PREFACE

I started work on Black Coffee Blues in the late eighties. I wanted to make a book that would be great to have along with you on a long trip. If you were stuck in some moving vehicle, far away from familiar surroundings, this book would come to your rescue.

I am fascinated by the effect exhaustion has on me. Ever since I started touring in 1981, sleep has been an elusive and much sought after quantity. I wanted to collect writing from the ends of tours when I was hammered by fatigue. When I am exhausted and overworked, I tend to drop my defenses and let it rip. I thought that other people might find themselves at this point too, no matter where they might be, and that this book would do the trick.

Living on the road can be a hollowing experience. The scenery is constantly moving and loneliness can be a hell hound on your trail. Alienation and isolation have followed me my whole life. I can’t think I am the only one out there that feels this way.

Writing, music and speaking dates are for the most part the way I communicate with people. It’s from the written word that I can speak to you with the most clarity and unguarded honesty. It is the medium I prefer over the rest. In my opinion, it is silent communication and unknown acknowledgment that is best. Like when two people at a record store are both looking through the John Coltrane section and they nod and smile at each other. If that instance could be a language, it would be the one I try to speak every time I write.

This book and Do I Come Here Often? (Black Coffee Blues Part II), are my attempts to do for you what Henry Miller’s Black Spring did for me ever since I first read it many years ago. I rarely went on the road without one of Miller’s books in my backpack. A man I never met kept me company and became my traveling companion and friend.

In my mind I am always moving. When I am sitting on an airplane I am thinking about a place I have not been for a while. When in the farthest reaches, I think of the streets I grew up on.

For me, this book is like the letter you write to someone that you regret sending seconds after it falls into the post box because it is so honest and revealing that you are mortified by the thought of having it read. Even though you mean every word of it, sometimes you can mean it too much. It’s conversations you have with yourself about how you would deal with having the person who dropped you walk into the room at that moment. It’s walking late at night in the summer, listening to the insect choir and smelling the trees. These are the voices that I hope speak to you in this book.

 

HENRY ROLLINS
Los Angeles 1997