September 12 [12:00 EDT] -- Punk renaissance man Henry Rollins will soon see the re-release of an armload of his admittedly intense early writings.

"Those were some pretty furious years," Rollins told MTV News Online of the period from 1983-1987 which provide the works featured in a new collection titled "The First Five."

"Sometimes I read some of the pages, and I go, 'I'm not like that any more,' but I think that's just the process of growing up and moving through things. I wouldn't want to be the exact same guy I was five years ago, and I wouldn't want to be the exact same guy I am right now five years from now. I read some of it back, and winced a little here and there, but you know, it was the truth, and it takes a certain amount of guts to just go out and say what you feel, so I stand behind it."

And never let it be said that Henry Rollins lacks guts.

While he has changed a bit ("I'm perhaps a bit of a nicer guy now," he says) since cranking out the five early works captured in "The First Five" (including "High Adventure in the Great Outdoors," "Pissing In The Gene Pool," "Art To Choke Hearts," "Bang!," and "One From None"), the writing is still very much Rollins.

"It's not as if I looked at them and said, 'Who is this guy?' I mean, it's me," Rollins said.

"I had to do some editing for the re-release, and I was like, 'Yeah, those were some intense times,' but I was actually surprised how much I liked a good deal of it because I never really do a lot of re-reading of material after it comes out in a book. I figure the bomb has been dropped, and I'll have to deal with it. But re-reading it I was actually surprised how much it still works for me."

"The First Five" will hit stores in late November, along with the re-packaged "Black Coffee Blues" and "See A Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die."

Rollins the musician, who racked up 86 performances across the globe already this year, will soon give way to Rollins the spoken word artist, who will hit the road later this month.

"It's all equally liberating to me," Rollins said of his various projects. "To perform, to write, even band practice it's all a get-off to me. It has to be or else none of this would be worth it because the amount of bulls**t from institutions, like the one you work for (MTV), can be very aggravating. So you gotta get your ya-ya's somewhere."

You can see Rollins get his ya-ya's at the following spoken word dates:

  • 9/24 - Oklahoma Sate University
  • 9/27 - Florida State University
  • 9/28 - West Palm Beach, Florida
  • 9/30 - Clemson University
  • 10/5 - University of Colorado at Boulder
  • 10/18 - Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
  • 10/19 - Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania