Tom Morello

00:00:20
Speaker 1: Tom Morello arrived in Los Angeles from Libertyville, Illinois in the mid-80s with a Harvard political science degree in his pocket and a guitar strung across his back, determined to be the next great guitarist on the scene. Instead, he was locked out of the L.A. glam scene that had taken hold on the Sunset Strip and spent years working as a secretary to a state senator by day and playing clubs on the east side by night. Then after deciding to create his own destiny, he co-founded Rage Against the Machine with Zack DeLaRocca in 1991, and everything changed. The band fused hip-hop, punk rock, metal, and politics into something that had no precedent and became one of the biggest rock bands of the 90s in the process. After a nearly decade-long career, Rage has spent the last 25 years on and off again, but Morello has rarely stood still. He started Audioslave, gigged as the Night Watchman, recording folk protest records... toured as a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and has collaborated with artists as far-ranging as Chuck D, Be Real, and Johnny Cash. Now for the first time in his decades-long career, he's made a true solo album. Everyone Gets Everything They Want blends high-energy rock and social consciousness and features his 15-year-old son Roman as a collaborator throughout. On today's episode, I talk to Tom Morello about making Everyone Gets Everything They Want and about the long road that led to Morello tells the story of his early years in Los Angeles, the divide between the East side and the sunset strip, his time with the East side band and so much more. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Tom Morello. I've been on a, um, Van Halen kick, which actually I want to talk to you about. Cool, cool, cool.

00:02:04
Speaker 2: I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Van Halen.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: I discovered the first album through a skate video when I was a kid. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I picked it up at the record store. And I loved it so much that I just never, this has never happened before because most times you discover an album, you're like, I want to go deeper. Okay. but it seemed like such a perfect album. It was never. Like you're good.

00:02:24
Speaker 3: I don't know if I ever need to go. I've got my Van Halen.

00:02:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I knew the singles, of course. Yeah, yeah. And I never quite understood until recently that 1984 was like the pinnacle.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: That's when they broke. That's the commercial pinnacle. Commercial pinnacle, right. Commercial pinnacle, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: Because they listen to the first album, like this should be This is everything. Anyone would ever, you know. So it kind of blew me away. So I never dug deep into it.

00:02:45
Speaker 3: The first record changed the world. I mean, it was 1978, I think, when there was nothing like that. And I remember hearing it on the radio in Chicago. I think Run With The Devil was the first song that I heard. And I just couldn't believe it that the band came so fully formed like that.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: What station was that in? The Loop. The Loop.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: In Chicago.

00:03:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, The Loop, yeah. It's like the rock station. And they were playing, at that time, Priest and things like that?

00:03:10
Speaker 2: Probably, yeah, yeah.

00:03:11
Speaker 1: I mean, meh.

00:03:12
Speaker 2: Like, leaning maybe sort of Styx, REO, you know.

00:03:15
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, AOR.

00:03:17
Speaker 3: Leaning a little Doobie Brothers and whatnot. But there was enough hard rock, you know, Billy Squire content in there that when Van Halen came along, it was an entirely new.

00:03:26
Speaker 2: Matter, yeah.

00:03:27
Speaker 1: So was that, like, were you into, like, Styx and all that?

00:03:30
Speaker 2: No, no, I was metal.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: I was metal. You know, it was.

00:03:33
Speaker 3: You know, it started with Kiss and Alice Cooper. And then it was ACDC, Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, you know, Aerosmith, Hard Rock. And then came Van Halen, which was, you know, a watershed moment. I had not really started playing guitar yet, but I just like was wowed by the spectacular overall thing that they were selling me sonically.

00:03:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Because that's 78, I guess. So about how much much later do you start?

00:04:00
Speaker 3: I started playing when I was 17, so in 81 is when I started playing.

00:04:05
Speaker 1: At that point, I guess also Randy Rhoads is kicking. Sure.

00:04:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:09
Speaker 3: The reason I started playing was I took a couple of guitar lessons when I was 13 years old. I bought a $ 50 guitar and a $ 50 amp, and I marched into Rigoni Music on Milwaukee Avenue in Libertyville, Illinois, and I I had bought like a Kiss songbook and a Led Zeppelin songbook. And I wanted to learn Black Dog and Detroit Rock City. That felt like a great place to start. And they said, no, no, son, you're nowhere. You have to learn how the C major scale, or actually learn how to tune the guitar. Seemed like a huge waste of time, huge waste of time.

00:04:34
Speaker 2: But I thought, you know what? I'll pay my dues.

00:04:35
Speaker 3: Paid my $ 5 for the lesson, groaningly tuned my guitar all week, getting ready to put on like my seven inch heels and whatnot to rock out. Next week, I'm like, is it Detroit Rock City or is it Black Dog? No, it's the C major scale.

00:04:49
Speaker 2: And I was done. And I was done. And I just thought, I'm never going to be a musician. I hate this. I hate it. And the guitar sat in the closet for four years, untouched.

00:04:57
Speaker 3: My mom would occasionally say, remind me why we blew $ 50 on that thing. And then it was the Sex Pistols cassette, which brought me into the fold. And I was in a band within 24 hours of purchasing Nevermind the Bollocks. I did not know how to play a note on the guitar. I did not know how to play a chord on the guitar. I had a guitar of dusty moldering guitar in my closet. And I just marched into the Libertyville high school drama club after hearing that cassette and said, a punk band is forming. I'm the guitar player. If you'd like to be in the band, raise your hand. No experience required. And a couple hands went up, and I was in a band. I was in a band. Did they play instruments?

00:05:37
Speaker 1: There was an.

00:05:37
Speaker 3: Aspiring drummer who did not have a drum set, so he played on a chair. There was a saxophone player who raised his hand.

00:05:42
Speaker 1: He was in.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: And then a sort of.

00:05:44
Speaker 3: A Mick Jaggery wannabe drama club singer guy who was fantastic.

00:05:48
Speaker 2: That was our band. The Electric Sheep was the name of the band.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: And what was the repertoire?

00:05:53
Speaker 3: The repertoire was, well, we didn't have the... ability to learn anyone else's music. So we were forced to write our own and which, you know, and crazily the, you know, a guy who soon joined that band was Adam Jones, who's currently the guitar player in tool. He was in the electric sheep. He was your youngest. He was in that band too. There were three bands in my. high school and we were the worst.

00:06:15
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: So there was destiny and they were beautiful young men with beautiful hair who played the beautiful hits of the day.

00:06:22
Speaker 1: Right.

00:06:22
Speaker 2: And the girls swooned. Uh, and then they played all the school dances.

00:06:25
Speaker 3: Then there was epitaph and they were bad boys and they were not playing any stupid fucking school dances. They were playing garage parties with weed, beer. They had holes in their jeans. You see those dudes in the hallway and you got out of their damn way because they were playing ACDC and Black Sabbath and looked like they knew how to fight. And then there was the drama club band, The Electric Sheep. And we wrote our own music. And I remember, you know, we'd played like some garage party somewhere and I'm sitting in PE one day and dude comes like a kid I hardly know because, hey, you're Tom Morello.

00:07:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: You playing that band, the electric sheet. I've been looking all over for you. You guys suck.

00:07:06
Speaker 3: He had to find me. I'm like, thanks. I'm putting on my tube socks. Thanks bro. So, but the formative, the formative moment where I realized that the Holy spirit of rock and roll was in me, there was a, um, a variety show about the sixties called the sixties all shook up.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: And the electric sheep audition for that.

00:07:23
Speaker 3: We played one of our original songs, you know, which we kind of hacked our way through and They brought us back and said, hey, the show is in four months. Can you learn Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf? And before anybody else, before any other jackass in the band could open their mouth and honestly report that there's no chance we can learn it.

00:07:40
Speaker 2: I said, yeah, no problem. We'll take the gig.

00:07:42
Speaker 3: So we had four months to learn the song. And Destiny was also in the show. They were playing some like Crosby, Stills, Nash, some beautiful, beautiful song. So rehearsals go like this. Me and Adam are on stage, right? Trying to tune our guitars, just grimacing, unable to, they were not like guitar tuners. I don't know why you didn't have guitars. We couldn't tune our guitars. And on the other side, the Destiny dudes were sitting on stools.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: They were like a jukebox.

