Tom Morello’s newest project, Street Sweeper Social Club, combines the unique guitar tonalities and treatments he used with Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave with the rap lyrics of Boots Riley. The conscious intent here was to make music that was "provocative and dangerous." Morello’s playing is, as always, inventive and off-beat, and is presented here more as an instrument playing riffs and rhythmic parts as opposed to an upfront solo thing. He doubles on bass, laying down greasy lines in accompaniment to the profoundly funky and fearsome drum parts from Stanton Moore.
Morello, as he has always been, was funny and self-deprecating and open about the new music and even the future of
Rage Against The Machine. Not to mention his preference for the
Stones over the
Beatles.
UG: One of the major aspects of your new project is that you’re playing both bass and guitar.
Tom Morello: I’ve been a bass player and a guitar player for a long time. I just haven’t done it on a record.
What were some of the reasons you decided to play the bass yourself rather than bring someone else in?
I produced this record as well, and I really wanted to do it in a streamlined fashion. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted these songs to sound like. I didn’t want someone else’s interpretation of my riffs and ideas for it. I wanted it just so. Also I think I lock really well with myself as like a guitar player and a bass player. That was one of the keys to the record’s impact. It was going to be that sort of interplay between the right-hand rhythms of the guitar and the bass together. Also a difference on this record is that I use a different guitar than normal. Throughout the entire history of Rage and Audioslave, I’ve used the same backwoods set of chintzy, Frankenstein guitars. It has been my signature sound.
Is it the Arm The Homeless guitar mainly?
The Arm The Homeless and the Mexican Tele. But for this record, I wanted to switch it up. I wanted a distinctively heavier sound, so I used the one nice guitar in my collection, which is a beautiful Les Paul standard. That’s the guitar on 90 percent of the record.
Does the Les Paul feel different beneath the fingers for you?
Yeah, definitely. I use the same amp that I’ve been using for years. Just the way that the Les Paul kind of cuts. It cuts through in a heavier way. Normally the big riffs on my previous records had been played with a single coil pickup and then doubled. This is humbucker insanity the whole way through. Some of the songs are just one guitar and others are Les Paul doubling itself with the bass up the middle. To me, it just felt really heavy. I wanted this to be the heaviest and funkiest record that I’ve made in a long time. That seemed like a good starting point.
Can you describe the Les Paul?
Sure. It’s a brown burst Les Paul. It’s actually the guitar in the video for “100 Little Curses.” We approved it the other day, so it will be readily seeable. I used it as my drop B guitar in Audioslave. It’s been sitting around waiting for its turn. It’s been sitting around in the warm-up circle for a long time, but now it has its turn at bat. I love playing it. It’s got a great, great sound. It’s an effortlessly great sound. A great heavy sound.
What year is it?
I got it new in 2002.
You’re on the bass with Stanton Moore laying down these rhythm tracks. Were you thinking, “Okay, this guitar player or drummer needs to lock into this bass player.”
Some of the songs were tracked with guitar and drums. They weren’t always tracked with bass and drums. It’s basically whatever I felt. Stanton is a tremendous drummer. We started doing some post-Katrina work down in New Orleans. One night we were just out at some juke joint, this tiny place with a lot of drunken carrying on going on. There was this great New Orleans horn funk band playing. I was thinking, “This band sounds kind of great.” I realized why; it was the drummer. I said, “That guy’s the funkiest drummer maybe I’ve ever seen in my life.” So we exchanged numbers afterwards, and his band came in and added a lot to the record. I wanted to distance this record from Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine. One way to do that was to bring in someone with funk stylings that were in a different direction than Brad Wilk, who’s a tremendous drummer.
"I had a very clear idea of what I wanted these songs to sound like."
That’s a good question. It’s a Fender Precision bass on the entire record, except for the drop B songs. I believe there are two drop B songs on the record. Believe it or not, it’s an Ibanez ATK bass. It’s a five-string bass that just happened to be sitting around my house. For reasons unknown, it made its way to the studio. I tried playing the Fender bass in drop B, and it just didn’t sound right. I had bought this thing as almost a joke, and it sounded great. You can thank the engineer for that.
What songs are the ones in drop B?
The drop B songs are “Megablast” and “Clap For the Killers.”
