Once upon a time, "Henry Rollins" was a pretty miserable guy. Most people remember the Black Flag and Rollins Band days, times fraught with intensely fixed anger and raw aggression. His books and spoken-word recordings, including the Grammy-nominated epic of punk rock life "Get In The Van," are rife with intensely-retold stories of the fucked up things that can happen to a band while alone, poor, angry, hungry, and tired, out on the road.

However, these days, Henry is a much more relaxed guy. He laughs. He cracks jokes...and they're funny. He smiles. He makes eye contact - while smiling. He's not afraid to be in a good mood. He's HAPPY.

Not so long ago, one would have thought Rollins felt that being taken seriously meant that he had to be as serious or as intense as he felt he needed to be. One would also have thought that for Rollins, all of that anger and rage had fostered a complete inability to understand that we'd all still like him if he had a sense of humor and he showed his (gasp!) softer side.

I am delighted to report that Henry has lost none of his edge by being happy. Far from it. I find him just as listenable as I did before, but for very different reasons. I think Henry has grown up with all of us, and inherited a little of the wisdom that comes with age. He now has the ability to laugh out loud at the stupid things that make no sense, and to accept the fact that the things he's done for punk, for spoken word, for art in general, has been nothing compared to what he has done for himself as a person.

Take the epic "Psychos And Stalkers I Have Known." New to Henry's pantheon, it gets remarkably personal about how an artist of some note deals with schizophrenics that latch onto him along the way. Women from all over have written Rollins, taken something from his work, and then managed to manipulate it into something twisted and cartoonish. Tales of the Australian woman who poured sand on him in his bed. Tales of the German girl who flew all the way to the States and followed him to San Francisco, all the way down to that very night, having the door staff look us all over to make sure we weren't the strange woman who had been hanging out at the venue for a week waiting for him to show up.

Rollins also brought with him a box of "stalker mail," to back up his tales of ridiculousness, and, ostensibly, things he would one day be able to show the police should someone ever come after him with harm in mind. Rollins has, over the years, made the effort to answer all of his fan mail, which may have been the big mistake. His way with fans is the same as his way with words. They are all personal, they are all from the heart, and people can sense that.

Also excellent is the closing bit that I'll call "The Roommate I Never Really Knew," about a former roommate and great friend - once vibrant and witty and fun, he watched her slow spiral into drug addiction, followed by depression, criminal activity, promiscuity, thievery, and finally suicide.

He described so well the dilemma that faces a guy with a life on the road, and the inability to be present in his friends' lives to help hold them up the way they help hold him up. What do you do when your friend helps herself to your bank account, the one you trusted her with while you were out on the road? What can you do when you find out you're not the only one?

Rollins can take you through the motions, every step, and you will unconsciously begin to feel the kind of grief, or disbelief, or discomfort, or a host of other emotions, that he was feeling at the time. Not because he transports you to the exact same place that he was at in his stories, but because his way of describing emotions will transport you, the listener, back to a time where something similar may have happened and affected you in a similar manner. That, to me, is real storytelling talent - to bring something up in an audience that is real, that is active, as opposed to the passive, meaning easier to shake, incredulity that a less actualized artist might bring out of an audience.

Rollins takes a stage and owns it in a way that few performers do. He inhabits a space that is storyteller and best buddy at the same time. He is engaging and warm, but still intense and powerful. I always enjoy hearing about his road-warrior life, maybe because I know so many who have done just that, as either the performers, or the backline techs, or the lighting designers, or the monitor engineers, and road lore is still interesting to me, the girl who's never lived it, but hopes that the lessons others learn will make sense to her. Go on, Henry. Write your life story in places where we can all read it. Tell it in places where we can all come and hear you. It's nice to see you happy, finally.