00:08:05
Speaker 3: Like every attractive woman in the school was shouting out their favorite songs by bread and by, you know, whatever, whatever, R & B jams. And they knew, they knew them all or they could figure them out on the spot. They could figure them out on the spot. So Adam and I are grimacing over here, right? So the night of the night of the show comes and destiny plays and they're fantastic.

00:08:23
Speaker 2: They're fantastic. And they're people swoon.

00:08:25
Speaker 3: They push out the riser and the, we begin to play our rendition of born to be wild. And the keyboard player comes in on the wrong chord. Bass player comes in the wrong note. It's going terribly. Like it's a, does I've ever been like in your, somewhere you just go like, this is a disaster.

00:08:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:08:39
Speaker 3: I'm a disaster is what I was thinking.

00:08:41
Speaker 2: Like I'm a disaster.

00:08:42
Speaker 3: And so, but I realized the first verse went really, really bad, but as the chorus was approaching. I said something, we have to do something to turn the tide. And while we were not playing very well, my guitar was certainly out of tune. I did have a track and field background and I was on a riser. So when the chorus came, I did like a, I leapt and I could leap high and I leapt high off the rider, did sort of like a kick, you know, like sort of a kick in the air and the roof came off the place.

00:09:08
Speaker 2: Now we were not playing well. but they sensed rock and roll was happening.

00:09:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:09:13
Speaker 3: And that rock and roll might be something different than being in tune. And then I smelled blood in the water. And I'm like, hold on one second. If you rock out, people like it. And so I began rocking out to thunderous applause. We finished the song and the 800 person theater just went absolutely ape shit. And people, And if there was a battle of bands that night, it was a clear electric sheep victory over Destiny.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: That is wild.

00:09:38
Speaker 3: And I just knew, I felt in that moment when that first, when the first jump lands, I was like, oh, like, it's not about an expensive guitar or having a castle on a Scottish lock or even knowing how to play the song, that there's something else that is a vibe that is the thing that connects.

00:09:56
Speaker 2: And it's the reason why I love music. And I tasted a little bit of it.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: Which is funny because if you weren't in New York or London or where like the hotbed of punk rock at the time was happening, if you didn't see them live, like if you listen to, nevermind the Bullocks, it's kind of hard to play. It doesn't sound like they're, they sound tight to me. They sound tight, yeah. Very good producer, I think. So you wouldn't know that like that was, that you could just be that. You could be sloppy and have attitude.

00:10:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was, I mean, that was kind of it for me. And then later I did practice and learn how to play Born to be Wild for real.

00:10:28
Speaker 1: Did you ever learn Black Dog?

00:10:30
Speaker 3: I did learn Black Dog later on. Later on, I put in my 20,000 hours, you know, soon thereafter.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: Did you want to be like a front person after that?

00:10:38
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I wasn't the front person. I was not the singer of Born to be Wild. There's another dude who was a singer.

00:10:42
Speaker 1: But that didn't make you feel like I should.

00:10:44
Speaker 3: No, it made me realize that there's a potential in this instrument and in curating an experience that we'll just call it, you know, it sounds flower, but like an artistic experience on a night or in a garage or in a basement that is something that feels very.

00:11:02
Speaker 2: Attractive to me.

00:11:03
Speaker 3: I didn't, however, have the calling to be a musician until a couple of years, 19. I was a freshman at Harvard University in one of like the basement studios. And there was a moment where I've been practicing a lot. And there's a moment where I had like an improvisational break. That was a jam and by myself down there to some, to some record. And all of a sudden it felt like, like this kind of almost like weightless feeling. Like I was, I had tapped into a thing that artists recognize as like a special thing. And it felt, it really felt like a religious calling. Like I had a lot of other interests, politics, art, you know, literature, journalism, and they all faded.

00:11:41
Speaker 2: You know, they all took a couple steps back.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. That feeling that you experienced through your career from that point through to now. Yeah. How regular is that?

00:11:50
Speaker 3: That's an excellent question because A lot of you have the 24 hour clock of a musician's life. A lot of it is doing interviews and driving to interviews and traveling to the next city and, you know, and, you know, and having a band meeting about.

00:12:07
Speaker 2: T-shirt designs, or are we paying the attorney too much?

00:12:11
Speaker 3: You know, like a lot of like your life is that, and then even in practice and recording and performance, a lot of it is craft. You know, you have to rehearse the song so you remember the notes when you're playing them live. In the studio, you want to make sure you have a good tone and get a good take of it. All of that is craft. None of that is the thing that I'm talking about. None of that's the thing I'm talking about. Then there are transcendent moments and it can be in any venue. It can be just like backstage warming up. It can be in a huge arena where you decide to extend. I can give you a couple of very specific examples, but like where something happens, it's unexpected. A perfect example of that was the first time I ever played with Bruce Springsteen. It was in 2008. I'd known Bruce for a while, been friends for a while, never played together. And it was at the Anaheim Pond. we were playing a song, the ghost of Tom Joe. He had an acoustic version of it from his record of that title rage had done a, um, like a big riff rock version of it. And he told me, you know, to just be ready to play it acoustic or electric. He'd come see me at this point. I was a singer too. And so I was just ready. So I'm downstairs, I'm listening to the band play it. And to my total dismay, he is, uh, raise the key of the song by eight steps significant.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: Right.

00:13:23
Speaker 3: And And so now I have to like relearn all, I'm going to, I'm going to go rehearse with the band in 15 minutes. I have to like relearn the chords, which are now all in different places. My rich milk chocolate baritone voice is no longer able to hit the high notes of this. And I, Bruce Springsteen is my favorite artist. And I recognized that I'm going to blow it. There's no, I don't have the, like sort of the learning speed to be able to in now seven minutes be able to do this.

00:13:49
Speaker 2: I walk on stage. And they're playing this key and it's a disaster.

00:13:53
Speaker 3: Like I can't, I'm getting the wrong chords and trying then to watch my hands play while I'm singing in this different key. And I made nervous, anxiety-riddled wreck. And they don't call him the boss for nothing. Bruce comes over and he goes, we're going to do this key, Tommy. He calls me Tommy, which is awesome. My mom and people back home call me Tommy. You know, we're going to do this key and it's going to be great. I think to myself, like, thanks a lot, Jedi Master Yoda. I still don't know how to play the thing and I can't sing it, but it does calm my nerves for the moment.

00:14:21
Speaker 1: He's just reaffirming that we're going to play eight steps higher. Exactly, exactly. Let's figure it out. It's just going to happen.

00:14:26
Speaker 3: But then it allows my test-taking skills to kick in. Like, okay, there's like 15 people in the E Street band. They can play the chords. I don't need to be another chord player on this. And if you refer to the video of this, which was a popular YouTube clip, I'm faking all the chords on this.

00:14:40
Speaker 2: I'm not playing any of the real chords on this. And you couldn't tell.

00:14:42
Speaker 3: There's like seven guitar players playing the chords. You know, can I authentically... sing a song of social justice.

00:14:49
Speaker 2: I can do that.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: Like I can find a way to say those words in a way. And can I play a guitar solo?

00:14:55
Speaker 1: I can do that.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: So it calmed my nerves.

00:14:57
Speaker 3: And then because, you know, they sort of sprung a surprise on me at soundcheck, I thought I would spring a surprise of them at the show. So during the soundcheck, I didn't give anything away in the guitar solo. I kind of Chuck buried my way through some scribble, scrab, blues licks and whatever.

00:15:14
Speaker 2: I said, let's just hold it. Let's just hold it till the show.

00:15:16
Speaker 1: Right.

00:15:17
Speaker 3: So I'm backstage, like in a little sort of maid's closet with a bottle of Jameson and like, it's time, it's now time, it's time to go and come on stage. And, you know, we're doing this. So first of all, Bruce Springsteen, I'm somewhat surprised that he's friends with the dude from Rage Against the Machine. They don't know, they don't know the crossover that I feel the common DNA there, but they're about to learn. And, you know, we play the song and there's sort of a middle section where we exchange guitar solos and it's really sort of beautiful and almost kind of.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: David Gilmour-y melodic in.

