Planet Joe

by Joe Cole

Life on the road as seen through the eyes of Black Flag/Rollins Band roadie and Rollins confidante, Joe Cole. Tour journal documenting the final Black Flag tour and first Rollins Band tour.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Punk

140 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 1997

About the author

Joe Cole was an American author, writer, actor and roadie for Black Flag, Hole and Rollins Band.

Cole and singer Henry Rollins were assaulted by armed robbers in December 1991 outside their shared Venice Beach, California home. Cole was killed outside the home after being shot in the face at close range while Rollins managed to escape while inside the home. The case remains unsolved.

Cole's father was actor Dennis Cole. Henry Rollins went on to include Cole's story in his spoken word performances.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little time on Planet Joe is enough. This tour diary of being in the road with Black Flag and then the Rollins ‪band is repetitive and myopic, but then the author repeatedly tells us he’s not a good writer. He also repeatedly tells us about “scamming” girls, most of whom he comes too quickly to satisfy. Oh, and lots of fighting. There’s little insight considering how much LSD he takes, just a typical young man’s claustrophobic meanderings, swaying between feelings of grandeur and insecurity. What saves the book is that it’s short and, for me, a glimpse (albeit quick) of a period in music I hold nostalgically. Cole’s end is tragic, but even that kicker doesn’t resonate emotionally. Maybe it would if you knew him personally, which many did and apparently were better for it.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another reviewer wrote:

"Joe Cole is kind of a whiner (rich kid slumming it on tour with Black Flag) but reading his diary is illuminating because it puts to rest all rumors that Rollins is gay."

LOL

He is kind of a whiner, though.

[Alex Ankarr · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been a long time. You couldn't honestly call it good, as such. But still interesting to read, because of his role in the scene. He must have been a heck of a charming magnetic dude, to have so many people so devoted to him.

[Grace Krilanovich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Joe Cole is kind of a whiner (rich kid slumming it on tour with Black Flag) but reading his diary is illuminating because it puts to rest all rumors that Rollins is gay.

[Jim]

It’s been a long time since I read a book that made me depressed, but Planet Joe did the trick.

Joe Cole kept a journal of his stint as a roadie for Black Flag’s last tour in 1986 and the Rollins Band’s first tour in 1987. Rollins published these diaries as Planet Joe after Cole was killed during a botched robbery in 1991. I read Get in the Van by Rollins earlier this year, and was struck by the narrow focus of Rollins’ diaries. I naively believed reading another voice would enlarge my impression of Black Flag’s last, longest, and ill-fated nationwide tour.

Unfortunately, Cole shares Rollins’ self-absorption and his nihilistic disregard of others. In entry after entry, Cole’s mood swings from excruciating self-deprecation to narcissistic self-regard. Basically, from “I am shit” to “I am God,” and I’m not exaggerating. Cole apparently suffered from undiagnosed depression that caused him to retreat into himself, which is a hard thing to do when you’re sharing a van with a dozen other people.

One of Cole’s outlets was LSD and holy shit did this kid take a lot of acid. Some of his accounts are extraordinary. For instance, can you imagine being pulled over by the police, not once but twice, while driving a truck loaded with gear over the Rocky Mountains while frying on acid? Well, you don’t have to because Joe Cole tells you all about it. Not surprisingly, some of Cole’s worst depressive episodes occurred after these acid trips when he was worn out, over-tired, and his serotonin all but spent.

I wanted to feel bad for the kid, but his honesty made that difficult. He was happiest when “scamming on” (Black Flag parlance for “hooking up with”) young women who came to the show in search of cheap thrills. Cole would frequently ejaculate prematurely and didn’t seem particularly interested in his partner’s pleasure, so even this pursuit of pleasure was painful to read.

Cole displays a knack for recording the names of the clubs the bands played in, but mostly he made the members of Black Flag seem even more unlikable than Rollins does in his diaries, which is really saying something. The only person who comes off as a sympathetic character is Dave Markey of the zine We Got Power and drummer for Painted Willie, who recorded the tour for his documentary, Reality 86’d.

Normally, I’d only recommend Planet Joe for Black Flag obsessives. But, like Get in the Van, there’s so much more to the story. Joe Cole and Henry Rollins were best of friends. They lived together in Venice Beach. Henry was with him when Cole was killed, a murder that remains unsolved. After his passing, Sonic Youth wrote songs about Cole. I’m not going to mention his famous father because fame doesn’t validate a life. It’s a real tragedy that Cole’s life was cut short, but it’s a shame the mark he made with Planet Joe is so bleak.

