our recent phone interview, his intensity knob was dialed down. His answers were polite, thoughtful, sharp and devoid of pretension. Even the way he answered the phone when he dialed in was that way: “Hey, this is Henry.”

Previously, in reply to my email inquiry about an interview, Rollins suggested a recent Monday at 1400. In 20 years of doing interviews with famous musicians or otherwise, this was the first to be scheduled on military-time. Edited excerpts from our 30-minute conversation are below.

If there a different kind of nerves or butterflies you get before your spoken shows compared to when you were doing shows as a singer with a loud band behind you?

Henry Rollins: No. Um, it’s a more difficult show to do, the talking show, because while the stories, the set, I can’t reinvent it every night. I’ve only got so many stories, so the stories become a certain way, like songs. Beginning, middle, end, you know, this guy falls off the roof, etc.

But with a song, it’s really strict — verse, chorus, and there’s a snare drum keeping time for you — and so the intensity there is an emotional, physical, a caloric expenditure in the music I played quite hard.

The talking show is basically like taking a final exam on a tight rope because it’s only me. If I stop talking, there’s no show. If I get something wrong, everyone goes, “Well, that sucks.”

So it’s basically like trying to pass the bar exam every night, and so prepare, prepare, prepare, and I’m one of those people who likes being onstage. It’s pathetic. And so I have no trepidation whatsoever. I love the audience. You know, I’m a born ham. And so ‘ve never went “uh oh, I’m nervous,” it’s like “turn me loose” is more like it.

I’ve been doing the talking shows since 1983, so I would do like a Black Flag tour and then turn right around and go back out on my own. And with the Rollins Band, I would do like 150 band shows, and then turn around and do almost the entire circuit again on my own. Back when I was doing music, I would go back and forth all the time. Or a band tour, like on a night off, I would go do a talking show, so I would hop into both hot pots of water over and over again.

I read a recent interview with The Guardian where you said you had no desire to be onstage with a rock band anymore. You’re putting that energy into the talking show, radio show, acting, etc., and didn’t want to be a human jukebox playing your old songs. Do you think more veteran rockers – many of which have great stories — should make a similar shift and leave the rock behind and move on to other ventures?

Well, I wouldn’t tell a musician what to do. I think that, you know, “We’re gonna go on tour and do our first album again.” Uh huh. You’re 63. Those songs are gonna kill you or you’re gonna play them really badly. I don’t understand the appeal of that, and bands do it all the time. Or it will be like one guy from the [original] band and three other people on stage, and that’s supposed to be something.

I don’t know. I mean, I think they might be good storytellers, but you do it with a microphone in front of an audience and hold them? They might be able to tell a good story on the tour bus or in the bar. But put that on stage? Not necessarily. And you also really have to want to. I mean, it’s pretty tough work.

I don’t know what I would tell a musician to do. That’s a really good question. I think if more of those people wanted to do it, they would because I think they’ve seen enough examples, or if they’re kind of like, you know, Tom Petty in stature, like big deal, they’ve already done some VH1 version of that.

Like Dave Grohl, he just put out a book and he did like five shows of going up on stage and like telling stories from the book. And he was talking to my friend Ian MacKaye [frontman with hardcore punk bands Fugazi and Minor Threat] afterwards, and he [Grohl] said, “I don’t know how anyone gets through a tour of this. That’s exhausting,” like just going up there and talking. So it might not be for everybody.

But I have met a lot of musicians with stories that are completely mind blowing, because they do get to see, as they say, life’s rich pageant.

How’s your current show, “Good To See You,” the same since you started it? And how has it changed?

Well, the tours are always the same in that it’s basically stories from the last few years, since the last tour. And traditionally, I’d finished a tour — like this tour finishes in late November — and say it was pre COVID, I would finish in late November, catch my breath, and by winter, I’ll be traveling somewhere you know, continent of Africa, Middle East, somewhere interesting, looking for stories, life experience.

And by the time the next tour would start up, I would have made multiple, transcontinental journeys — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, north, North Korea, Iran, all these places — and I would use those travel stories to inform the next batch of stories to take on tour. And to gather them like kind of hone them into stage craft, that’s about three years.

And you have to give the audience time to miss you. You can’t keep coming back every two weeks. They’ll get the wrong idea, like the impression is I’m after your money and that’s believe it or not, that’s really not why I’m out here. And so if they thought that, that would be horrifying to me. That would be a failure.

So that’s how I lived my life for many years, travel, travel, travel, and then go on tour and travel, travel, travel. This year, last night was like show 106 for the year in country 27 for the year. With COVID, I could you know, I could no longer like go fly to Vietnam and go live there for a while and then break out to Mongolia.

This is how I used to live. And I think that’s over with for at least a while, and I’m not all that young anymore. And so this time around, all the stories are basically domestic. They’re what happened during lockdown, and a little bit before and a little bit after.

Luckily for me, or unluckily maybe, during lockdown there was quite a bit of interesting turbulence in my life. I had a crazy stalker. I’ve had them throughout my life, but this guy was really tenacious, and he kept trying to break into my house, which is a first.

He finally broke in and he wrecked a bunch of stuff, and I confronted him outside and we had like a physical altercation. It was pretty intense, and that became the centerpiece story. So there wasn’t a travel story, there was this crazy, psycho story. All these stories, basically, they start at the beginning of the journey, and as the tour goes on, they start moving through as new material starts coming in.

And so the stalker story, which is like 65 minutes in length, it fell out of the set a few nights ago. And so that one’s gone. It’s worked, it’s been digested and expelled.