00:15:48
Speaker 3: That part, and there's a lot of cheering, and then there's the last verse, and then the guitar solo starts at the end. Now, in rehearsal, it had been about eight bars. But as I begin playing the guitar solo, Bruce is just like, keep going, keep going, keep going. And it's one of those moments where I'm just unconnected to Thinking about anything about like being nervous or anxious about something totally connected to the Like the rhythm track that's behind me and the meaning of the song Tom Joad was the main character of John Steinbeck's the grapes of wrath Bruce Springsteen's the ghost of Tom Joad is talking about modern-day immigrants and unhoused people then I'm like I'm channeling those ghosts and I just felt like And it just, he just was like, and keep going. Like I didn't, if I had anything planned, it was out the window after the first eight, 16 bars. And it just kept going and ascending. And we, you know, we finished it and it was like, literally like the roof came off, off the place. And I was so surprised. No one in the room wasn't surprised. Him, me, like that was shitty at soundcheck, right? Like him, me, everybody.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: And then gave him a hug. And, and, uh, I said, Bruce, I guess that was the right key after all.

00:17:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:17:03
Speaker 2: And then we played together for the next six years.

00:17:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, including. Including recently, including this last year. Recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:09
Speaker 2: We did a run this year.

00:17:10
Speaker 1: How was it this last? Great.

00:17:11
Speaker 3: I mean, Bruce Springsteen is one of one, you know, at 70, whatever, six years old. You know, he still goes out there like tonight's going to be the best show I ever do. And he's more excited to be there than the person in the front row who flew in from Germany, you know?

00:17:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:17:25
Speaker 3: And it's, you know, there's never been. A Bruce Springsteen tour where we were more ideologically aligned. He had played with me in Minneapolis. I did a benefit show for the U.S.

00:17:35
Speaker 2: Citizens who were murdered by ICE agents there for their families.

00:17:38
Speaker 3: And Bruce played that show and he felt something in that room that he wanted to take on tour. And so we did 20 dates and it was, you know, sort of his most overtly political tour. And, you know, I think certainly one of his most impactful ones.

00:17:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. When did folk music start making sense to you?

00:17:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, I discovered it very, very late. It meant nothing. I didn't even know what it was. It was probably in my early 30s, like late 20s, early 30s. I had always been drawn to heavy music. First it was metal, then it was punk, then it was hip-hop. It was probably the Springsteen Nebraska record that might have been the introduction that made me go back to the early Dylan records.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: You had known Nebraska from when it was released?

00:18:19
Speaker 2: No, no, just sort of found it.

00:18:21
Speaker 1: Found it in the 90s.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: Found it, found it, yeah, found it.

00:18:23
Speaker 1: And.

00:18:24
Speaker 3: And then I was, you know, I did a little research like, oh, this is because he's a fan of Dylan. And then you find Dylan and he's a fan of Woody Guthrie and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger played together and Joan Baez. And there's a guy named Joe Hill who sort of is the founding father of punk and political music in the, you know, 19 teens. And I realized that music, that's the heaviest music of all time. Like there's not a Marshall stack in sight and with the right couplet and the right intent to, that an acoustic guitar and a singer who really, really means it is as heavy as anything in the Sepultura catalog.

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Was it hard, though, to be that, like, you're doing rage shows, and you're on tour, and you're just listening to, you're doing deep dives on folk music. Was that like a bit of a.

00:19:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

00:19:09
Speaker 3: I mean, I've always been, like, had diverse tastes, but to me, they felt very much aligned, and they were definitely links in the same chain. You know, I think that, you know, the music of Rage Against the Machine doesn't sound... you know, exactly like public enemy, but there are links in the same chain or Nina Simone, there are links in the same chain or Woody Guthrie, there are links in the same chain, you know, where it, to me, it's like the, the, the, the genre is we're making music with a purpose to, to stand up against injustice, make music on the side of the oppressed, make music to in our lane to try to change the world.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: And that's what those, all those acts have in common.

00:19:47
Speaker 1: That was one of the incredible things, it remains one of the incredible things about the Renegades album. It's just, it's, it sounds all of a piece.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:19:55
Speaker 1: But when you, you're like these, you're pulling from so many disparate sources.

00:19:59
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, sure.

00:20:00
Speaker 1: It's insane.

00:20:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: But you realize that there is some sort of common denominator between them. And it made me realize that there is a folk element to hip hop even.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: Sure. Absolutely. Counterintuitive.

00:20:11
Speaker 1: Exactly.

00:20:11
Speaker 2: In the storytelling and whatnot.

00:20:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:20:13
Speaker 3: I mean, that was interesting because we made that record with Rick Rubin and, um, we were recording some shows at the grand Olympic auditorium for a live record.

00:20:22
Speaker 2: And the idea was we would have like B sides.

00:20:24
Speaker 3: And so people just started throwing out ideas of cover songs that we would just sort of work up. And then it turned, you know, four songs became 12 songs and eventually became that renegades record. But I think it shows like sort of the diversity of, ideas about what like it goes from dc hardcore to bruce springsteen from you know rolling stones to epmd it was a real melting pot of influences that made that band yeah.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: When you were first connected with zach you're coming off the lockup yes which was a very different And your sort of interest to that point seemingly had been metal, some punk rock.

00:21:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:21:05
Speaker 1: And then you have that group Lock Up, which is on Geffen.

00:21:08
Speaker 2: It's on Geffen Records.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: You guys kind of get dropped.

00:21:12
Speaker 2: Yes, yes.

00:21:13
Speaker 1: The story is old as time. The tale is old as time. Sort of bad ending. But you connect with Zach, and your lead playing sounds largely the same. It maybe sounds a little more constrained on Lock Up than on that. But your rhythm playing sounds... Was there a learning curve?

00:21:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it wasn't a learning curve. It was it was a shift in North Star.

00:21:35
Speaker 3: I moved to Hollywood to try to be a rock star and to try to be a person who makes albums. And then by an incredible luck and fate, I found myself with a record deal with a band called it was my favorite local band. I joined. I was like a junior part. I was like a young about five years younger than everybody else in the band joined that band.

00:21:55
Speaker 2: Got a record deal. I never met anybody that had a record deal before.

00:21:57
Speaker 3: You know, everybody back home thinks you're a trillionaire. It's like five roommates on this street where we're doing this thing in Hollywood. And so there's experts involved. There's a producer and producers. This guy's made hit records. There's an A & R person who signed groups that you own their catalog. There's a record company that's got ideas. And we listen to them. I listen to them. some of the stuff that later became more signature guitar sounds in the weird, like the R2D2 barnyard animal noise thing I was playing. They're like, well, don't do that because there's none of that on the radio. We got to get these songs on the radio. And I liked heavier music than that. And they're like, we're looking for, you know, this is what we're like, okay, well, you're the experts and I'm about to be a rock star. I'm a record maker is what I'm, I'm, my dream is coming true. I'm a record maker is what I'm about to be, you know? And then we had our 15 seconds of fame and the record company stops calling you back. And, At this point, I was 26, 27 years old.

00:22:53
Speaker 2: I had failed.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: I was an abject failure at the thing that I had tried. That's the way you felt? Well, I knew I was never going to be a rock star.

00:23:02
Speaker 2: I knew I was never going to make records. I had a chance.

00:23:04
Speaker 3: I'd never met anybody that had a record deal, and I had had one and blown it.

00:23:08
Speaker 2: And I'm done.

00:23:09
Speaker 3: But I'm still a musician. I knew that. I still very much self-identified as a musician. And so I remember on my little futon in West Hollywood there, made a solemn vow to never play another note of music that I didn't believe in. And that's when I began writing the music that would be my contributions to the first Rage Against the Machine record.

00:23:29
Speaker 1: All on your own?

00:23:31
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I had a bunch of those before I knew those guys at all.

00:23:35
Speaker 3: They were huge contributors musically to that record. But I had, I mean, I had Bomb Track, Know Your Enemy, Township Rebellion, Freedom. Like those were ideas that I was like, this is the shit I want to hear. No one else has ever been here. Where was that coming from? Because it's very interesting.

00:23:50
Speaker 1: It's like, it doesn't, as.

00:23:52
Speaker 2: You know, it doesn't sound like anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:54
Speaker 1: Sounds like an amalgamation.

