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Brad Wilk: A profile in Rage Against The Machine
By David Weiss for DRUM! magazine
Transcribed by Alex Allen

There aren’t any two-part harmonies on the new Rage Against The Machine Aginst the Machine album. The Battle of Los Angeles. That’s because people who listen to the band want to hear one voice: Zach de la Rocha’s. And that’s the same reason you won’t find any loops, percussion, or drum machines there. Because whether or not they know his name, people who listen to Rage Against The Machine just want to hear one rhythm source: Brad Wilk. When Rage Against The Machine's self-titled debut album was unleashed over the airwaves in 1992, there were two ways you could react: You were either set on fire by the Los Angeles four-piece's highly aggressive metal-funk minimalism, or you brushed it off as grandiose posturing --- distorted protest songs too over-the-top to be taken seriously. But however the music hit you, the fact was that Wilk's pushy beats, de la Rocha's spitting politics, Tim Bob's bottomy bass and Tom Morello's thin, hard guitar lines added up to something quite different. Amazingly, in the six years and 361 days between the releases of Rage Against The Machine and Battle, the band has only been able to give birth to one other album, 1996's highly successful Evil Empire. But since then, a lot has happened in the dominating hard-hop scene that Rage Against The Machine helped bring to the mainstream. Now Wilk and his slow-moving buddies re-enter to find that they've almost been left behind. The two main groups that have won over the voracious hard-hop (or rapcore, or whatever you want to call the fusion of metal and funk) fans, Korn and Limp Bizkit, have swarmed around Evil Empire, collectively releasing six albums since 1995. No one's saying that Rage Against The Machine has been forgotten, but they have a lot of catching up to do. Still, there's hope for the shredding pioneers. With Limp Bizkit only on their sophomore album, Significant Other, and Korn's third release, Follow the Leader, Rage Against The Machine had the responsibility of demonstrating that their genre still has room for growth. And with the ferocious funk of Battle, damn if Wilk and his bandmates didn't do just that. "Our objective was to [make] a record that was better than our first two," says Wilk, a decidedly upbeat speaker. "A thought-provoking, pissed-off record and I think we succeeded. I think Evil Empire was a really dark record, and it made our first record took almost like a pop record, in terms of song structures and choruses that had catchy hooks and whatnot. I just think that [Battle has] better songs and we've branched out sound-wise to different types of grooves. The grooves are always changing." With the release of Battle, Wilk acknowledges, when prodded, the band's often unrecognized role in hard hop's evolution. "We started this in '92," he points out. "I feel that there's actually a lot of bands [making this type of music] and not really giving us any influential credit. [That's] fine --- I almost take it as a compliment. We're still actually doing it, and I think that we are continuing the sound and the sound is always changing. I'm not really too concerned with what any other band is doing or how they sound. "You know what's interesting, and actually the most frustrating thing about it? It has nothing to do with the bands that are doing it --- I think that's great. That's what makes us even more viable right now as a band. But I think that most of the frustration comes from only putting out a record every four years. We have a lot of downtime, and when you see other bands doing what you think you should be doing, it's a little frustrating. But that's nobody's fault but our own." The successful convergence of metal and hip-hop drumming in the ‘90s has given a whole generation of drummers new creative options. Ask Wilk straight up if he thinks he was a major influence in that movement, and he’ll give you an honest answer. "I really want to believe that I was," he says. "I just want to say it because I don’t think that I have gotten any recognition for that, and I thinks it’s something I consciously wanted to do. "There's bands before us that were kind of doing it in a different way - absolutely. It's been going on for a long time. Both [metal and hip-hop] are rebellious types of music, so I think they actually do work well together in spirit. When this band first started in '92, 1 was listening to alternative, punk and hard rock records, and I was also listening to hip-hop. The three other guys in the band were, too, and I hip-hop and metal] wasn't something that was really thought out too much. It was almost like we couldn't really control our influences or how they came out."

