Regarding Henry

HENRY Rollins probably has one of those passports stuffed full of extra pages and so bashed from sliding in and out of his pocket you can no longer make out the eagle on its cover. He often says his ideal weekend consists of solo hibernation, a stack of books and no phone, but Rollins – punk icon, raconteur, TV host, actor, author and publisher – isn't one for sitting still. Well, you wouldn't be, with that CV.

Despite rising at 4am for our phone call (he's in LA), Rollins is cheerful and verbose. He's not long back from a month in Southeast Asia, filming in Thailand and Burma. "I collect countries like charms on a bracelet," he says. "Not for bragging rights, but because my curiosity is so overwhelming. Whenever I come back from one place I want to go to three others.

"Since I'm a guy who likes to go on stage and tell stories, well, this is how you get stories. Some guys get their stories at the barbershop. I get mine at the barbershop – in Tehran!"

Passion, as much as necessity, impels him to lace up his travelling shoes: "As an American, we are the ones who dictate how the world turns – where the oil goes, who does and does not get fed – and I need to see this for myself, so my opinion is more informed than something I've read or some guy on CNN is telling me, because I know he is eventually pulling for some corporate concern."

So given the breadth of his travels, what has he identified as today's most important unreported story? "What a lot of people would not know is just what happens when globalisation hits the ground, what a McDonald's looks like in downtown Beirut and what all this does to culture in these countries, how it elbows it to the side," he says.

"Another thing that's important is the commonality of the human path. What are most people concerned about in Cairo and Minneapolis? Three square meals, a roof that doesn't leak and a day without fear. It's not like people are running up to me screaming 'Death to America!' They're just trying to get through the day."

At their core, I reply, I think humans are more alike than dissimilar. "Absolutely! And more good than bad, and if you put them in a relaxed circumstance where they're not freaking out, they'll probably offer you shelter and half their sandwich. That's what I learned from travel. Not many Americans hold a passport and if more travelled they wouldn't be so easily sold on one-dimensional hatred. To see these places with your own naked, steaming eyeballs, there's something about it that makes your life really special. Everyone desperately wants dignity and freedom and a chance. This is not a revelation. It's not that I did not know that, but when you see it first hand you really get it."

What's more interesting, if you want revelations about Rollins, is best summed up by that hoary homily about books being inadequately represented by their covers. When stripped to the waist and barefoot, hollering in front of his band, Rollins is a banshee – tattooed, snarling and dangerous. Everyone, Rollins included, describes him as an angry man. But delve deeper and it becomes impossible to seal Rollins into that particular box. For starters, his anger is matched by an equally vivid, if contradictory, optimism.

"I don't know if those are opposing forces," he says. "My anger isn't, 'I didn't get mine,' or, 'The girl left'. My anger is, 'Why are those people still broke? How come these people can't read?' My anger is civically driven. What else would I be mad at? That I'm not taller?

"I lose sleep with the arrogance, the outrage, the destruction of my Constitution. The fact that a law just passed in America that they can now take your laptop at the airport for as long as they want and they don't have to give you any excuse.

This is the stuff that makes me mad. The anger is a good thing because it's in lieu of complacency."

Having spoken fluently and at length (the above is just the tip of the iceberg), Rollins impresses me by remembering where we began, concluding: "I do have optimism, in that I think that the good people are eventually going to drag away the children of the idiots. I think young people are voting more often, starting to realise that if they don't look out, democracy is something we can lose. Also, whenever I travel and see the general gentleness and kindness of people – that's why I'm optimistic."

There are YouTube clips of Rollins treating interviewers, and even some of his fans, with disdain. Decades of pumping iron have earned him the body of a gladiator and he practically exhales testosterone. Yet the evidence attests that he's not homophobic, not racist, not misogynistic – in short, he's not a dick. How, I wonder, did he pull this off, given his extremely rough upbringing and time spent at military school? And is it true that as a kid he was so violent and hyperactive he was drugged to the gunwales? Or the admission he made to another interviewer that as a kid he mutilated other children, blinded one of his kindergarten classmates and stabbed another with a pencil?

"Yeah. The drug was Ritalin, which they started giving to special classrooms of people at the National Research Centre, where they stuck me for a year. I've seen government textbooks on Ritalin research and there's photos of me in the books! One week the pills would be little and yellow and the next orange and triangular and you'd play in a classroom with mirrored walls and people would come out of the walls with clipboards and analyse your paintings.

"I got thrown out of the Washington DC public school system for being hyperactive and violent and then thrown out of another school for being hyperactive, violent, with poor grades. I threw the powdered cement in the boy's face as I was running from him – I didn't understand the ramifications of my actions. I was knee-high. I only got it later. When the (other] kid beat me out for the touchdown – really nice kid, Tim, never hurt anybody in his life – and I fell in the mud on my face, I got up and pulled a pencil out of my pocket and stuck a bit of it into his ass. I was humiliated and angry and so misdirected with the anger.

"That landed me in prep school. All my teachers were ex-Korea, Vietnam, Parris Island (a training centre for Marines]. A lot of" (he imitates a drill sergeant] "'Get up you f***ing faggot!' kind of thing. Plus Ritalin!

"So my early years were a lot of confusion, pain and uncertainty, and basically being a very nervous, semi-hysterical child with a lot of weird impulse problems, like stealing. One time my mom took me down to the police station and they threw me in the drunk tank. It didn't really scare me straight, I really had no plans for a life of crime! That's when I discovered weightlifting and a way to achieve something on my own. It was a helluva thing to realise one can improve one's self. And then punk rock, when you meet other people who are strange and no-one's judging you. The DC punk rock scene was such that the fact you even knew enough to walk into this room where the show was – you were OK. In one night you had 30 new friends."

There are plenty of redneck punks I could name, so the question remains, how did he turn out so highly evolved? "I was lucky my mom is a pretty forward-thinking person because my dad is one of those (intolerant] guys. My mom used to go see (John] Coltrane and Miles (Davis]; she met Henry Miller. On her bookshelves were ee cummings and Mark Twain, and her vinyl collection is just sick (great].

"And she had gay friends, I was OK with the gay by the time I was, like, five, and understood it and didn't fear it. Also, being a white boy in an all-black school, grades 1-3 (ages 5-8], getting hit in the mouth for killing Martin Luther King, that really set me straight on racism. I thought, 'I'm never giving that back.'

"My dad was the complete opposite. I'd visit him at the weekends and he'd say, 'Your mom is a spade lover so don't take her too seriously, but I want you to respect her.' I'm eight years old. Thanks!"

There's time for one last question, and so I tell Rollins about the Hard Rock theme park opening in Myrtle Beach, California, the centrepiece of which will be a Led Zeppelin rollercoaster recreating the excitement of Whole Lotta Love. What might a Henry Rollins ride entail?

"Remember the scene in Runaway Train, where John Voigt is standing on the end of the train going, like, 70 mph into a tunnel in the side of a mountain that's been walled off? He's staring through the snow at a wall rushing ever closer.

"That would be the ride, just this massive wall and people would go up to the top and go, 'Wait a minute, it looks like I'm going to get into this toboggan and go down these rails right into an impenetrable wall that'll kill me and my entire family!' Yes. 'Well why would I want to do that?'

"Well, the ride's called F*** It! – with an exclamation mark. It's the motto of Henry Rollins and it gets him out of the door every day. So kiss your friends goodbye and get on the F*** It! ride." Rollins chuckles. "You wouldn't have to worry about selling tickets to my ride."

• Henry Rollins is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot until 25 August at 10:45pm.