00:23:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's, I mean, it comes from someone who loves Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin music. you know, and Deep Purple and funk music, you know, and like Run DMC is one of my favorite bands. And the idea that there's a world where, like, it's like I had nothing to lose.

00:24:13
Speaker 2: I had failed.

00:24:15
Speaker 3: It was the failure that opened the door to finding myself as an artist with a capital A, you know? And then with the chemistry of that band Rage Against the Machine and everybody else's spectacular contributions to it, you know, that band connected in a way that no, A & R person or no manager could have ever.

00:24:31
Speaker 1: Could have predicted or guided you towards. Guided you towards.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:34
Speaker 3: It was a very, very natural, you know, that event arrived fully formed.

00:24:38
Speaker 1: I imagine by that point you had enough also understanding of yourself to.

00:24:43
Speaker 3: not listen to advice. Oh, no, understanding myself and of the music industry. You know, like when you, I was very, very clear. So two quick stories about the origin story. So the first person that ever heard Rage Against the Machine, right? I remember this guy. So we're rehearsing deep in the valley where a lot of great rock's been made through the years and sort of in this industrial complex, this dude works down the way, walks by all the time.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: One day he says like, what are you guys doing in there? Like, we're a band.

00:25:07
Speaker 3: He's like, can I hear it? I'm like, I don't see why not. So we have about like five songs at the time. So Dude comes in and he sits down in place and we play him, you know, four or five songs and, you know, somewhat nervously. And we haven't sort of in the lab here and now someone is hearing it. And so I'm like, what do you think? And he takes his time. He stands up. He looks me in the eye and he says, your music makes me want to fight.

00:25:30
Speaker 2: I'm like, is that good?

00:25:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:25:37
Speaker 3: It's a great endorsement. Well, something's happening. No one ever said that about lockup. Nobody ever said that about lockup.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. Who was the second person to hear? Oh, okay.

00:25:47
Speaker 3: So the second, so the first time it like it arrived anywhere in the world was in Huntington beach. Uh, Timmy's some friends of his, like their parents were out of town. So booked a gig in the living room, somebody's house. Like they pushed the armoire over to the side.

00:26:00
Speaker 1: Right.

00:26:01
Speaker 2: And, uh, we knew five songs at the time.

00:26:03
Speaker 3: So the first song we ever played in front of an audience was the fledging version of take the power back.

00:26:07
Speaker 2: And, And there was a lot of nervous energy.

00:26:09
Speaker 3: We started the song probably like two and a half times faster than it was supposed to be because.

00:26:13
Speaker 2: We were all hyped up.

00:26:14
Speaker 3: And then when the beat dropped, this is a band no one has ever heard except for one dude in the Valley. And when the beat dropped, there was a huge pit in the living room instantly.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: Wow. Instantly.

00:26:26
Speaker 3: People are like toppling chairs and like leaping over the bar.

00:26:31
Speaker 2: And I had never felt anything.

00:26:32
Speaker 3: I had been, you know, I'd seen like Jane's Addiction at the peak of that and And it felt like from day one, this is not a band that people like. This is not a band that people love. This is a band that people believe in. And it felt like that from when the first drop of the first song. So we played our five songs and there was, you know, neighbors were like the window, the window, there's people plastered on the window, like, like hooting and hollering.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: And so we play the same five songs again.

00:26:56
Speaker 1: Wow. You just ran it back. We ran it back.

00:26:58
Speaker 2: We just ran it back. They ran her back.

00:27:01
Speaker 1: It's incredible. It's funny, the first time you play with Rage Against the Machines in Orange County, the first time you play with Bruce Springsteen's Orange County. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Orange County needs a... Didn't really have to ask, but was it weird to be... Because you get dropped in 1990 from Geffen. Yeah. And then 1991, Nirvana blows up. Yeah. That must have been a strange.

00:27:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

00:27:18
Speaker 3: I remember they were signed to Geffen when we were there. And I remember the assistants going crazy over this band and this guy, Kurt Cobain, who I didn't know we didn't know what was about to happen.

00:27:29
Speaker 2: Uh, but I remember there was a.

00:27:30
Speaker 3: Lot of bubblings about like how great this, this thing was, but, uh, lockup might've been a band that was a little bit ahead of itself with, you know, the lead singer was personally out, but publicly closeted gay man.

00:27:41
Speaker 1: Right.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: And that was a, it was always an issue. Like don't let on.

00:27:44
Speaker 3: Cause you know, you trying to be a rock star and that's just an unacceptable. So it was a band and he was Brian Grillo's his name. And he was a real talent to someone who was very much ahead of his time. And part of that, You know, because when I moved out here, I wanted to just join a metal band.

00:27:57
Speaker 2: That felt like the thing that I knew how to do. Because you came out here in the mid-80s. Yeah, and I could shred my ass off.

00:28:02
Speaker 3: But I was shocked and surprised to find that the music that was popular was not shredding metal bands. It was like Faster Pussycat. And it was kind of like... Explain the distinction.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: Trash, yeah.

00:28:14
Speaker 3: So I came out here thinking there's going to be a Steve Vai in every corner, and that's going to be my competition.

00:28:19
Speaker 2: I'm going to be... I had all those chops together.

00:28:23
Speaker 3: And I'm ready to enter the guitar slinger sweepstakes. And I didn't have $ 12, but I spent $ 12. I read there was a band called Faster Pussycat playing the troubadour. And the place was lying around the block. I'm like, oh, this is going to be the greatest musicians. This is the place where great musicians get careers and they're loved. And I mean, they have a style of music that is not dependent on great musicianship.

00:28:49
Speaker 2: That's how I'll frame it.

00:28:50
Speaker 3: Um, and they, you know, they had like a vibe and the women went crazy for them and, and they had cheekbones. And I thought, I can't do that. Like, if that's what you have to be, I don't, there's nothing in me that can be that. And I saw other bands. There was a man called jet boy. I said guns and roses at that time, you know, where the, and they had like a thing that was an image that was, you know, with the guns and roses, certainly authentic. Some of the other bands maybe put on a cape. I'm like, like, this might've been a mistake. Like I thought moving to Hollywood, I was going to be rewarded for my ability to play kick-ass guitar. And no one wanted to have anything to do with me. One, I answered an ad for like some metal band that, you know, like wanted lead guitar player and had a pretty good conversation with the bass player.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: It says, come on down. We'll jam. I hang up. Manager calls back. He's like, yeah, you were talking to Johnny there. You got to talk to me. So, so how long is your hair?

00:29:43
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, it's not very, it's a time I had like a, Lionel Richie, black man's mullet, little mini Jerry Crow mullet.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: Tony McAlpine.

00:29:49
Speaker 3: I'm thinking Tony McAlpine. I was aiming for Tony McAlpine. I'm glad that you know Tony McAlpine. I've got that reference. He was the model. It had not grown that long yet. But he's like, no, we're a particular image we're looking for. I'm like, but you haven't heard me play a single note.

00:30:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:30:04
Speaker 3: I might stink, but I might be the best guitar player you've ever heard to be in your band. It's like, no, no, we've, I know what we're looking for. And that's just not it. And he said, would you be willing to wear a wig? I'm like, let's not have the wig discussion before we see if I can play an a chord.

00:30:17
Speaker 2: Um, and I, I never auditioned for that. And then the, it was one night it was actually, it was, uh.

00:30:22
Speaker 3: Adam Jones who, you know, now in tool, former electric sheep alumni, he was in town. I was working for Senator Alan Cranston at the time as his scheduling secretary, which is a.

00:30:32
Speaker 2: Part of my very rich resume.

00:30:35
Speaker 3: And he dragged me out of bed to go to Al's Bar because he wanted to meet some people there. Al's Bar was like a real left-of-center punk rock place where your car stereo is going to get stolen. You know, you got to pay a dude $ 20 to watch your car stereo.

00:30:48
Speaker 2: Like, don't have $ 20. I don't want my, damn it, you've got me over a barrel.

00:30:53
Speaker 3: So we went down there and there was a band called lockup playing that night. And it was like, this is a different scene here. And they were really, you know, they were like raw. It was somewhere between chili peppers and Jane's addiction.

00:31:02
Speaker 1: That was the vibe. Yeah.