With a title like “Megablast,” one expects pretty big guitar sounds and you didn’t disappoint. It starts out with that almost space-sound intro. Can you describe it for me?
I wanted that song to start with almost a Wagnerian “Ride of the Valkyries” intro, something that sounded pretty epic. You knew that the beat was going to drop and it was going to drop heavy. I’m not sure if it was three or four guitars, with that long delay, whammy pedal set to alternatively one or two octaves. Then there’s a guitar playing harmony notes to give it that epic introduction. Then it all goes to hell once the rhythm guitar comes in.
The first single “100 Little Curses” has some strange harmonics in the intro.
Yeah, those are harmonics. That’s just a 12th, seventh, and fifth fret harmonics on that.
What is that guitar sound in the verse?
That’s a Les Paul through the Marshall half stack.
Do I get a little bit of a “Superstition” feel in the solo?
Oh, absolutely. What is that, a clavinet? It was not consciously, but the Stevie Wonder “Superstition” sound is in my mental rolodex. That’s the Les Paul played with a toggle switch and the octave pedal set to an octave below, but then the pedal is depressed. It gives it this weird, kind of slightly chorus sound. Then it was manipulating the wah pedal while toggling.
In our first conversation, we touched slightly on Jimi Hendrix. You said, “Hendrix intentionally was not a huge influence on me because it was very hard to be a black guitar player and escape the ghost of Hendrix. Every gig I ever played in my life, whenever someone would yell for ‘Foxy Lady’ or ‘play with your teeth…’” Has that still been chasing you?
That was more in my formative, cover band phase where it was much more haunting. There’s no doubt that Hendrix was as phenomenal a musician that this world has ever seen. At the time, the rock color barrier was pretty high. Until Vernon Reid in Living Colour came along, there really was not any other commercially viable example. I think that the combination of Living Colour and then I would take some credit with Rage Against The Machine, of a multi-ethnic hard rock band breaking down barriers. Now it really doesn’t matter what the guys in your band look like, which I think is really great. It’s not like I’m digging back into the Hendrix bootlegs for inspiration, but I’ve made my peace with the ghost of Jimi Hendrix.
So you don’t think there would ever be a sense if you pulled out the wah…
Oh, no; heavens no. Not at all. I’m not the least bit worried about that. I’ve been known to play with my teeth at concerts. That should show just how comfortable I am!
Is there wah on “Nobody Moves (Til We Say Go)”?
Yeah.
There’s a really big bass sound in that song.
Yeah, yeah. That’s incredibly the Ibanez ATK bass, the five-string kind of bottom-of-the-line bass. When we plugged it in, I couldn’t believe it sounded that great. But it does. It sounds huge. It sounds like menacing murder music.
When you’re working out the parts, do you have to divorce yourself from the mentality of a guitar player?
Not really. I’ve always looked at music – whether it’s Rage, Audioslave, Nightwatchman, or the Street Sweeper Social Club – I’ve always tried to look at the big picture of the song and not just my role in the song as a guitar player. These songs were composed from the top down. Because there was one music writer, it wasn’t the usual kind of interplay between musicians and bouncing ideas off. I had a real clear idea of what I wanted each of these songs to sound like. When Stanton came out to rehearse, we really only rehearsed…Well, I knew the songs and Stanton is such a quick learner that we rehearsed maybe two-and-a-half days. The record was pretty tight by the end of the second day. It was really pretty phenomenal. I’ve never seen a process come together that fast. Then we were pretty quick in getting the takes as well. Really the biggest determining factor was whether I would play guitar or bass during the rhythm tracks of the song.
What attracted you to Boots? How did you think he would work in this format?
