How Long Has This Been Going On? TheStranger.com
Lifetime of reading interviews with musicians leaves odd things stuck in your head. During the early '90s, when Details had some of the best music coverage to be found anywhere, I read a Q&A the magazine had done with Henry Rollins near the 1992 release of Rollins Band's The End of Silence , which is 72.5 minutes long—typical for the period. Rollins was asked about the album's length. His response—and this is from memory—was that all future Rollins Band albums would be 70 minutes or longer: Compact discs were expensive, after all, and Rollins didn't want to rip off his fans. I was in high school when I read this, and I thought it a rather noble gesture. Then the next Rollins Band album, Weight , came out in 1994, with a total running time of 53:26. Could you blame him for backsliding? Seventy minutes is a lot of music, especially if you're the one making it.And Rollins wasn't the only one to turn down the extra running time offered by