Machine Head-Tom Morello

Like Hendrix, Page and Van Halen before him, Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello is equal parts guitarist and magician--But the idea of taking over where his heroes left off is no easy trick for this guitarist.

By: Jeff Kitts

Ever since Eddie Van Halen began his domination of the rock-guitar scene in the early eighties, with his signature deployment of flashy pyrotechnics, flawless precision and unmatched star quality, no guitarist has had a fair shot at capturing the guitar hero's throne. But as we usher in the second half of the Nineties, and along with it a new era in guitar thinking, it may be time to crown a new king. Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello is, to many, the most likely heir. However, the very real possibility of being rock guitar's next messiah in one the few subjects that, when broached, has the power to tongue-tie the usually eloquent and verbose Morello. "Oh my god. I...I have no good response to that. [laughs] I need to think about it for a moment. Can we come back to that?" Despite Morello's reluctance to embrace the crown, the fact remains that his unorthodox playing style and unique perspective on the instrument have made him one of the most exciting players to surface in years. Within Rage Against the Machine's powerful fusion of hard-driving rock rhythms, stuttering rap beats and politically charged lyrics, Morello utilizes a vast arsenal of bizarre techniques to generate some of the most peculiar lead sounds this side of a Pac-Man machine. Whether he's scraping and Allen wrench along the strings, flicking to toggle switch back and forth, or applying generous pressure to his trusted Digitech whammy pedal, Tom Morello thrives on breaking old rules and new ground with each and every solo. His twisted approach is in full force on Rage's second album, Evil Empire (Epic). "More so with this record than the last one, I am willing to accept the fact that what I do with the guitar is my voice," says Morello. "What I play just comes naturally to me, as opposed to more traditional guitar-playing elements, whether they be pentatonic-based things or whatever. It feels very comfortable for met to be off that road and exploring different territory." But things weren't always this war for him. In fact, it wasn't long ago that Morello was locked in his bed room woodshedding textbook practice techniques, and using an Allen wrench for no other purpose than to build IKEA furniture. "I used to practice for eight hours a day, and much of that time was spent running the same laps that most other guitar players were running--I was competing in the same race," says Morello. "But around the time when the band first started playing, I experienced one of those moments of clear insight that left me standing at a crossroads. We were playing at some college just outside LA, and the two opening bands were cover bands. I was watching them at soundcheck, and the guitarist in the first band was absolutely shredding--just liquid fingers playing Eric Johnson solos note for note. Then the next band comes on, and they have two guitarists doing the same thing. Then I thought to myself, 'If there are three guys in two cover bands on one stage doing this, there certainly doesn't need to be a forth.'[laughs] And while their playing was certainly accomplished, it really dawned on me that any kind of originality was going to have to come from somewhere else. It was then that I realized that I wasn't going to run that race any more.

Guitar School: It's been nearly four years since the release of the first Rage Against the Machine album. Was there any difficulty getting the creative process going again after not recording for so long?

Tom Morello: Not at all. In fact, each of us is writing music constantly. The problem. or the challenge, was in finding a group of songs that we all believed in and that also made a great record. That wasn't something we were willing to rush. Rather than hurry out something a year ago to meat some kind of record company marketing criteria, we took our time with it so that we'd all be really psyche about it.

GS: The waiting period, though surely beneficial in the end, must have created some tension within the group.

Morello: Oh, sure. But that's just part of being in a band. It's each member's unique perspective that goes into making the band chemistry great. It's true that, because each member had various likes and dislikes when it comes to music, certain things have to be reconciled before you can write songs together. It's just a process it's something that we could have cut short in order to release something inferior a year ago, but instead we took our time and put out something that we're all really proud of.

GS: Did you find that, during this process, everyone in the band had to make certain sacrifices and compromise in order to achieve a specific goal?

Morello: Absolutely. It's basically a matter of deferring to the band's chemistry and accepting that what makes Rage Against the Machine work is everybody's input. From a guitar standpoint, the fact that we waited gave me time to come up with at whole new batch of sounds and effects and general craziness, and that helped me to add more flavor to our music.

GS: Musically, what's your relationship like with [bassist] Timmy C.? Seeing as you're not a typical guitarist who plays traditional chords and leads, he must have to alternate between playing along with you when you're playing rhythm and playing along with the drums when you break into a solo.

Morello: Actually, that's one of the things that's most fortunate for me: the sublime, rocking power of the rhythm section allows me a great deal of freedom as a guitarist. We were recently in Australia playing a big festival, and a lot of the other bands on the bill kept telling me that our rhythm section was unbelievable, and that when I take a solo, Timmy and Brad [Wilk, drums] just keep on rocking and the bottom doesn't drop out. And I guess that when you've lived in a band for a number of years, it's something that you might start to take for granted. In Australia I really acquired a renewed appreciation of just how good our rhythm section is.