Well, we’ve been friends since 2003. Around the time that Rage Against The Machine broke up in 2000, Rick Rubin and I went to a Coup show. We were just checking out a lot of different bands and saw Boots perform. Frankly, we didn’t think that much of it. Later Boots toured with me a number of times, opening up for Nightwatchman tours, playing benefits shows. He played countless benefit shows. He was always the first one to raise his hand and say that he was going to fly himself down to Los Angeles and fly himself out. “The grocery workers are on strike. I need you, Boots.” “I’ll be there.” From 2003, we played hundreds of shows together and became really good friends. Most of those shows, though, I was his backup band on acoustic guitar. It was me on an acoustic guitar and Boots rapping. It was during those shows that I realized what a brilliant, brilliant lyricist he is. What a tremendous and charismatic performer he is. I didn’t see that when I saw The Coup play, but I saw that when it was pared down to his essence at these shows. We became very good friends as well. So when Audioslave disbanded, it was a no-brainer for me. We sat down, had dinner, and I didn’t even give him a choice. I said, “We’re in a band called the Street Sweeper Social Club. It’s going to be revolutionary party jams. Here’s a cassette tape. Start writing.” To this day he hasn’t even said, “Yes.”
"I’ve always tried to look at the big picture of the song and not just my role in the song as a guitar player."
Only as sort of a superficial fan. What attracted me to Boots was the depth of his lyrics. It’s the dichotomy. He tells stories from the heart and stories that come from personal experience. Boots quit music for a few years to be a community organizer. He’s really committed to ideas of social justice, but not just that. He’s also a tremendously witty and satirical songwriter. It’s not anything like a college lecture. There’s both venom and satire in the lyrics he writes. I think that they’re just brilliant. There’s a dichotomy between that and the depth and the intricacy of the verses matched with the soccer-stadium ready choruses, which I love. I wanted it to be revolutionary nursery rhymes. The first time you hear them, by the time the chorus comes along the second time, you’re able to sing along. A lot of the shows I’ve played, whether they’re rallies or protests, I don’t want to hear “Kumbaya” again. I love “We Shall Overcome,” but I don’t want to hear that one! We need songs for now that everybody can sing along.
Back when we did our first interview you said, “I started thinking about guitar in an entirely different way. It’s not like, ‘What would Yngwie do?’ But, ‘What would Dr. Dre do?’” Were you thinking about different stylistic options for the new material?
I felt more comfortable on this record just being myself. Many of the rock records I’ve made, I’ve challenged myself to not sound like a guitar player again and again and again, especially when it came to the soloing section. Whereas my life as a guitar player and my non-record life as a guitar player, when I’m jamming with friends or playing along with the radio, there is a lot of Randy Rhoads-like shredding that goes on. There is a lot of Albert King-like string bending that goes on. With this record I thought, “I’m not going to be afraid to just play whatever comes naturally.” So some of the songs like “Somewhere In The World It’s Midnight” have an over-the-top Morellian, weird solo. Others like “Clap For The Killers” have something that sounds more like David Gilmour. So I wasn’t the least bit afraid to just play guitar to the best of my abilities, as opposed to trying to redefine the instrument on every track.
Do you feel more comfortable in this situation than with a band like Rage or Audioslave?
From the time I was 17 years old to the day that Audioslave broke up, I was either in a band, putting together a band, or trying to hold together a band that was breaking up. There was this liberating feeling that came. While I was upset with the fact that Audioslave was going away after all of our hard work we put into it, it also felt very liberating. For the first time in my life, there is not an agenda like I’ve got find four new guys or find a lead singer. It just felt very free. Since that day I’ve just been following my muse, whether it was playing Rage Against the Machine shows, which were awesome, or whether it was writing and touring behind protest music for The Nightwatchman. It was fantastic and helped me grow exponentially as an artist. I think it can be summed out very simply that they are two entirely different worlds. In a band, what you get is chemistry. As a solo artist or as a less-democratic undertaking, you get purity. They are just two completely different things. I love the band chemistry that I’ve been in and I love having the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want.
On a CD like The Fabled City, you’re basically doing everything. Were those songs more perfectly realized than any songs you had ever written?
Even the solos are a collaborative effort. Like Brendan O’Brien and I made that record together and his input was very important. I like being the last line of defense! I really like that. But it’s two different things. There are Audioslave songs, Rage Against The Machine songs, and even my bands before them. I mean, my high school band, there were ideas that I never could have come up with on my own. There were ideas that I had but morphed into something much better by working with other people. It’s the reason why Led Zeppelin is great, but they’re great for very different reasons.
There may be a better analogy in why Led Zeppelin is great and why Robert Plant is great doing a solo project with Alison Krauss.
Yeah. They have a purity in maybe their determination. It’s very different. I love doing both. I spent much of my life doing the democratic band scenario, which is great. This feels very refreshing in a way.
