"I went to Harvard and did my thesis on student protest in South Africa. Then I went to L.A. because I wanted to join a rock band!" --Tom Morello, Rage Against The Machine Against The Machine

Rage Against The Machine:
BACK ON PARADE
By Adrienne Collier
Photo by Lisa Johnson

Rage Against The Machine'S self-titled debut album (Epic Records) shipped gold, particularly remarkable since they received no major airplay. Now The Machine is up and running again with their-long awaited new album EVIL EMPIRE and first release Bulls On Parade. Because this band despises the trappings of superstardom and prefer to keep their focus on the social messages in their music, Rage Against The Machine have kept their distance from the press, but guitarist TOM MORELLO was kind enough to give IN JERSEY ROCKS this majorly exclusive interview!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: Tell us about your background.

TOM MORELLO, Rage Against The Machine:I grew up in a small town called Libertyville, Illinois, but I didn't follow the traditional rock band path. I was in the local drama club; I played Dungeons And Dragons, I liked Star Trek, and I was into Marxist politics. The very first band I played in had Adam Jones, the guitarist in Tool, in it. He, Maureen Hermann of Babes in Toyland, and I all went to the same high school. I went on to Harvard University, where I majored in social studies and did my thesis on student protest in South Africa. And from there, I went to L.A. because I wanted to join a rock band!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: How did you get interested in playing guitar?

TOM: I was thirteen when I first picked it up. I wanted to learn how to play Detroit Rock City by Kiss and Black Dog by Led Zepplin, so I gave this guy five dollars and told him that's what I wanted to learn. But he said, "No, little Tommy--first we have to learn how to tune the guitar." I thought that was a huge waste of time when there were so many cool songs to be learned! But I tuned the guitar, and when I went back the next week, he said, "Now we have to learn how to play a C major scale." That was it--no more guitar lessons for me! I didn't play for four years. Then I got the Sex Pistols record, and like so many other angst-filled, alienated suburbanites, I said, "I can do that, too." There were times when I was practicing eight hours a day and reading nothing but guitar magazines. It's very flattering that those same magazines have paid enough attention to our work to want to do articles on me now.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: How did Rage Against The Machine form?

TOM: From reading hard rock magazines, I understood that Los Angeles was the place where you had to go. So I moved there with no roots, no friends, just a list of names from the Harvard Alumni Association! I expected that I would find a big pool of great musicians, and that I could find some with whom I could meld my interest in politics. Nothing could have been further from the truth--I got there at the height of the glam era when Poison and Faster Pussycat were on top. Because my hair wasn't long, and because of the color of my skin, I couldn't get in a band to save my life! That resulted in years of frustration, but I finally found out about bands that didn't have that overtly sexist, homophobic, Sunset Strip crotch rock mentality--the Fishbone/Red Hot Chili Peppers/Jane's Addiction scene. I finally joined a band called Lockjaw. We got a major record deal, released an album, and broke up. Then along came Rage Against The Machine Against the Machine.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: Where was your very first gig?

TOM: In a friend's living room! His parents were out, so he had a bunch of people over. We had only five songs at that point, and barely knew them. But we played them, and we tried to go home. But the audience wasn't going to have any of that, so we had to play our five songs all over again. They ended up wrecking the place!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: What was your initial impression of your frontman Zack De La Rocha when you first met him?

TOM: It was at this tiny, cramped rehearsal space with a P.A. system you could hardly hear. Zack came with a couple of his friends, and started rapping. But because of this horrible P.A., I had no idea of what the lyrical content was, and there wasn't enough room for him to express himself in the way he does onstage. The next time we got together, I got to look through his lyric book, and I got to see that Zack is every bit as intense in rehearsal as he is onstage. I was blown away by the magnitude of his ferocity.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: How did you put your now-famous demo together?