This review originally ran in Message from the Underworld
http://jimruland.substack.com

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

teenagers who are obsessed with the hot topic brand of punk should read this book. that's who i was when i read this the first time, when i was sixteen.

[sarah rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

throughout this journey of my return to books, i’ve unfortunately discovered that i am of the variety that has to finish a book no matter how much i hate it. an affliction, grueling. i feel like i am in purgatory.

somehow, the two books i decided to read close to first presented to me the worst most intolerable main characters i have quite possibly ever came across. alas they have taken so long to finish. why could i not just stop? abandon it? i’m on a mission to read every book i own before buying a new one (failed) and clearing my shelves of books that don’t align.

this will be one of them. i was drawn to the cover initially before even realizing the book was a diary of henry rollins (of black flag) best friend. i have always loved rollins poetry, despite never listening to his music — and historically i adore music-adjacent memoirs about questionably moral people. the prelude speaks so favorably of Joe, i kept waiting and waiting and waiting to see what rollins saw.

nonetheless, the ending of joe’s story is tragic. i’ve never encountered a human being that has 1: done so much acid regularly 2: had such an uninteresting writing style — there were glimpses of appeal. 3: i am trying to have a little empathy for the time it was written, and how young joe was. 4: the way he speaks about women is terrible, despite thinking he adores & worships them.

i’m notorious for sympathy for terrible men growing up, i guess ive outgrown that. the paradox and contrast of joe’s worship of himself intertwined with the amount of disgust toward himself tracks psychologically, bizarre but also see-through.

An instance:

”I am surrounded by shit. I am covered with human waste, smeared over my entire body. stuffed into every opening. My eyes see nothing, my ears are clogged and my nose is overwhelmed with the stink of it all. Other people's shit, my shit, there is no difference anymore. I'm living inside it, slowly suffocating. I am becoming a pile of human shit. I am totally and completely without worth. I am rotting every second. Deteriorating, falling apart, dying. My eyes are going blind. I feel myself dissolving inside myself. My body is feeding on itself, muscles slowly, painfully being eaten and digested. I am turning into a zombie. A skeleton that can't die. My heart has stopped beating. It is shriveling up like a dried up prune. Cuts do not bleed or heal. My blood has clotted and hardened and I no longer bleed. When I shit, my intestines are all that come out, slowly, painfully, a little bit at a time. I have lost my hearing and my smell. I am dead but unable to die. My body is dead but I am still alive. I cannot be killed, there is nothing more of me to kill. Thoughts swirl relentlessly through my head. I haven't slept for three weeks. My head is pounding with pain and l've lost the ability to concentrate or think straight. I bring everyone who comes in contact with me down. Everything around me falls apart, nothing works, people hurt themselves trying to help me and I can't help laughing at their pain. The whites of my eyes have tumed a dull urine yellowish color. My skin has dried up and turned whitish gray and flakes off when touched. My movements are slow and labored, have very little energy. i see things that other people do not, l hear things that they cannot. Everything is communicating to me. The radio and television talk only to me, about me. Everything they say is for me. Everything is about me. I am completely possessed. I am the center of the universe. There is no escape, no hope, no savior. I am in hell going down even further.”

the above excerpt and a long retelling of one of his acid trips (too lengthy to include here) are probably my favorite, the first paragraph is likely the height of Joe’s self-awareness.

most lasting in effect, the book has left me with a haunting chill and unease, also fascination because of the unbelievable infatuation that persists throughout this retelling which is joe’s affinity, obsession, and admiration for murder (& death), again, to an obsessive degree. will say why this is relevant at the end. there are far more references aside from what I’ve quoted below:

”bored of watching it, I guess I'm bored of everything. The more I experience this society, the more certain I am that I am not part of it. I've made myself an outcast and everyday I get further removed from it. This is by choice. I need to go beyond this madness before / am forced to become a part of it. There is nothing here for me, nothing keeping me here. I'd like to leave this world.”

he alternates so seemingly quickly between wanting to leave this world, while simultaneously convinced that he is a God, timeless, invincible and that this world belongs to him and him alone. there were times he had so much hope for the future.

excerpts:

”I know eventually I'll get to a place that is better than any place I've ever known if I don't die or get killed first. I'm not afraid to die. I could die right now. I don't want to but I'm not scared to. I just keep getting stronger and smarter as I get older. Who cares about the age thing? I'm older than I've ever been now and getting older every second and that's good because that's what's supposed to happen. I want to go back in time and be a child again knowing what I know now but that will never happen so fuck it. I'll just keep taking life as it comes.”

