Hardest-working man in show biz?

Recently, Henry Rollins found out that he might well qualify for a spot near the top of any list of hardest-working men in show business. On a whim, he decided to compare his touring schedule over the past two decades to the one maintained by a rock group that has become notorious for their marathon tours and love for the concert stage — Kiss.

The results surprised Rollins, who found that for the past 23 years, he has averaged more than 100 shows a year between concerts fronting his group, the Rollins Band, and his solo spoken word shows.

“I’ve outdistanced the mighty Kiss by like 600 shows,” he said. Given such statistics, it’s no surprise that 2004 finds Rollins on the road again, this time on one of his increasingly popular spoken word tours. Rollins continues to hit the road — both for spoken word shows and for concerts fronting the Rollins Band — for a simple reason. He loves that sort of life.

“The idea for me of the artist type is to work vigorously,” Rollins said. “It should not be a cool job. It should be one of those cranky, pain-in-the-ass jobs, where you’re always kind of low on sleep, you’ve got way too much that you’ve got to do that day ... To me the real artist was always that one who’s always vigorously working. And my heroes are people like (jazzmen) Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, or (John) Coltrane, who always were working, always moving to the next thing.”

Rollins has a variety of next things. In November, he published his newest book, Broken Summers. He also released Nights Behind the Tree Line, a CD of spoken material culled from his books and new, unpublished work.

This February, he releases Live At Luna Park, a DVD comprised of performances from a series of weekly spoken word shows at the Los Angeles nightclub in March and April 1999.

The first four months of 2004, meanwhile, will find Rollins back on the spoken word circuit with a show made up of all-new material.

The tour is entitled “Shock And Awe My Ass,” which offers a hint about some of the topics Rollins may expound upon during the tour.

“The shock and awe thing is not in reference to a request that someone do something devastating to my ass region,” Rollins joked. “While not being overly politically correct, I did take a little bit of an exception to some of the language used before we went into Iraq, where you’re watching the news and here come these guys: ‘Shock and awe’ and ‘We’re going to give them a light show the likes of which they’ve never seen before.’ And I kind of went, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey chief, we’re going to be killing people.’

“When they’re selling it like one of those federated wrestler Direct TV sports packages, like it’s a monster truck show, ‘Be there for the,’ you know, ‘the bunker buster bomb!’ I kind of went, ‘Man, we’re talking about kids coming home in body bags. Can we please respect the gravity of what’s about to happen?” he said.

While humor will be a primary ingredient in his shows, Rollins said he very well may share some insights and observations gleaned from a USO tour he took last year to Afghanistan, where he visited with American military personnel and toured the war-torn region.

“I saw some pretty unbelievable stuff,” Rollins said of his Afghanistan visit. “I’m talking about human lives. So it’s stuff that is gravely important, not that I’m important. But what I’m saying is there’s nothing to laugh at. It ain’t funny. What I saw was not funny. So there’s stuff like that [in the spoken word shows]. If you’re a comedian, you say stuff like that and people go, ‘Well wait, what are you bumming us all out for?’ That’s why I don’t want that, I don’t want to have to answer that and say, ‘Hey, I’m a comic.’”