TOM: We did the demo because we wanted to put out our own record. I'd had such a bad experience with Lockjaw's label, I didn't even want us on an independent label! So we were going to form Rage Against The Machine Records. We wrote fifteen songs, and recorded twelve of them in what was supposed to be a sixteen-track studio, but three of the tracks didn't work. We did it quick and rough, and sold about five thousand copies of it at our shows and through the underground. The version of Bullet In The Head that's on the first album was taken from that demo--it was one of those magic takes that you just aren't going to be able to re-create!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: How did you end up with Epic Records?

TOM: We were fortunate, because my old friend Adam Jones was in the big local band at the time--Tool! We got to open shows for them and play for full houses, and we got a major label offer after our second show. Most of the other labels that were sniffing around us seemed to be into the band for the wrong reasons--they liked our energy, but they didn't really understand anything beyond our riffs. We got Epic's attention through a club doorman who used to work with an A&R guy at the label. They really seemed to understand where we're coming from, and they were willing to put in writing that we had 100% creative control over every aspect of our careers, which was paramount to us.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: What kind of equipment do you use?

TOM: There's no rack gear whatsoever in my setup--just a few greasy effects pedals. My main guitar is sort of a homemade Frankenstein-type thing. It was custom made, but they did such a terrible job--and overcharged me for it!--that through the years I've completely reassembled it from loose ends. My other guitar's a Fender Telecaster. And I just got a new guitar--it's Telecaster-shaped, but it's hollow-bodied and made of steel, and it has a great sound. I approach the guitar in a very unorthodox way--I try to provide sonic patterns as opposed to the traditional wanking guitar solos. Yes, there are occasional flurries of notes, but we've come to alternate them with big Zeppelin-esque type riffs, a hip-hop type feel where you have a strong groove, and some weird guitar on top of that. One of the things we gave up on long ago was trying to play in tune with each other!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: Because your band hasn't done a lot of press, many people think you're too serious and too political. Would you say that Rage Against The Machine has a fun side?

TOM: (Indignantly) We like to have fun! In a soundcheck one day, we were playing Working Man by Rush, and the guys in Quicksand joined in, so we had six guitars going! Sure, there's enough going on in the world that you could easily be pissed off 24 hours a day. But from a musical standpoint, we like doing other things. (Bassist) Brad Wilk and I are on the Kiss My Ass tribute compilation album. We did an annoying version of Doctor Love with Maynard Keenan from Tool and Billy Gould from Faith No More.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: You were chosen as an opening act on last year's Lollapalooza tour. What was the T-shirt controversy on the tour all about?

TOM: We sell our T-shirts for ten dollars, the long-sleeved ones for thirteen. The Lollapalooza people said no to that, because the Lollapalooza shirts were going for 23 dollars, and they were afraid that choosing between that and a Rage Against The Machine shirt would hurt their sales. So we decided not to sell any T-shirts at all, and Zack told every audience where most of the money for the Lollapalooza shirts was going--to the promoters and the landowners of the venues. Their sales declined dramatically throughout the tour!

IN JERSEY ROCKS: And what happened when the Lollapalooza tour got to Philadelphia?

TOM: We appeared onstage completely naked with electrical tape over our mouths with the letters PMRC written on our chests. We let the guitars feed back for about fourteen minutes and left without playing one note. It was our way of letting the audience know that if they didn't take the issue of censorship into their own hands, they would not be able to hear artists like us. A lot of people were pissed off about it, but that was the point. We did a free show in Philadelphia to make up for it.

IN JERSEY ROCKS: How is Rage Against The Machine handling all of this sudden fame and success?

TOM: I'm not sure exactly how much fame is involved at this point. We're really a band that judges success in very different terms from other bands. It has less to do with selling records than it does with motivating our audiences to accomplish things within the activist realm. On this tour, for instance, we've been passing out information on ways how folks can physically break censorship in their home town. And there's the case of Leonard Peltier, the Native American who's spent two years in jail for allegedly killing two FBI agents. He was framed for the crime because he was one of the leaders of AIM, the American Indian Movement, a militant Native American rights group. We measure our success in terms of what we can do to really address those issues. And in the process, we play some frenzied, live rock music!