Did the Rage reunion at Coachella feel pretty good?
Yeah. We played probably almost 30 shows or 20-some shows.
Any chance of that continuing?
Yes, I think there’s a great chance of that continuing. Everybody had a great time doing it. We had talked about doing shows this year, but I don’t think that that’s going to come together. I’m very open to the idea of playing more shows. It is a very unique band in the history of rock music. Standing onstage with those guys and playing in front of like 50,000 people a night, there’s really nothing like that.
Talk about your appearance on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Does it become a transformation from guitar player to icon?
That game has changed my life in some very odd and unexpected ways. What seemed like just an offhanded decision on a Wednesday afternoon to be in that video game – I didn’t know that it would go on to be the highest-grossing video game in the history of video games. The demographic of people who are aware of me, at least as a cartoon character, has gone to like five years old. It’s pretty crazy. Every day on the street I have people coming up me and going, “Dude, I kicked your ass at Guitar Hero!” I’m like, “Yes, it’s a video game. You should get out more.”
What did it feel like to play with Bruce Springsteen?
We’ve now played four times together. Three times electric and one time acoustic, at Madison Square Garden and Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration. I’ve got to tell you, to describe it as an honor wouldn’t go nearly far enough. Bruce is one of my favorite artists of all time. To be welcomed into the E Street Band family for a few nights onstage was something that I do not take for granted.
In terms of Springsteen’s ability to combine political consciousness with the music, would you like to be at that level?
That’s quite a level. He’s a huge influence in my Nightwatchman songwriting, being able to weave the personal and the political together. Also there’s a side to his work that is darker and heavier than anything in the Slayer catalog. There are deep, dark ravines that are really scary in his work. Maybe it doesn’t always come across in these bright melodies, but that’s part of his catalog that I really gravitate toward.
You’re currently doing the Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails tour.
Yeah. They’re long-time friends. Perry and I first met, I think, in 1988. To be playing in front of 15,000 people a day 21 years later, you can’t take that for granted. That’s an amazing thing. Trent is a good friend as well. All the guys in Jane’s I’ve known for awhile. We’ve had a great time with it.
"I didn’t want someone else’s interpretation of my riffs and ideas for it."
We were eagerly waiting to see if President Obama would. When he was campaigning, it was something he talked about. He didn’t quite go far enough. I worked for a U.S. senator for a couple of years, and I realized that political expediency will all too often get in the way of doing the right thing. That’s why I’m a musician rather than a politician. In my line of work, I can say whatever I want, do whatever I want. There is no constituency. I don’t have to look to advertisers or right-wing talk show hosts to hold me accountable for anything. I have complete freedom of expression, and I’m quite confident that President Obama knows what the right thing is to do with regards to the issue of Armenian genocide. He’s unable to do it for political reasons, and that’s why I’m in this line of work and he’s in that line of work.
Do you think it’s possible to ever go too far with a lyric? Do you ever worry about turning people off with what you say?
It certainly is a consideration, but not like you’re saying. I hope it turns some people off. I want to make music that draws a clear line between us and them. I want to make music that is provocative and music that’s dangerous, that calls bullshit when it sees it. If you’re making music that everybody is happy to hear, then you’re making pretty bland music.
Do you think that in 2009 there are a lot of bands that are saying some positive things?
Sure. There are many artists that are an ongoing link in a chain. It goes all the way back to Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through early Dylan, the MC5, The Clash, Public Enemy, Springsteen, Rage Against The Machine, System of a Down, and Minor Threat. There are bands now from the Street Sweeper Social Club to Zack’s group One Day As A Lion. From punk rockers Anti-Flag to hip-hop artists like Dead Prez to the courage of groups like the Dixie Chicks, who spoke their mind in a hailstorm of criticism. When music is at its best, it’s musically and lyrically challenging the norm. It’s both uplifting and challenging. We call our music revolutionary party jams. You can take those words in order, or you can put a period between each one of them and it still rings true.
Did The Beatles do that?
I’d say no. I think musically, their music was very revolutionary. I think their politics were very ambiguous. They have a lot of beautiful music, but as far as kick-ass rock and roll, The Stones had them hands-down.
Interview by Steven Rosen
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2009
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