——

”The tour is going well for me now, I feel under control and open to all the new experiences. I don’t have a clue what is going to happen to me. What does it matter anyway? What does real hatred feel like? The kind of pure hate that drives a person to commit senseless murder. I figure that you're just a poser with your hate until you kill somebody. Then you cross the line and your hate becomes tangible. I hate cops but I haven't killed any of them so I'm just aposer. Maybe one day I'll get real.”

—-

I cannot stop thinking about this:

”Last night Jill who I met last year on the Black Flag tour came to the show and we spent the entire night hanging out until this morning. I didn't get any sleep at all. She is a beautiful smart girl and I wouldn't mind having her for my girlfriend but she lives here and I don't. She drove me around in her car and told me about all these people she knew who had been murdered for one reason or another. She's known over thirty murder victims in her life and she's only twenty. She said everyone she knows gets murdered. Maybe I wouldn't want to be her boyfriend after all. Florida is a very weird place.”

joe’s life ended 5 years after the last journal entry in this book. joe was shot and killed at 30 years old, died immediately, in a senseless home robbery with Henry Rollins in the other room. This journal takes place while joe was 26. murdered on December 19th, 1991. completely senseless tragic ending to an adolescents life, completely random event, while Henry Rollins escaped. yet he wished to do the same to people again, and again, and again. surreal. Need to know if Jill knows.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent quick read. There's a rawness and an energy to it that keep a reader going, to say nothing of the interest to serious Black Flag fans (though probably not the casual ones). There's enough of Cole's personality that a reader gets that he was probably an interesting person to be around. Though pretty much anybody who's gone through their mid-20s understands the recurring theme of trying to figure out what they're doing with their lives, Cole belabors the point considerably. Same with the difficulties of being a roadie. One can only hear how much it sucks so much before wondering why he continues doing it. Additionally, the casual homophobia and the consistent objectification of women is pretty troubling (it's hard to think of any woman in the book who he's not viewing as somebody to sleep with).

[Benjamin Van Buren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been looking for a copy of this one for years, finally stumbled upon an affordable one online. Any Rollins fan knows how important Joe Cole was to him, so there’s a lot of weight that comes with reading this book, especially when you consider his tragic ending. This book features Cole’s tour diaries from the last Black Flag tour and the first Rollins Band tour; it’s definitely repetitive in parts—as I’m sure touring itself actually is—but it serves as a nice counterpoint to this same era that Rollins wrote about in Get in the Van (minus the Rollins DARKNESS of course). Long drives, loading in/out, LSD trips, scoring with girls (lots of premature ejaculation apparently 😂), etc.—this is a portrait of the artist as a young man struggling to find himself and his place in this world, Planet Joe.

[Mark Twistworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the roadies point of view of a couple of the same tours that Rollins wrote about in "Get In The Van". It's interesting to get a viewpoint apart from Rollins, but it's really more of the same.

[Bill · Rating 1 out of 5]

For Black Flag/Rollins mega fans only.

[PhattandyPDX · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The first thing you got to do is beat the grind; it’ll kill you. Then you go from there.”

Anecdotes from the ‘86 Black Flag and ‘87 Rollins Band tours. Some of the stuff was totally hilarious and I couldn’t stop laughing: a show that Black Flag played with Venom, being followed by Park Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns, Ratman playing “Paranoid” over the PA so no one in the audience could hear the last song from a crap opening band.

“Once an alien, always an alien.” True.

[James Doughty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating Read

Joe Cole's tour diaries combine the cosmic with the mundane as he chronicles his experiences as a road crew member for Black Flag and then the Rollins Band. His depictions of the daily routine of a touring band provides great insight into a life in the van. This book also provides a counterpoint to Rollins' "Get in the Van" which includes his journal entries from the 1986 Black Flag tour.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my absolute favorites, Cole isn't a great writer -- but then, he was writing a diary, for himself, not a book. Hysterical and vivid in the way that being brash and angry at the world can be when you're in your early 20s.

[Bill H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read for fans of Black Flag/Rollins. That said, if I kept a diary where I frequently referenced prematurely ejaculating I would consider it a solid if my best friend either didn't publish it (after my murder) or edited those details out :)