GS: Your confidence in the rhythm section is obvious when you launch into a solo and let the rhythm guitar drop out, leaving Timmy and Brad to keep up the rhythm by themselves.

Morello: Definitely. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we recorded the album at Cole Studio in Hollywood, which is also where we rehearse. When we were doing pre-production there, the demos sounded so good that we asked ourselves why we should move everything to a sterile recording studio environment and try to recreate the vibe that we already had right there. So we just rented the room next door, set up a board, knocked a hole in the wall between the two rooms and put mics in our rehearsal space. For 2 of the rhythm tracks on the album, we were standing in exactly the same place we stood every day in rehearsal. I always had a problem recording in a big. $2,000-a-day studio--I don't feel comfortable playing in a place where you can eat off the floor. [laughs] It almost takes an extra amount of mental effort to get yourself in the place where you can create in the same way that you can in a comfortable environment. We just removed that step, and Brendan [O'Brian, producer] was into it.

GS: What do you think was the key to getting such a great sound in an atypical recording environment?

Morello: I think a lot of that has to be chalked up to the engineering prowess of Nick Didia and Brendan O'Brian. You can take more chances and risks with the recording when you have a lot of confidence in the people you're working with. And I also think the sound of the record has a lot to do with the spirit in which it was recorded. We recorded 12 songs in 14 days, which meant we pretty much just went in and banged 'em out. Recording that way really feels good to me because you can get so bogged down in the endless tuning and double-tracking that is makes it more difficult to live in the moment and play a doing the way we did when we first wrote it or when we're on stage. This way, we were able to capture the spirit of what it was like in the rehearsal studio, rocking on those songs.

GS: For a musically complex band like RATM to be able to record so quickly, you must be very well-prepared when you go into the studio. I imagine the song writing process must be long and tedious.

Morello: Not really. Once we finally got in to the frame of mind where we were all comfortable, everything happened very quickly. Most of the songs were written within a month and a half of going into the studio. While it did take a long time for us to get to the point where we all agreed that these 11 songs would make a great Rage record, the fact is, that actual recording went very quickly.

GS: Unlike many sophomore efforts, which tend to be sprawling epics filled with long winded intros, outros, instrumentals, ballads, and other examples of self-indulgence, Evil Empire is surpassingly tight and condensed.

Morello: Part of that has to do with the way Brendan likes to record. He had some good suggestions during the pre-production that helped us trim out some of the fat and take out those fourth versus and choruses. [laughs] He did the same thing during the actual recording. There were times I'd come in after a take and say, "you know, that was good but listen to the tuning." And Brendan would just say "Dude, don't worry about it. It's rocking!" The same thing happened to me with some of my solos. For example, I didn't think I executed the solo in "Tire Me" in the meticulous way that I have envisioned, but everybody in the band and Brendan said it was great, that it was like a train going off the tracks. Later on I went back and listened to it with more objective ears, and I was glad I kept that take.

GS: Interestingly, some songs like "Tire Me," don't have crazy sound-effects solo, while others do. How do you decide which songs get the solos and which don't?

Morello: That's always been something I've tried to let happen very naturally. Whatever guitar sound I was working on that morning is usually the sound I'll try to incorporate in to the song we're working on that day. A couple of them came from my noise chart, which is something I've kept for a couple of years now. Whenever I come up with an interesting noise, I'll work on it for a while and then record it on my little hand held tape recorder. It's critically important for me to write down how I made that noise, because I've got tape of me playing some truly crazy guitar stuff, but now I have no idea how I got those sounds. [laughs] I referred to the chart a few times when I was looking for things that would work well with this new batch of songs.

GS: Let's talk about some of the strange guitar sound on Evil Empire. The into to "Revolver" is particularly interesting--almost like video game blips and bleeps.

Morello: It's funny because, when I first came up with that, Timmy said that it sounded like a forest coming to life. [laughs] The story behind that sound starts with me going over to Ibanez one day. They were making a guitar for a guy in another band, and it had a special feature on it that they wanted me to try out. So I tried it, and it didn't really seem to do much that was anything different from a normal guitar. But I noticed that when you set the toggle between the two pickup settings, there was a really peculiar, high-pitched noise, and you could manipulate the tone of it dramatically when you turned the tone knob. I asked them what the noise was, and they said it was just incidental noise, that the guitar had and internal pickup and it was picking up this weird noise that they were trying to get rid of. I said "Oh, no, no--come here with that one." [laughs] I gave them and idea of what I thought was possible with that noise, and they were kind enough to custom build a guitar for me with that feature in it. It's an Ibanez Talman. That guitar also has another cool feature. It has a locking tremolo, but the low E is not locked, so you can tune down to D. It's like a dropped-D tuner. It has an intricate set of weights and pulleys in the back to keep the guitar in tune when you click down to D, and it's really helpful when we rehearse and play live.