00:31:03
Speaker 2: That was.

00:31:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:31:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:31:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I didn't know those bands existed. And then I discovered Jane's addiction. I'm like, Oh, hold on. There's a fishbone.

00:31:09
Speaker 3: There's like a different side of town. Like the people who were in that scene became my friends welcomed me readily. I eventually did join lockup. They didn't care what color my skin was. They didn't care how long my hair was. There was just like a, You know, Jennifer Finch, who recently passed from L7, she was in that scene. She was one of the most, one of the first and most welcoming people. She didn't have to be, she was one of the coolest people on the planet. I'm just a freaking brown skin hillbilly from Illinois. And she just was, could not have been more warm and welcoming. And that's what I found on that side of town. And in that scene was, was like love and open heartedness.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: Well, geographically, how far? So it was easy.

00:31:44
Speaker 2: It was kind.

00:31:45
Speaker 3: Of East and West. So the sunset strip up to probably La Cienega. was, you go as far as like Crescent Heights with a coconut teaser, which was there. That was kind of the spandex scene, the fresh and salt water mixed maybe at the coconut teaser there where both Nirvana and GNR played and Rage later. And then east of that was like the Jane's Addiction world of arts for art's sake. And it was what would become alternative music or the Lollapalooza Nation was bubbling under there.

00:32:17
Speaker 2: And that's where I found a welcoming nest.

00:32:19
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. I imagine you've met Slash, right?

00:32:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:23
Speaker 1: Have you talked about... How did he manage as a black guy? I don't know.

00:32:27
Speaker 3: I think that he and I have a very, very... There's something we have in common is that... Maybe somewhat less so for him, but for me... I have changed color over time. When I grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, I literally integrated the town. According to the real estate agent, one black person lives in the town.

00:32:44
Speaker 2: It's me.

00:32:45
Speaker 3: Got a white mom and there's one kid. And every single day I was reminded that I was black. My hair was different. People want to touch your hair. They want to see, you know, like your palms are a different color than the back. There's a lot of like, you know, anthropological study of this, of this guy, this guy.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: This guy.

00:33:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, there's a noose in my family's garage at one point. And, you know, I was black and there was no doubt to anyone. Time was black cut two years later. I'm in a band whose music appears on radio stations that don't traditionally play black artists or rock and roll magazines that never feature black artists. Um, my vernacular in interviews is not stereotypically urban, um, And there is a sizable portion.

00:33:29
Speaker 2: There are people listening to this right now. Like, what's he about to say?

00:33:30
Speaker 3: There's a sizable portion of people been my audience through the decades that are, when I talk about being African-American are stunned and refuse to believe it.

00:33:40
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:33:40
Speaker 2: Like there's a cognitive dissonance.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: Like, no, no, no.

00:33:42
Speaker 2: Tom Earl's not black.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:33:43
Speaker 2: Like, well, there was the clan must've been mistaken and Liberty. But it's very interesting. Like I've changed.

00:33:49
Speaker 3: Cause I wonder if, cause people don't guns and roses fans don't know that slash is black.

00:33:53
Speaker 2: They don't, they don't know. They don't know. They don't know. They don't know. Rage Against the Machine fans don't know that Tom Morello's black.

00:34:01
Speaker 1: That is one of the things you and Bruce also have in common, is people perpetually discovering. Yes, yes, yes, yes. To their chagrin, discovering. Every year there's a fresh wave of people figuring it out.

00:34:15
Speaker 3: No, no.

00:34:16
Speaker 2: Bruce Springsteen is not a liberal. Wait, couldn't the name of it wasn't in support of the Klan?

00:34:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:21
Speaker 2: I thought they were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's just fascinating.

00:34:25
Speaker 3: It's an interesting commentary on race in the United States of how like, I'm the same shade I was when I was in Libertyville and yet completely different groups, you know, view me in completely different ways.

00:34:35
Speaker 1: In different ways.

00:34:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:34:36
Speaker 1: It's a Rorschach test. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Skin color. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the country.

00:34:40
Speaker 2: I remember there was one little story about it.

00:34:42
Speaker 3: So I went to go see some metal band play at former Universal Amphitheater and Warren Demartini, the guitar player in Rat, good friend of mine, lovely, lovely fella. There was some like metal guitar player who's a fan of Rage Against the Machine and he And so I'm just sitting there, I'm sitting there with my wife backstage, and I see Warren, and he told me that this guy wanted to meet me. And so he's, you know, I see them at the doorway, and he sort of points this way and gestures over, and the dude comes over and talks to the dude behind me who looks like a metal dude, who looks like sort of a Zach Wilde kind of guy. And then the guy goes, I'm not Tom Morello, that's Tom Morello. And the look of disappointment on his face.

00:35:19
Speaker 2: Was totally like, that can't be Tom Morello.

00:35:23
Speaker 3: That cannot possibly be the guy that makes the guitar sound like that.

00:35:27
Speaker 2: I don't mind it though.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: You don't mind it?

00:35:28
Speaker 2: I don't mind it at all. I don't mind.

00:35:29
Speaker 3: I'm very, I'm very comfortable in my nerd skin, my black skin, my whatever.

00:35:34
Speaker 2: I'm comfortable in all of it.

00:35:36
Speaker 1: I know your grandfather was a Mau Mau, Kenyan rebel.

00:35:41
Speaker 3: My great uncle was Jomo Kenyatta, who was Kenya's first president and the leader of the anti-colonial movement.

00:35:46
Speaker 1: A fascinating character in history.

00:35:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: And your mom's, she's a political activist.

00:35:51
Speaker 2: A lifelong, yeah.

00:35:52
Speaker 3: She just passed at 102 years old. I appreciate that, but she lived a humble yet powerful and purposeful life.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I imagine you were steeped in radical politics from a young age. Yes. Meeting Zach, though, I was curious how aware of, like, the Latino political culture in L.A. you were before you had met Zach.

00:36:14
Speaker 2: I'd say not so much. Not so much, you know, not so much.

00:36:17
Speaker 3: And, you know, that band benefited so greatly from his passion, his insightful and just spectacular lyrical catalog and his insight and his fire.

00:36:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. Was it like a learning curve? Was it like it must have been a crash course in some way of learning?

00:36:32
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:36:33
Speaker 1: I think politics is fascinating.

00:36:35
Speaker 3: All bands, what makes a band, when a band is great, what makes a band great is chemistry. Everybody brings their own experience, you know, their experience with injustice and racism, this, that, and the other. Their degree of kind of street knowledge and book learning and their degree of like where the snare lands is just as important to the political message as any of the rest of it.

00:36:54
Speaker 1: You know what I mean?

00:36:54
Speaker 3: And that band had such a potent history. four-person chemistry that it allowed the ideas and the great lyrics of Zack Della Rocha to connect on a global scale.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: So the new album you put out, The Journey from Street Sweeper Social Club.

00:37:09
Speaker 2: Sure, with Boots Riley.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: First of all, this is the first release you put out. This is the first.

00:37:14
Speaker 3: Tom Morello solo rock album. This is my 22nd album of my career. Between Rage, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage, Street Sweeper Social Club, the Acoustic Night Watchmen records, Atlas Underground records.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: This is the first record.

00:37:27
Speaker 3: And it actually came from, over the course of the last five or six years, I've been touring with my backup band, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra. And in the past, I had kind of compartmentalized. Like, this is a Prophets of Rage tour, and this is a Tom Morello solo acoustic tour. And I've been embracing the totality of those 21 records. And playing those Rage Against the Machine riffs for a world that's never needed it more. You know, it's in the DNA of... the hopeful and the hopeless, you know, and needs and needs to be played. Keeping Chris Cornell's memory alive, playing like the audio slave songs and feeling his spirit in the room of someone I miss every day, not issuing the folk music that I love and which was the reason why I am a solo artist playing, you know, when I was on tour with Audio Slave playing arenas on days off, I'd sign, I'd play coffee houses and, you know, it's the same passion and intent as anything else I've ever done.

00:38:20
Speaker 2: And I wanted to make a record that was.