If you saw the first show of this tour last year, in March, and you saw last night, I think it’s all different. And that’s just me not wanting to be boring to myself on stage and always coming up with new ideas.

I was looking at a recent playlist for your radio show. There’s a lot of very cool artists like David Bowie, Wire, Joy Division, Joy Division, Buzzcocks. All cool stuff, but all stuff I’d expect you to like. What’s something more mainstream you like to listen to?

Oh, well, you know, I couldn’t tell you what a Taylor Swift song sounds like, but I still like all my Van Halen records. [Laughs.] But as far as like something that’s big now, I don’t know what Beyonce sounds like, and I don’t listen to country western, except for like people like Hank Williams, so I don’t know.

I still like all my old ‘80s Madonna records. I like “Like A Virgin” is like a perfect pop record, and Madonna is only one of the many reasons it is so good. It’s [Chic guitarist] Nile Rodgers, his [instrumental and production’ contributions on that record.

Tony Thompson [of Chic, Power Station and Led Zeppelin’s 1985 Live Aid reunion] on drums. Just a monster drummer, so like behind the beat. He’s great. And Nile Rogers, he’s a bloody genius. I mean, there’s a lot going on with that record. This is a production masterpiece.

I don’t listen to much new mainstream stuff, but I listened to a lot of punk young punk rock music. That might surprise people. I’m not one of those old men who thinks it was better when I was young. It was great when I was young. It’s also great right now, so I listen to a lot of records made by like 20-year-olds. I’m continually buying records.

As an actor I’ve seen you in movies like “Heat” back in the day and more recently the TV show “Sons of Anarchy.” Has there been any acting jobs that didn’t work out because of logistics or you were busy with music, that wish would’ve?

There was a film that got shot in Australia in 1984 that Nick Cave is in, “Ghosts… of the Civil Dead,” and the director wanted to put me in that film as a cool small part, which would have gotten me out to Australia. And I couldn’t do it because I was on tour. But that would have been cool.

I had a big tour planned, and the “Sons of Anarchy,” they wanted to kill off my character in season three because they wanted to make it more of a cliffhanger. Like, what’s going to happen to that evil neo-Nazi [Rollins’ character A.J. Weston], and you’re gonna have to find out next season.

So [”Sons of Anarchy” creator, writer, producer, director and actor] Kurt Sutter had a meeting with me and said, “OK, so you know you’re a bad guy, you’ve gotta die.” I said, I know. He said, “We want to kill you like episode three next year,” and I said, oh boss, I’m so sorry.

You know, writing if fluid. Like if you’re an idiot on set and they don’t like you, your character will fall off a bridge in the next episode. When you’ll see characters go away abruptly, quite often they have a problem with that actor. And that actor, like, oh, he slipped in the shower and he died. [Laughs]

And Kurt Sutter, he knows my manager — their kids go to the same school, it’s kind of like one of those rich guys clubs – and I said the tour’s booked. Like, the logos on the T-shirt. If I cancel, I get sued.

And he goes, “No problem, we’ll just kill you at the end of this season.” I went, well, thanks.

He went, “No, no, we just liked this character, we want to milk it. You’re a great bad guy and FX likes you and we just want to hold on to it. But if you gotta go, we’ll just find a way to take you out sooner.” And so he says to the writers, “OK, we’re gonna off him in like ep 11.”

I’m not going to cancel a show and break my promise to an audience, but it would have been cool to have been in seasons two and three of “Sons of Anarchy” but I had a tour booked.

I mean, had Kurt told me earlier we might have been able to do something. But they had to do like a wait and see with the character to see what FX thought of me because his superiors did not want to hire me. They thought I was a bad idea. I was his idea. Like they said, “Kurt, don’t do it. He’s an idiot, he can’t act.” And he said, “Screw you. I’m doing it,” and eventually they went, “Wow, he surprised us. He’s not so bad.”

Final question: Most surreal thing you saw backstage in 1993 on the episode of “Saturday Night Live” when Rollins Band was the music guest and Pamela Anderson was the host?

The coolest thing about that afternoon was hanging out with Pam, who’s a pal to this day. And she came backstage, she’s gonna be hosting the thing and all of that, and she was like, “Hi, I’m Pam.” When not a single cast member of “Saturday Night Live” would give us the time of day. Except for Tim Meadows, they were just totally uncool to us, and it’s too bad because they’re all like wicked funny. I mean, I’m a fan but they were like bristling to us. We’re like, OK. And we just hung out with Pam Anderson.

I’ve known her and Tommy [Lee, Mötley Crüe drummer and Anderson’s then-husband] for like a hundred years. You know, I don’t how they get along with each other but they’ve both of them have always been nothing but completely friendly to me.

For more mainstream music fans who just know your former band Black Flag from seeing the name on T-shirts or whatever, which of your releases with Black Flag would you have them start with?

Uh, I have a high metabolic rate and I don’t stand around. For me Black Flag was 40 years ago, and I haven’t heard a Black Flag song in I don’t know how long. There’s no moss on this stone. So at this point I’m verging on being somewhat unfamiliar with the catalog and I’m not into blowing my own horn.

But I think if I was direct to direct anyone to a single Black Flag release, I would direct them to a release called “The First Four Years.” And the reason I direct them to that is I’m not on it. It’s really, really good. It’s [a compilation of] all the records up to me, basically, and that’s unimpeachable [Black Flag guitarist] Greg Ginn genius. And I think it’s the best band ever was.

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