GS: How do you play the main scratchy riff in "People of the Sun"?

Morello: That's just and Allen wrench on the A string. We've been playing that song live for a few years now, and I've always loved the incessant grinding of it. It sounds like some kind of evil spring.

GS: What about the lead break in "Bulls on Parade"? It sounds like a DJ scratching records on a turntable.

Morello: That's to old toggle switch again. [laughs]

GS: The lead in "Snakecharmer," right before the second verse, is a weird, high-pitched shriek.

Morello: It's funny because the name of that song comes from that noise. When I was tooling around with it in rehearsal, Timmy thought it sounded like a snakecharmer. That's the toggle switch again with some feedback, but this time it's on an early seventies department-store-brand guitar I found for $60 in a Canadian pawn shop a while back. I was completely struck by the grotesque colour and odd shape of the guitar, and when I picked it up it weighed about as much as a set of keys. [laughs] For this album I used it on "Snakecharmer," and I also ran it through a 20-watt practice amp for the main riff in "Tire Me."

GS: Many of the big, crunchy, driving riffs on the album have a Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin feel to them.

Morello: I was a big fan of the huge riffs of the Blackmore/Page/Iommi triumvirate. [laughs] The monstrous sound we got on some of the songs is because Timmy uses distorted bass to get the sound up into the midrange level a bit more, and at times I'll hit an octave pedal so it kicks it an octave below. When that happens, the whole spectrum is just filled with riff; a distinctive low, heavy sound.

GS: You've never been shy with the whammy pedal; in fact, people often refer to you now as the "guy with the whammy pedal." Does that reputation bother you?

Morello: The truth is that the whammy pedal was something that I had always envisioned and dreamed of even before it came out. My reticence about the rack gear is not only philosophical, but practical: I can hardly change a battery, and trying to electro-harmonizer is a daunting prospect. [laughs] And I always thought, "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a harmonizer in a pedal?" SO when one actually appeared, I was totally psyched. It really helped my playing to step up to another level. Being able to integrate the pedal with things I had already been doing, like using the toggle switch or scraping the strings with Allen wrenches, helped me into a whole new realm of sonic possibilities. And the truth is that there's considerably less whammy pedal use on this record that on he first one.

GS: What's your approach to using the tremolo bar?

Morello: I use it less and less, but it's okay because it's another way to bend notes. [laughs] I've got it set so you can bed up as well, which creates a different kind of feel.

GS: Except for the expensive rack hear, would you use just abut anything to created new guitar sounds?

Morello: I really like the idea of embracing the limitations of the 50-watt half-stack I've had for 10 years, the pedal setup I've had forever, and my guitars, and exploring all the possibilities within that. I still find lots of new things within that context that are exciting to play. It can be more debilitating to personal creativity to go out and but a bunch of rack gear and see what it does; to envision a sound and by a $3,000 piece or gear to get it. I'd rather push, scratch, pull, rub, kick at and slam down on every piece of the six wires and chunk of wood called a guitar. [laughs]

GS: What other kind of gear did you use on Evil Empire?

Morello: For the first time I used and old Music Man and with a built-in phaser and a knob you pull out to sit in to anywhere on the sweep. It was a geared riff enhancer. Brendan also brought in these really small, tan-coloured amps, which I used to double some parts. I use a Tone Bender vintage effects pedal for my added distortion on some things. My guitars were a Telecaster, the Ibanez Talman, the department-store pawn-pawn shop and an old blue mongrel guitar I've had for a while that I pieced together from different guitars. I used a Les Paul to double some the dropped-D songs.

GS: What guitarists did you admire growing up?

Morello: The players I 've always admired were the ones that used the guitar less as and instrument and more as sort of divining rod to find spirits from another world and bring them over like Hendrix and Jimmy Page. When you listen to something like Hendrix's "Machine Gun" or Zeppelin's "Nobody's Fault but Mine," the guitars sound like magic. Those sounds are coming from somewhere else. The ability of tap into wherever that is has always been my goal.

GS: Why do you think it is that most young guitar players choose to play only from traditional methods?