00:38:22
Speaker 3: Going to stand toe to toe riff wise, stand toe to toe ideologically with the best of my work. And it was getting to that point was a bit of a challenge, you know, because like I know how to make a folk record now and I know how to make a band record, you know, but to make a Tom Morello solo record and finding like sort of the right producing partners and leaning very, very heavily on my secret weapon on this record, which is my 15 year old son, Roman Morello, who is a monster. And, you know, he began playing in the pandemic, and he can play circles around me now.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: Did you help teach him?

00:38:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I tricked him into it is how I got him to begin.

00:38:59
Speaker 3: Because, you know, kids don't want to do what your dad does. But there's always instruments around. His introduction, both my kids' introduction, like, they didn't know what I did for a living. I never played one note of Rage Against the Machine or Audioslave for them, ever, growing up.

00:39:12
Speaker 1: Not once. Really?

00:39:12
Speaker 3: I want to be their dad. I want to be their Little League dad. I don't want to be like, oh, here's my record. Check out my billion streamer.

00:39:18
Speaker 2: You know?

00:39:18
Speaker 1: That's like....

00:39:21
Speaker 3: I've never mentioned it. Like, I'm just they're like, oh, that's the guy. He's very friendly and he sleeps late. That's that guy. So the first time that they were kind of introduced to it was when Rage was rehearsing for the 2022 tour. And you know, my wife was out doing something and we had a 10 PM rehearsal and I couldn't leave them home alone. So they'd burn the house down. Like you guys got to come to rehearsal and they're moaning. Like what's that?

00:39:42
Speaker 1: And they're how old at this time?

00:39:44
Speaker 3: So this is 22. So they're 15, 16 now. So they're like, what, like 11 to 12, something like 11, 12. And they've never heard rage against the machine before. So their introduction to rage against machines, they come to rehearsal and we just play the set. You know, and I see them and they're sort of wandering around and, you know, impossible to read. So on the ride home, very cautiously ask like, so what'd you think about, you know, what you just saw on her? And my, my older son goes, Timmy C's tattoos are awesome.

00:40:15
Speaker 2: That was like the first, that was the first, like, like, like kind of superhero. Awesome. And then, and then the next comment was like, Brad Wilkes, a really good drummer.

00:40:23
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, he is.

00:40:25
Speaker 2: He's really good drummer. And then the third comment was like, Zach raps.

00:40:30
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, he raps. He raps really good. And they're like, they didn't mention my guitar playing at all. But, but I began hearing rage coming out of their rooms, you know, and I began hearing like some audio slave come out of the rooms and I think they started poking around at what dad does for a living. And then they, you know, we've, we played 19 shows on that tour and they came to all 19 shows and they, got to, you know, sort of feel it at its, you know, in full flower.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: Did they know Tim at that point? And Brad, like, exactly.

00:40:55
Speaker 3: Maybe, yeah, I've been barbecues and stuff. Like, yeah, I've been around, but like, that's, didn't see him, you know, fully, like, doing it.

00:41:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Doing it.

00:41:05
Speaker 3: But how, how, how I tricked my son Roman into becoming a shredding all-star guitar player during pandemic times. And, you know, the kids were on, it was terrible. Kids are on Zoom school and playing Fortnite. And I said, he likes Led Zeppelin. So, Like, give me five minutes of your time, and I'll teach you the first three notes of Stairway to Heaven.

00:41:25
Speaker 2: And he sort of thinks about that, and he says, I'll give you four minutes.

00:41:28
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, I'll take it.

00:41:29
Speaker 3: So in four minutes, I could teach anybody in this room the first three notes of Stairway to Heaven, right? And then I go back to your fortnight or whatever. The next day, I'm like, give me four more minutes. We'll learn the next three notes.

00:41:38
Speaker 2: He's like, okay.

00:41:39
Speaker 3: Like, that was sort of fun yesterday. So now he knows the first six notes. If you could hum them in your mind, what the first six notes of Stairway to Heaven are, it's like an iconic hook. And in eight minutes, you too can learn to play the first six notes. And then the next day he asked me, he said, can we learn the next three notes? And it was sort of building on those successes. And then he made his way all the way through the song. And he was like, you know, I want to learn the solo. I'm like, okay, great. And then once he got the solo down, all of a sudden, you know, he had a great, I felt a pride.

00:42:12
Speaker 2: You feel like, oh, hold on.

00:42:14
Speaker 3: There's a musician in me that is unlocking itself right now.

00:42:19
Speaker 1: How long did it take to work through? We had a lot.

00:42:22
Speaker 3: We had the two grandmas if that was. We didn't do anything. We had it all day, every day.

00:42:27
Speaker 1: That's insane. I mean, pretty quickly after like the... after the ninth note.

00:42:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:34
Speaker 1: It gets a little more complicated.

00:42:36
Speaker 3: But it's, you know, it's the lesson that I learned when I took those two terrible guitar lessons that made me not want to play music. It's called playing music, not working music. Like, what do you want to do? What makes it fun? What makes you want to come back to it? Even if it's for four minutes. And it's that success. Like, I wanted to be, I loved being in the electric sheep. I didn't know how to play a note, but I liked the idea. We wrote a song, like, we'd just be making a bunch of scribble scrab, but it was a song, like, okay, it's fun.

00:43:02
Speaker 2: I'm playing music, you know? And that's what hooked him.

00:43:05
Speaker 3: And, you know, now he's already got his 10,000 hours in, which is crazy.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: So what was the syllabus after that?

00:43:10
Speaker 3: Syllabus, the next one, the next one he wanted to learn was Crazy Train. You know, he wanted to learn Crazy Train. So the riff in that is very doable. The solo, super hard. But he had been able to do the Stairway to Heaven solo, so this is one he wanted to tackle. And also, you know, I did leverage some rock power to try to encourage him further. When he had mastered the Stairway to Heaven solo, I filmed him playing it and sent it to Jimmy Page, who then sent back a positive reinforcement for that, and that I think was helpful.

00:43:42
Speaker 1: What do you do with that? What do you do with that? You like Jimmy Page's number?

00:43:46
Speaker 2: Jimmy Page is number two.

00:43:48
Speaker 1: And you talk?

00:43:49
Speaker 2: Sometimes we have dinner.

00:43:50
Speaker 1: What does he do? He needs to play. What is he doing?

00:43:52
Speaker 3: I think that he's, you know, he's sort of an English gentleman right now, you know? He's in the same castle he's been in since, I think, the 70s, you know?

00:44:01
Speaker 1: Can you nerd out with him and, like, ask?

00:44:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. He's so easy.

00:44:04
Speaker 3: He's so, like, you will, and I do, and I warned Roman, you know, we have dinner. I'm like, you can ask him. He's really going to answer any question you want. Like, so on, you know, Achilles' Last Stand. how many guitars are stacked in the pre-chorus. And he knows a lot of that.

00:44:19
Speaker 2: You know, he's pretty.

00:44:20
Speaker 1: He's in the sessions, like, all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:22
Speaker 2: He's always remastering and doing stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, anyway.

00:44:25
Speaker 1: They're the greatest. They're the greatest.

00:44:27
Speaker 2: They're the greatest.

00:44:28
Speaker 1: They're the greatest.

00:44:29
Speaker 3: And to see, and to sort of see a young person who, you know, is immersed in a world of hip-hop and pop music, and, you.

00:44:36
Speaker 2: Know, they love Lucky, and they love, you know, Lil Yachty, and they love.

00:44:40
Speaker 3: that and then to discover houses of the holy and no quarter and the lesson in that is like great music is great music yeah you know sometimes it's marketed to it's not marketed to a generation in a way that was marketed to another generation it doesn't make it any less.

00:44:55
Speaker 1: Great yeah no yeah it's very true.

00:45:01
Speaker 3: So let's talk about this record a little bit more so everyone gets everything they want is the album september 25th that comes out and it's a state of the union address This is a record for people who have had enough. These are anti-racist songs for anti-racists. These are anti-fascist songs for anti-fascists. And the single is currently out now, which is called Date Night, which is about three Dutch teenage girls in World War II who lured Nazis into the woods and killed them. It's anti-Nazi songs for anti-Nazis. And surprisingly, that is a controversial position in 2026. You get a lot of pushback on that. And it's, you know, when you're opposed to anti-racist songs and anti-fascist songs, anti-Nazi songs, it's not hard.

