It’s still a standard response when someone around here brings up the name Henry Rollins. “You know, Rollins went to Bullis!”
Punk rock legend, author, and Black Flag leader Henry Rollins attended Bullis, a private school in Potomac, Maryland. Rollins was a student at Bullis from sixth grade in 1972 to when he graduated in 1979. For those of us who grew up in Maryland around the same time, Rollins will always be connected to Bullis. I grew up in Potomac, and the beautiful 100-acre campus, with its green sports fields and clean buildings, is right in the center of the town.
Still, when the Rollins-Bullis connection was made, no one had any details. What was the school like, and how did Rollins do there? Now we have answers. I’ve obtained an early copy of Bait Dog Boy, Rollins’ memoir that’ll be released in March 2027. Because Random House supplied me with an early copy, I don’t want to review the entire book six months ahead of the publication date. I’ll focus on just a few pages—the part where Rollins talks about Bullis.
Growing up in Glover Park, a neighborhood just north of Georgetown in D.C., Rollins was an intense kid. A disciplinary problem who was diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin, Rollins was so crazy that his parents Iris and Paul sent him to a tough school—Bullis. Rollins: “Bullis seemed to say ‘No matter what shape your son is in, no matter how well or badly he performed in his previous school, we will raise him to our high (nationally accredited) standards. If your son already gets good grades, we can take him to a higher level with advanced classes.” However, “if your son is a ‘disciplinary problem,’ we’ll definitely fix that.” For Rollins’ parents, “this was the school’s most appealing promise. It was a way for them to pay the tuition and have the staff and institution take care of the rest.”
Before classes started in September 1972, “Iris took me to the school for a tour and to get my uniform. Days later, I had multiple white shirts, several pairs of gray pants, a blue blazer with the school’s insignia on the left pocket, and a clip-on tie. I found the black book bag I’d been given in first grade which I kept in use until it finally fell apart, years later. On the first day of school, I was out the door to catch the public bus on Wisconsin Avenue at R Street, then up Wisconsin Avenue to meet the school bus and journey out to the campus. I remember feeling so odd walking to the bus stop in my uniform with the sun coming up. I had no idea what the day would hold. I don’t remember having any fear as much as resignation. Off I went.”
While Rollins was having disciplinary issues at Bullis, I was having disciplinary issues at Our Lady of Mercy, a Catholic parochial school just a mile down the road from Bullis. It wasn’t punk rock but literature that saved my life. It’s also worth mentioning that my next-door neighbor growing up was Scott “Wino” Weinrich, a local doom metal legend loved by Rollins.
What Rollins got at Bullis was discipline. Bullis was an all-boys school until the 1981-82 school year. Rollins reports that when he was there teachers felt free to hit students, and the kids were to “stand up whenever an instructor came into the classroom and only sit down when we were told to.” Still, Rollins speaks kindly of headmaster John Spencer—“he was great to us”—and observes that there were no student bullies or “people to be afraid of” at the school: “I found out there were a few boys in my class who were somewhat like me—poor students, perhaps medicated, and possibly sent there to get straightened out. If I ever interacted with anyone, it was mostly with them. There wasn’t anyone in my class I hated or did my best to avoid. Everyone was pretty cool. We were all in the same boat and in that, there was some sense of community.”
Sports were popular and the boys couldn’t leave the school until an hour after the last class, encouraging them to get involved in extracurricular activities. Rollins ran track. Rollins has always been an intense and unpredictable individual, and he refuses to call himself a victim or blame anyone else for his screw-ups. He knew he needed discipline and Bullis provided it. “The all-male, all-day thing seemed like part of the punishment,” he writes. “I was obviously a fuckup and sent to this school to get that in me which was incorrect, corrected.”
He also argues that his craziness saved him from a bland life; Bullis “prepared the boys for the soft-handed, corporate, white privilege world of ambitious, backstabbing cowards, liars, and thieves who become presidents and Supreme Court justices. Ironically, many of my classmates ended up living blocks away from their family homes, breeding, overfeeding, and staggering headlong into numbingly predictable lives. By being such a failure amongst my peers, I was spared.”
I’m a few years younger than Rollins, who’s 65. I went to Georgetown Prep, which gets a shout-out from Rollins: “Many of my classmates lived a short drive away from the school, so it’s possible their perception of Bullis was different than mine. A lot of them came from wealthy families. I remember when George W. Bush became president, it struck me how familiar he seemed. A lot of the Bullis guys were like him. When Brett Kavanaugh was auditioning for his Supreme Court gig, I thought the same thing. We used to play soccer against the high school he went to.”
I was at Georgetown Prep with Kavanaugh in the early-1980s, and Rollins is wrong about him. As Ruth Marcus notes in her book Supreme Ambition, Kavanaugh’s parents weren’t wealthy, at least while he was in school. “For all the leafy elegance of Georgetown Prep’s North Bethesda campus,” Marcus writes, “for all the school’s vaunted exclusivity, in the social architecture of privileged Washington the Georgetown Prep boys were looked down on by those who went to even tonier schools, such as St. Albans and Sidwell Friends. They were viewed as less academic, more focused on sports and drinking. Getting into Yale was no big deal for St. Albans grads; it was for a kid from Georgetown Prep.” The reason we played Bullis in soccer and not football is that for decades Prep had great football teams that would destroy other schools. Our guys were not rich, at least not all of them.
After graduating in 1979, Rollins discovered punk rock and joined Black Flag. I loved punk as a student at Catholic University in the 1980s, although I also preferred the funny bands like the Replacements to the self-serious gods Fugazi and other Rollins idols. Still, like Rollins, I had a streak of defiance that made me question authority and hate coercion, even if coming from the left.
