Tom Morello, the Last Rap-Rock God Standing

“In my adult life, I’ve never played on a bill where I fit in, or my band has fit in,” boasts Tom Morello, rap-rock savior and undiminished guitar god, relaxing in his sparse backstage trailer at yet another gala heavy-music festival almost, but not quite, made in his own image. “Ever, ever, ever. And today will be no exception. Today, we’re bringing this kind of EDM, metal, punk, radical, leftist, guitar-hero thing. There’s only one box today to check for that.”

Morello, best known for his tenure in ’90s rap-metal titans Rage Against the Machine and the early-’00s alt-rockers Audioslave, has been a walking embodiment of that box for 30 years or so. (Minus the EDM part, a far more recent fascination of his.) It is a Friday afternoon in mid-May, and the guitarist, singer-songwriter, and jovial poli-sci flamethrower will soon take the stage for a solo set at Columbus, Ohio’s Sonic Temple festival, a pulverizing three-day headbanger bacchanal fueled by nostalgia but dependent on a present-day thirst for crushing distortion, for fist-pumping defiance, for fuckin’ guitars.

This year’s headliners—the annual fest, first launched in 2007 and held at Columbus Crew home base Mapfre Stadium, was previously known as Rock on the Range—include Foo Fighters, System of a Down, Disturbed, Ghost, and your old friends Papa Roach, along with the omnipresent threat of a stadium-clearing Midwestern-spring thunderstorm. It is Morello’s job, in his estimation, to bring forth the thunder and lightning and so forth in the event that God does not.

“No one knows what my set is today,” he says. “No one knows. ‘It’s Tom Morello. Is he gonna sing folk songs? The Rage guys aren’t gonna—what is that gonna be?’ No one has any idea. And I love that.”

The Rage guys—including bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk, who joined him in both Audioslave and, more recently, the RATM/Public Enemy/Cypress Hill supergroup Prophets of Rage, which released its self-titled debut album in 2017—are indeed not around to back him up this time. Instead, Morello, who starting in 2007 has also cut three full records of tremendously earnest aggro-folk under the alias the Nightwatchman, is promoting October 2018’s The Atlas Underground, an EDM-heavy solo album released under his own name but packed with famous pals from Bassnectar to Big Boi, Steve Aoki (?) to Marcus Mumford (!), the RZA to the GZA.

None of those guys are here in Ohio, either, but no matter: All Morello really needs is his guitar and your undiluted reverence. “There’s a confidence to, say, a Rage or Audioslave show, where you have X number of hits on the radio,” he concedes. “You gotta fall off the stage for that to not go great. And while I’ve always tried to remain in the moment, there can be a complacency to that. This—I’m totally present, and I’m like, ‘You don’t know what’s gonna happen, and we’re going to ambush you today.’”

By we he means basically just him. Morello will, indeed, unexpectedly start his Sonic Temple set alone and very much offstage, ripping off gargantuan riffs—fueled by his trademark mix of Black Sabbath ultra-heaviness and Bomb Squad bombast—from deep within the sizable and immediately ecstatic crowd. With the aid of a rowdy backing track, he rips through a few dubstep-drop-heavy Atlas Underground jams; with the aid of an unassuming live bassist and drummer, he finally makes his way onstage and rips through a quick, invigorating medley of Rage and Audioslave hits. Meanwhile, a video screen barrages us with fiery leftist sloganeering: “Every government is run by liars.” “We don’t negotiate with racists.” “Nazi lives don’t matter.” “God hates flags.” Such sentiments remain as integral to the Tom Morello experience as his wah-wah pedal.

It all climaxes, triumphantly, with our hero inviting several dozen jubilant fans onstage (“Don’t step on my shit,” Morello warns of his other various guitar pedals, “and if you put a phone in my face I’m gonna throw it”) for a cathartic group scream-along to RATM’s breakout single “Killing in the Name.” Morello does not even try to replace the fiery lead vocals of largely reclusive Rage frontman Zack de la Rocha, or rather, he enlists everyone to replace him. Here, watch me and several hundred of my fellow compatriots sing, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” in, uh, not quite unison.

The crowd is thrilled and thoroughly sated, or so it appears. “They’ll never get what they want,” Morello tells me, politely confirming, for the 10 billionth time, that a full Rage Against the Machine reunion is not forthcoming. (That already happened, via 50-odd shows spread out over four years, starting with a raucous gig at Coachella 2007.) “Rockers are conservative that way, you know.” But his Sonic Temple set is nonetheless everything a longtime superfan would hope for, just delivered in a manner even a longtime superfan would not quite expect. That’s his goal now. Well, that and full-scale political revolution. He’s still working on that, too.

Morello grew up mostly in the small town of Libertyville, Illinois—go ahead, picture it—and started hearing about the imminent death of the guitar, and of rock ’n’ roll itself, long before you ever heard of him. He vaporized that notion by violently coaxing sounds out of his guitar that evoked anything and everything else. “I was the DJ in Rage Against the Machine,” he recalls, of the deified band he formed in L.A. in 1991. “I’d done my 10,000 hours of practicing Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen licks, but when I found my own voice, it was lawn mowers and helicopters and trips to the zoo.”