00:45:41
Speaker 1: To do the math. Yeah. It's a lot of revisionist history these days on everything, including World War II, which you thought sort of.

00:45:47
Speaker 2: We thought that was self.

00:45:48
Speaker 1: I thought that was done.

00:45:52
Speaker 2: Nope.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: That was gospel. I thought we knew the whole story. That's why I think it's important.

00:45:57
Speaker 3: Like, that's why the reason why I chose this particular song is like, It's celebrating these war heroes. These, Hanny Schaaf was 14 years old when she became a guerrilla partisan who was offing Nazis.

00:46:07
Speaker 2: And that's a hero. That's a hero.

00:46:09
Speaker 3: And, but you say that in 2026 and you'll get some pushback about, about that, which is just kind.

00:46:14
Speaker 2: Of crazy to me.

00:46:14
Speaker 1: It's insane. I love the track too with, with Serge. Yes.

00:46:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:19
Speaker 1: Ajourn it. Yeah.

00:46:19
Speaker 2: Serge Tankin, longtime friend and comrade.

00:46:21
Speaker 3: He's, he came through and we wrote that in the height of the immigrant purges in Los Angeles where- You know, we're going downtown every weekend to protest and watching, you know, all the stores close and our neighbors terrified and black vans cruising the neighborhoods. And we're like, we got to do what we can with what we got, you know.

00:46:42
Speaker 2: And Serge can always be counted on.

00:46:46
Speaker 1: How did you collaborate with him? Yeah, that one, I think that he was out.

00:46:49
Speaker 3: It was, I basically said it was a Roman Morello riff, which is the hot riff in that one. That's your son's riff? Yeah, that's his riff. That's his riff in that one. That's his riff in Date Night, too. And sent it to Serge and said, this is three of us in L.A., me, you, and Roman. We see what's happening every day. What do you think about that? And he sent back that huge, spectacular Tankian hook.

00:47:08
Speaker 1: He just had that?

00:47:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just sent it back within 36 hours, sent that back, and then produced the song up around that. But Serge is great and excited to have. He's playing the Power of the People show, too, in D.C. He's always there for me.

00:47:23
Speaker 1: It's also what like feels to me, unless I'm wrong, you can correct me if I'm wrong. It feels like the first time you're, you're singing in your, your Barrett's. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm on the night watch.

00:47:31
Speaker 3: There's like probably like six Americana records where I sing, but this is the first time where I'm doing it with Marshall stacks in the background, you know?

00:47:37
Speaker 1: And that's also your, your, your octave is like, you're lower. You're singing lower. I've got that Leonard Cohen. It's like a Leonard Cohen thing.

00:47:44
Speaker 2: If you want to hear, or Barry White, depending on where.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: There's not a lot. There's not a lot of singers. There's not a lot of singers.

00:47:49
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

00:47:50
Speaker 3: But I mean, it's, it's the thing is, The only thing that matters to me in record, like the records that I make is authenticity. Like that's how I sing. Like I wish I could sing like Robert Plant. That's not, that's not a thing, but I mean, Leonard Cohen, some of my favorite singers, you know, like whether it's Paul Robeson or Leonard Cohen have a register that is, you know, that has a certain amount of gravity to it.

00:48:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:48:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it just feels like you're sitting, sitting in your voice different on this. I don't know if that's because it's a Tom record.

00:48:19
Speaker 3: It's a, it's a, It's figuring out how, because I've been singing in front of a rock band for years now, maybe since 2011 with the Freedom Fighter Orchestra, been playing electric guitars, but making a record that, if this record feels to me like a discovery of a new era, it feels to me like the first Rage record, it feels to me like the first Audioslave record, it feels like the first Night Watchman record, where it's like, this is an artistic chapter that is.

00:48:44
Speaker 2: Beginning in a way that is so exciting.

00:48:46
Speaker 3: Like, I haven't listened, like, I don't listen to a lot of my own music and this record, I love, I just love listening to them. Like this feels like it's so exactly what I want to say. It's exactly what I want to play. If you're dropping the needle on a Tom Morello solo rock record, there's some expectation and that expectation, like you better kick my ass. So I wanted to make sure that I was loaded, riff loaded, like never before. And it's riff loaded, riff loaded, but also, you know, like the one goalpost is maybe like the, the heaviest riffs of the rage audio slave world. And then the other goal post is my love of like the Springsteen darkness on the edge of town stuff and their storytelling and the, you know, there's, a piano song on it, you know, and the sort of maybe almost a Pink Floyd element to it.

00:49:32
Speaker 2: And there's a narrative arc to it that's spent a lot of time crafting.

00:49:36
Speaker 1: Well, how many songs in did you start to realize you were on? Like, when did you realize you were kind of finding your own? Yeah, that's a good question.

00:49:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I was really, this was a record that I had to fight for.

00:49:44
Speaker 3: Some records arrive and some records you fight for. And this, I had some great riffs and I had some lyrical ideas and I would record songs in different capacities and go like, that's not a song I want to play around the world the next two years, you know? And since next, I got a basket of those that, that are just like done, done, done. And the first song that I went, okay, hold on. The soldier in the army of love was a song I wrote with Roman. And I thought, this is a song I can open my shows with for the next 10 years. And we've been open and it's to great effect. And, Like it's a mission statement.

00:50:15
Speaker 2: So I'm like, okay.

00:50:16
Speaker 1: It's the fifth song on the album.

00:50:18
Speaker 2: That's one in the hamper. That's one in the hamper right there.

00:50:20
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:50:20
Speaker 2: That's one of the hamper. Then, you know, like cut to date night. Like this is a story.

00:50:25
Speaker 1: Literally.

00:50:25
Speaker 3: I dragged that story around to Hollywood studios of these three girls. Like this is a, spectacular movie it's a spectacular tv it's real you pitched it pitched it no one want no one wanted to have anything to do with it and i'm like it's a story just who'd you pitch it to every production company ever like it's just i'm passionate about that idea of teenage girls killing nazis and um and in this in this particular time and i just thought well you know what i'm going to tell the story myself i'm going to tell the story myself and it's the reaction that it's had in the netherlands has been pretty crazy like the children of those women are alive and sort of aware.

00:51:01
Speaker 2: Of the song and commented on it in great detail, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:51:05
Speaker 1: Like they can't believe it.

00:51:06
Speaker 3: And I'm like, well, you know, it's like they're known in the Netherlands and somewhat less so everywhere else until hopefully now. Um, and so then like, then I started, you know, uh, you know, a chalkboard of, okay, we've got, we've got soldier army love. We've got date night, the song that opens the record, Beth from electronics, you know, that one was, I just was, we were recording something else and I just was jamming. And that's just a improvised one take of that hot riff right there.

00:51:32
Speaker 2: And I asked the engineers, like, did you record that? Please tell me you recorded it.

00:51:35
Speaker 1: Like, I got it.

00:51:35
Speaker 3: I'm like, we're going to start the record with that. And the idea is to come in with like the heaviest, that might be the heaviest riff in my entire catalog to start the record.

00:51:43
Speaker 1: And who's Beth from electronics?

00:51:44
Speaker 2: Beth from electronics. Beth is a real person.

00:51:48
Speaker 3: About five or six years ago, there was a great viral YouTube clip of a Walmart employee quitting her job.

00:51:55
Speaker 2: She films herself.

00:51:57
Speaker 3: Getting on the PA at the Walmart, calling out her boss, calling out the molester supervisor, calling out the horrible capitalist practices of Walmart, giving shout-outs to some of her fellow workers who don't deserve to be treated that way, says, fuck this job, I quit, Beth from electronics. I want to make an album that has that kind of energy. We started off with Beth. That's great.

00:52:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:52:23
Speaker 2: She says, this is, she starts out saying, this is Beth from electronics.

00:52:26
Speaker 1: That's attention.

00:52:27
Speaker 2: Walmart shoppers. This is Beth from electronics.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: And are you going out on the road with the same people?