Morello: The first answer that springs to mind is that I guess it's just an absolute rejection of the guitar-twiddles hedonism of the Eighties. It became so much of a grotesque caricature of itself that I think players now would rather strip it down to just straight riffing and songwriting. But I've always felt that unconventional guitar playing can be a powerful, integral part of music. I've finally regained the naive way of looking at effects pedals and guitar playing that I had when I first picked up the guitar. It's the feeling you get when you first walk into a guitar store and grab a delay pedal and turn all the knobs way up and the guitar makes the freakiest noise you've ever heard. You really get off on that. But as time goes by, you get more into the subtleties of playing which often translates into the homogenized guitar playing. It becomes more comfortable to fit into the current milieu of guitar playing by finding a comfortable niche there, rather that being willing to embrace the sonic possibilities of the instrument.

GS: Do you ever get the urge to play more traditional rock leads?

Morello: O yeah, sure. [laughs] The last record had a bit of notey playing, but this record had very little of that. The quick bluesy passage in "Revolver" is about it. But I'll sit at home sometimes and noodle along with a Wes Montgomery record, and I'm delighted to do that. But in the context of what we play, it feels right to do what I do.

GS: Do you find it difficult to draw inspiration from modern-day guitarists, due to the fact the very few of them attempt to expand the boundaries of the instrument?

Morello: Not necessarily. All you have to do is listen to rap or techno or industrial music and try to make some of those sounds happen with a guitar. I have a huge amount of respect and love for those genres. It some ways it's almost like the second punk rock revolution. You no longer have to able to play a G chord in order to make powerful music--you can just sample a G chord and put it together in absolutely new and groundbreaking combinations. That's not something we ever do, but it's great the way rap and industrial bands do it, and that's definitely something from witch to draw inspiration.

GS: Do you think RATM has gotten credibility from the rap audience, and is there acceptance important to you?

Morello: I think we have and it is very important to us. We've toured with Public Enemy, Cypress Hill and House of Pain. It has always been important for use to keep one foot in that world because we love the music and it's part of what we do.

GS: The rap/rock fusion started to gain commercial momentum a few years back but, except in your case, never really took off. Why do you think that is?

Morello: That's a monumental testament to our bands chemistry. It just so happens that the way the four of us play together melds those genres in a way that's seamless, instead of making music that's like, "Okay, here's the reggae part, here's the speed metal part and here's the rap part."

GS: You use your guitar the way a lot of singers use their voices, sometimes for power, sometimes simply for added colour. With that in mind, what's it like working with Zack? Do you have to be careful not to interfere with his singing?

Morello: Absolutely. A lot of the strange guitar noises function almost the way a DJ would in a rap group, and those sounds can be there during the verses while Zack is singing. But there are also times when, if you had two churning power grooves happening with everything else, it would be too much. That kind of space is afforded by the material and worked out during the songwriting process.

GS: Does Zack write most of the lyrics?

Morello: I'd say about 99% of them.

GS: Is it important that all four members agree on the political issues addressed in the lyrics, or are there unresolved disagreements?

Morello: It's very important that we're able to stand behind the record as a whole, and I unequivocally do with both this record and the first one. In fact, it seems like we're often more in tune politically that musically. Usually we're full-on in agreement with Zack's lyrics, whereas it's sometimes more difficult to make the soundtrack underneath work correctly. [laughs]

GS: Very few modern rock bands make political statements with lyrics. Why do you think that is?

Morello: We've always dealt in unpopular truths. I think the reason way some bands don't is because they're victims of escapist consumer culture or the propaganda machine that is the educational system in this country. But there have been some really notable exceptions over the years, like the Clash, Public Enemy, Fugazi, Consolidated, Janes's Addiction, Living Colour and the MC5. I think there's a very healthy community of new bands that are speaking out, but they're not always selling records. Bikini Kill is one example. They have a lot of important things to say, but just haven't made a commercial breakthrough yet.

GS: Do you have any interest in collecting and playing vintage guitars?

Morello. None whatsoever. [laughs] To be honest, I like the idea of just grabbing some crappy guitar off the wall and seeing what kind of noises I can get it to make. That's what's important to me in a guitar.

GS: It's interesting that, on the one hand you utilize a vast array of techniques to make sounds, but on the other hand, you do it without a lot of gear.

Morello: Whenever we do one of those European festivals and our crew rolls out my setup, it's so tiny compared to some of the other bands' gear. [laughs] Part of that is purely do to the impact it had on me seen the Clash play live. Joe Strummer had the same amp that I had at the time, and it was just sitting on a chair on the stage. It was as powerful a musical experience as you could ever imagine, and it wasn't created with a huge wall of Marshall stacks--just a few simple riffs and a few unpopular truths. Hope that's okay...

Neil Bowen