Rage’s self-titled 1992 debut album introduced many a surly Midwestern teenager to leftist political thought, from the “Freedom” video’s pocket history of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier to the de facto reading list (including The Anarchist Cookbook, The Black Panthers Speak, and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man) presented in the album’s liner notes. That record also, thanks to Morello, redefined how a guitar could sound and what it could do. His chosen instrument took so many trips to the zoo that Rage albums—including 1996’s Evil Empire, 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, and the 2000 cover-song farewell Renegades—also included this mildly sassy clarification: “All sounds made by guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.” Spoken like a band with a guitarist unlikely to dabble in EDM nearly 20 years later. But Morello’s continued success is down to both the ways he’s adapted and the ways he’s proudly refused to.

The Atlas Underground makes both perfect sense—“Rabbit’s Revenge,” costarring Big Boi, Killer Mike, and the hard-rock-minded DJ/producer Bassnectar, is like a Judgment Night soundtrack outtake fused to its rappers’ timely and righteous anti-police-brutality thesis—and, delightfully, no sense whatsoever. To hear the guy from Mumford & Sons brooding amid palm-muted crunch and signature Morello police-siren wail is to scratch one’s head even as one bangs it. (“We’re both rock dads,” Morello says of Mumford, “so there’s a lot to celebrate and commiserate about.”)

Much of the Sonic Temple crowd likely didn’t know the new stuff quite as well as they knew, say, “Killing in the Name.” But Morello’s goals for The Atlas Underground were modest. Well, sort of.

“This record, I wanted to be a Trojan Horse for electric guitar in 2018, 2019, you know?” he says. “And to find like-minded collaborators who were willing to conspire to help me inflict my guitar vision on the next generation. And I found, from Bassnectar to Knife Party to Pretty Lights—those guys were all Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fans, and you could tell. And so the idea was, ‘Let’s look at how you produce a song but replace some of your digital sounds with my Marshall stack sounds.’ And to be on the road with it, it seems like that lane’s open.”

RATM first broke up in 2000 after De La Rocha’s angry departure; Audioslave functionally swapped him out for Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell and a more streamlined hard-rock sound that has taken on a sadder, more profound overtone since Cornell’s death by suicide in 2017, just a few days before Soundgarden were set to headline that year’s Rock on the Range. The most thrilling part of Morello’s Sonic Temple set, in fact, was when he closed out his string of classic RATM riffs—from “Bombtrack” to “Bulls on Parade” to “Sleep Now in the Fire”—with Audioslave’s power ballad “Like a Stone,” with a surprise guest, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, jumping onstage to handle Cornell’s vocals. “It is a horrible and haunting thing, and it doesn’t get better,” Morello says. “I’ve lost friends and family members to a number of things, but this one is particularly difficult, and we honor him every day on stage.”

There’s that we again: Even as, nominally, a solo artist, Morello clearly prefers a band, a gang, an army, a movement. His best album of this century is 2009’s Street Sweeper Social Club, the self-titled debut of his rap-funk duo with the Coup mastermind and future Hollywood disruptor Boots Riley, a perfect match both musically and politically. You might’ve also seen Morello on tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 2014, uncorking a trademark bonkers solo during “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” He plays well—plays best—with others, especially those who share his passion for sociopolitical subversion.

What Morello and Springsteen have in common is millions of fans who love their music but emphatically do not share their politics; I caught an especially fraught Prophets of Rage show in July 2016 in Cleveland, the night of the Republican National Convention that cemented Donald Trump’s nomination. That band was formed, Morello says, “during a time of national emergency” that has not exactly dissipated since. “I think it’s a global emergency now when you throw the environment into it. And you know, I didn’t choose to be a guitar player; that chose me. It’s my responsibility to weave my convictions into my vocation. And the way that I connect to people is via the electric guitar.”

The vexing issue, whether it’s Chris Christie worshipping the Boss or Paul Ryan worshipping Rage, is when both politicians and civilians connect to the music but not, somehow, the message. Or maybe it’s not so vexing. “I’ve been on a warpath since my first gig in high school, and it’s missionary work, in a way,” Morello says, describing what it’s like to play a red-state music festival in 2019. “And one thing I want to be very clear about is that there’s no political litmus test to being in the crowd. I come from an archly conservative town in Illinois, and it was music that reached me. So you play a few good guitar solos, people pay attention a little bit to the lyrics and the graphics on the screen, and you never know what might happen.”

Morello’s Sonic Temple show indeed had a campaign-trail ferocity to it, though it’s unclear whether he changed anyone’s hearts and minds when he lifted up his guitar to play it with his teeth, revealing the slogan “PRO CHOICE” scrawled on the instrument’s back. From Rage Against the Machine to The Atlas Underground, from the alt-rock-icon years to the nostalgia-festival and solo-experimentation years, it’s maybe enough that Morello has more, and more important, metrics for success than just tickets or albums sold.

“That music touched a lot of people,” he says now of Rage Against the Machine’s monster run. “Some would go on to become public defenders. Some went on to become brick-throwing anarchists. Some went on to have a different view of the LGBTQ community. More open-mindedness, more questioning of American foreign policy that they may not have otherwise. But, you know, it’s a mission that’s incomplete. We do not live in a just and humane country, or on a just and humane planet, so there’s more shows to be played.” He’s not trying to beat you. He’s trying to get you to join him.