00:52:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:52:34
Speaker 3: We've got, we've got a dialed in now. We've got, you know, Roman's been in my band the last three years. And so we said perhaps to massage a lot of touring around, you know, his school schedule. But, um, we've been out the last three summers and, You know, the rest of the year, there's a couple of festival shows and then the big Power of the People show, which we should probably talk about as well. So October 3rd is establishing a new festival called Power of the People outside of D.C., the Merriweather Pavilion in Maryland. And it's Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Joan Baez, Cypress Hill, Jack Black, myself, the Linda Lindas. Dropkick Murphy's, the idea is to have a festival show that is branded around saving democracy, protecting voting rights, smiting the fascists, and having a day of celebration of rock and roll and hip hop.

00:53:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing. And a great place to do it. It harkens back to the 80s. Yeah, exactly. Incredible.

00:53:28
Speaker 2: Exactly. That's the idea. Power of the people.

00:53:31
Speaker 1: A couple different drummers, a couple different bass players on this record, right?

00:53:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:37
Speaker 1: So are you going to is that like.

00:53:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra has a slightly shifting cast, but it's sort of the same relative been relatively steady. And, you know, we bring it out and it's been so great to like this summer. We played almost a million people in Europe, you know, and to be able to do that at this age and to, you know, tackle those, whether it's those the big. french metal festivals or whether it's the more indie alt stuff or you're playing like we did play this i forget the name of the famous german anti-fascist punk club like i've never been happier playing live music you know and never been never felt better about making music it's like this is the difference between one of the reasons between being in a band being a solo artist when you're in a band you get all the pros and cons of chemistry and when a band is great it's because the chemistry is great you cannot do that alone you can't as a solo artist you get purity You get a purity of vision and you get something that is unfiltered by outside. You know, the two great examples, like sort of a Springsteen and Led Zeppelin, which we've talked about today. One is an example of band chemistry. One is an example of artistic purity. And each of those can be very powerful. I've had the great good fortune in my career to be able to do a lot of both.

00:54:48
Speaker 1: Did you play this record for Bruce at all?

00:54:50
Speaker 3: No, I played him just one, the last track, They Can't Kill Us All, which is very Springsteen sort of.

00:54:56
Speaker 2: Darkest on the edge of town.

00:54:57
Speaker 1: I love on your lap.

00:54:58
Speaker 2: You call it a dark beauty.

00:54:59
Speaker 1: You call it a dark beauty.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is nice.

00:55:01
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. It's phenomenal. It's great. Pretty good pull quote. How did you pull him into it? Because you got him to do Highway to Hell on... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I meant to ask you, how did you get pulled into that?

00:55:08
Speaker 3: Okay, so the Highway to Hell, so Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, and I did Highway to Hell on my Atlas Underground Fire record. And this was one of the most fortuitous... I was on tour with Bruce in Australia. We're playing the soccer stadium in Melbourne. Yeah. Eddie Vedder happens to be in town that day doing a solo show the day before after. So he's coming down the show. We had been working up Highway to Hell ever since we were in Perth, the home of Bon Scott. And it was my suggestion. I came back from Bon Scott's grave, sat down, saw Bruce in the bar. I'm like, do you think there's any overlap of the East? I said this very sort of tentatively. Is there any overlap between the E Street Band and ACDC? He said, I'll think about that. So he went upstairs, thought about it. We began rehearsing Highway to Hell. So we had like a pretty decent version of it. So we're in Melbourne and I, you know, I've been texting with Eddie, I knew he was coming down the show. And I said, oh my gosh, like I called John Landau, Bruce's manager said, I got an idea.

00:56:01
Speaker 2: And I tell him the idea. He's like, you got to tell Bruce that idea yourself. I'm like, why?

00:56:04
Speaker 3: Cause you're afraid to, or what am I going to get in trouble? So I go in there and knock on the door. I was like, so we're in Australia where ACDC owns it. Highway to hell is the national anthem of Australia. How about we open the show with highway to hell with Eddie Vedder. and he had that same look that you just had on your face right there like that sounds like a pretty good idea right so we open the show and it's a peak moment i mean there's moments like this that only mountain climbers and bullfighters get you know where you just like it's a peak human moment for everybody in the room so cut to pandemic time everybody's miserable i just called those dudes up and said why don't we record highway to hell so bruce was in jersey eddie was wherever and And we just did it remotely.

00:56:47
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:56:47
Speaker 2: To recapture some of that vibe.

00:56:49
Speaker 1: And it was Bruce who felt how the hell was the overlap between... Yeah, yeah.

00:56:52
Speaker 2: He picked that song. He picked that song.

00:56:54
Speaker 1: I have to defer to Bruce. He knows the E Street Band. I'm shocked.

00:56:59
Speaker 3: The E Street Band is the most pliable band perhaps in the history of bands. You know, the guys that played thousands and thousands of shows. I learned 250 Bruce Springsteen songs before I went on tour with them. 250 songs, right? And they still played songs outside of that. He would take requests... But sometimes the request would be from other bands. It'd be like a Van Morrison song that I heard on the radio in the 80s. And I'd expect, you know how long I had to learn it? One, two, three, four. I don't know what that's like. But the two songs that were the most challenging to make great, and they got great because Bruce doesn't settle for less than great, were Highway to Hell and Clampdown by The Clash.

00:57:36
Speaker 2: We had to work on both those songs.

00:57:38
Speaker 3: Those took a lot of reps because I don't think that metal or punk are really, that's not what those guys were playing in the bars.

00:57:44
Speaker 1: No. Yeah. It was clamped down also, Bruce?

00:57:47
Speaker 3: I suggested that one in 2014, but he brought it back for this tour.

00:57:51
Speaker 2: Wow. And it became a staple.

00:57:52
Speaker 1: It's a great song.

00:57:53
Speaker 2: It's a great anti-fascist anthem.

00:57:55
Speaker 1: How do you work through 250 songs, memorizing 250 songs?

00:57:58
Speaker 3: First of all, I leaned heavily on the freedom. Some people have that jukebox ability.

00:58:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:58:04
Speaker 3: Like you can listen to a song and they figure out the goal. My son does that. It's just maddening. Like you can just figure it out by ear. I don't have that. So I have to study it or I have to look. Now you could like look on the internet. So Carl Restivo, who's been my musical consigliere, the rhythm guitar player and, you know, other singer and freedom fighter, he's got that. So I said, Carl, you're going to teach me 250 Bruce Springsteen songs.

00:58:24
Speaker 1: Went over there every day.

00:58:25
Speaker 3: And we just, you know, we do, you know, seven at a time over the course of months and months and months and months and months and charted them and So I showed up knowing 250 songs, and he still played songs outside of that.

00:58:37
Speaker 1: Oh, man. Oh, man.

00:58:38
Speaker 2: On the last U.S. tour, we played.

00:58:40
Speaker 3: 32 shows, 184 separate songs, different songs, in 32 shows.

00:58:47
Speaker 1: 184 songs. That's crazy. That's wild.

00:58:50
Speaker 2: It was crazy.

00:58:51
Speaker 3: This last tour, the set list was pretty locked, was locked, maybe with the exception of Purple Rain in Minneapolis. And it was the same set, you know, 18 out of 22 shows or 20 shows.

00:59:01
Speaker 1: Something like that. Wow. So if you have to go out and do like, if you're gonna do an audio slave song or rage song, do you have to relearn? I have to relearn. I have to relearn.

00:59:11
Speaker 3: I mean, some of them are more muscle memory though, but, but I, I want to make sure that I wouldn't throw them.

00:59:16
Speaker 2: I wouldn't do it on unrehearsed.

00:59:17
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:59:17
Speaker 3: Cause a lot of times in the studio. we record stuff like you record it and you don't look back. Like you do a bunch of takes like on a guitar solo.

00:59:24
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:59:25
Speaker 2: Comp this one together. That's the guitar solo.

00:59:27
Speaker 3: And you move on with your life and then you have to like, okay, here comes the tour and the guitar solo is hooky. I've now have to relearn my guitar solo and I'm like a, Like a student.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: What did he play there? How did he get the R2-D2 noise?

00:59:42
Speaker 1: That's amazing. Well, I appreciate you coming by. I know you don't love doing interviews, so thank you so much, man.

00:59:48
Speaker 3: I appreciate your thoughtful questioning. I'm very delighted to have the discussion with you.

00:59:52
Speaker 1: It's great to chat with you, man. Thank you.

00:59:53
Speaker 2: Pleasure. Thank you.

00:59:57
Speaker 1: Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.