Early Days. Before he came to Los Angeles, where he would eventually find his bandmates through a classified ad, Wilk's biggest influence wasn't a drummer, but a drum set. "When I was about 13 years old, in Chicago, a friend of mine who lived a couple of doors down had a Ludwig Silver Sparkle drum kit with a big Kiss logo on the front head," Wilk says. "I was totally infatuated with the drum set --- period. So any time I could, I was on his kit, not knowing what the hell I was doing but banging away nonetheless." His second biggest inspiration after that Silver Sparkle siren was a band synonymous with high energy: Keith Moon and The Who, which Wilk got into around the release of The Kids Are Alright --- the 1979 live-performance documentary and soundtrack. "That record was a huge record for me," he recalls. "It came with that book inside, with all those amazing pictures, and they also had the movie as well. I was just fascinated by the energy and with The Who in general. The excitement that they were portraying as a band ---- I think that had a huge effect on me, definitely." The next drumming giant to impact Wilk would be one he met personally: David Garibaldi. Sitting in on group classes led by Garibaldi, the then- 19-year-old Wilk picked up on essentials covering everything from technique to attitude. "His nickname was 'The General,"' says Wilk. "The guy was so intimidating, you saw it in his eyes: He had 'the confidence' there. It was great. He had the confidence of knowing what he was doing. "I love that fact that Keith Moon played with this unbelievable confidence, but he was on the edge of insanity. He was a driving force, but he was always just on the brink of completely losing his mind." During those six months of lessons, Wilk developed the self-assurance that can put a player's skills over the top. "Confidence to me is being able to get on a drum set and look at that drum set and know that you can pretty much play what you're thinking," he relates. "You have a good sense musically of what's going on, an, d you feel confident as to what your abilities are. I'm not saying I always play like that! I beat myself up more than anybody could possibly do. I worry about just actually feeling good about what I'm doing. Anyone that’s too confident may be selling [themselves] a little short. But if you're David Garibaldi, it's kind of like being the God of drumming. He's allowed." In Garibaldi's group classes, Wilk also picked up the foundation for his own feel --- a kind of funk science that he continue sto study intently to this day. "[Garibaldi] really taught me to focus on what's going on between the beats," Wilk says. "The stuff that's kind of felt, less heard." Sure space, right? "Not necessarily space, but the feel of ghost notes, if you want to call them that. The feel in between the kick and the snare drum and where exactly you put that, really has everything to do with what makes you different from other drummers." For Wilk, that means a very special emphasis on the approach he takes to playing --- or not playing --- the I in a measure or phrase. "Heavy on that I --- coming down on that big time," explains Wilk. "I think that's everything. That all goes back to James Brown and George Clinton. If you listen to P-Funk, a song like 'Downstroke,' and listen to just how heavy and slightly late he's coming down on that 1. He's waiting for everybody, so everyone's going to get it and know where they [are]. That to me is deep in the essence of that style of funk."

Begin the BarRage Against The Machine. After floating around the Los Angeles scene for a while and then placing an ad looking for a band, Wilk definitely got a return on his investment. Morello responded, then brought Tim Bob and de la Rocha into the picture for a memorable first meeting. I remember from playing with Zack that he was just like a lighting bolt," says Wilk. "That's all I remember, just really feeding off each other. It was just this kind of intense electricity that I hadn't really felt before. We started playing all this pretty insane punk rock and hip-hop fused with hard rock --- it wasn't just me --- everyone in the band was fully on that tip, whether it was Zack rhyming through a verse or just going off an intense punk rock session." In Rage Against The Machine, Wilk suddenly had a highly charged outlet for his funk philosophies. "When I put an ad out looking for a guitar player, it basically said I wanted to get together with people who had a lot of different influences [so we could] form our own unique sound," he says. "It seemed like everyone [in this group] was on that boat, and it felt like what I could bring to ~ it] was kind of unique At the time. One of my biggest assets is [being able to put] together completely different grooves and making them sound good and interesting together ---- straight grooves with funky grooves or whatever. With our band, its rare that there's a song that has just one feel. " Probably due to the strength of a 12-song cassette that they released right away, Rage Against The Machine found record company A&R geeks lining up for a piece at the band's very first show. "We were at a point where we were just like, 'The record companies probably won't like this anyway,"' Wilk recalls. "We were wrong." Completely wrong. After coming out on November 6, 1992, their debut on Epic Records stayed on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart for 89 weeks, peaking at a very respectable number 45. Billboard called them "one of the most original and virtuosic new rock bands in the nation." But the best was still to come. Evil Empire debuted at number one in April, 1996. The single "Bulls on Parade" was a solid hit, while the single "Tire Me" picked up a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance the following year. Not a bad run at all.

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