Rollins talks North Korea, Costco at Cedar

Henry Rollins sure is turning into a softie in his old age. The once-snarling, throat-damaging, hot-headed frontman for Black Flag and the Rollins Band spent a lot of his time on stage last night at the Cedar Cultural Center promoting peace on earth and pledging goodwill to man. He was even gracious to the crowd about Minnesota's headline-stealing Republican congresswoman. Well, sort of. "No one thinks badly of you just because Michele Bachmann is from here," he said.

Out on another spoken-word trek that he dubbed the "50 Tour" -- so named because of his birthday last month -- the now-gray-haired but still-bad-ass-looking punk vet said he was playing smaller venues this time so fans could "get close enough to poke me with a stick: 'Oh, look, he's still alive!.' " Rollins avoided talking domestic politics, aside from a riff on Bachmann and a hilarious recollection of the day he read George W. Bush's book "Decision Points" aloud in a Costco. Instead, he stuck to a lot of international talk, starting with Egypt and the Middle East and then going on to Iran, North Korea, Vietnam, Tibet and Sudan -- places he has actually visited. The segment on North Korea was surprisingly funny, as he poked fun at their arcane laws and insane regime while talking lovingly about the people. His account of war-torn Sudan, on the other hand, was expecially moving. He went there on a recent charity mission with www.DropintheBucket.org and claims he went away a changed man. "Don't ever think you're anything else but a great vehicle of change," he preached to the crowd at the end of his two-hour-plus set.

In between, Rollins dropped in some colorful stories from the old days with Black Flag. "This was always a great city for us," he boasted, going on to talk about a club owner in Pittsburgh who was "famous for, in lieu of payment, he would show you his gun." He paid homage to the late CBGB's, where he estimated he left 4 percent of his body weight on the poorly ventilated stage every night. "The humanity that was soaked into the wood at that place," he marveled. At another New York show, he remembered there being four long-haired dudes pressed up against the stage during the show watching with intensity. Afterward, a mouthy manager knocked on the door and introduced the metalheads: "They're going to be huge! This is Metallica."

There was another story about attending a Captain Beefheart art exhibit in Venice, Calif., where Henry got the idea to impersonate Dennis Hopper's "Blue Velvet" character to Hopper's face -- "I'm sure no one has ever thought of that before," he self-parodied. That one served as a reminder that, following Hopper's and the Captain's deaths, Rollins himself is now one of L.A.'s longest-serving underground artists, and he still delivers with quite an edge -- even when playing nice.