“The moment where the skies open”: The 1977 album Rage Against the Machine wouldn’t exist without
Conservative audiences of the 1990s might have thought that the righteous fury of Rage Against The Machine marked the emergence of a frightening new brand of direct, provoking, and revolutionary rock. While there is certainly some truth in that, Tom Morello and the band were also simply the latest in a long line of rock and roll rebels.
In essence, after all, Rage Against The Machine were always a punk band – albeit one that struck upon a pioneering blend of punk, hip-hop, funk, and metal. Punk’s origin as a species is endlessly disputed, of course, with some citing Patti Smith or the Ramones back in 1970s New York, others going back further to The Stooges and the garage rock scene of the 1960s, and some even stretching back all the way to rock and roll’s first emergence during the 1950s.
For Tom Morello, though, the first instance of punk inspiration came courtesy of an unassuming cassette tape in his mother’s car. Being just 12 years old in 1976, the future Rage guitarist was slightly too young to fully take advantage of punk’s heyday, but his brooding obsession with rock and roll meant that it was only a matter of time before he stumbled upon an artefact of the punk revolution.
As fate would have it, that artefact was the Sex Pistols’ sole LP, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. To call that album’s impact on Morello profound would be an understatement, with the guitarist affirming to Louder, “I started playing guitar in a band within 48 hours of hearing Never Mind The Bollocks.”
“I remember that moment so perfectly,” he continued, harking back to that transcendental moment in which he heard Johnny Rotten’s trademark snarl for the very first time. “I was in my mom’s Honda Accord at a friend’s house, and I’d bought the cassette, and once I put it in the deck, I didn’t leave the car until it finished.”
“It was my punk rock revelation,” the guitarist declared, “the moment where the skies open and you go, ‘Oh, a lot of that music which I’ve liked up until now isn’t so important anymore.’ And it also made it accessible… I couldn’t play like Jimmy Page and I’d no hope of living in a castle on a Scottish loch, but I could do this later today… and I did.”
That was the inherent spirit of the Pistols: a DIY ethos that meant anybody with enough attitude, drive, and disdain for the musical establishment could follow in their footsteps. Morello took that ethos quite literally, forming a band the same day and starting to work his way around the fretboard of a guitar that had been, up until then, gathering dust in his wardrobe.
Although there is a clear and vast chasm between the sound of the Sex Pistols and Rage Against the Machine, the spirit of searing fury, rock revolution, and tearing down the establishment was transferred from that cassette tape into Morello’s very DNA.
Without the Pistols, the guitarist’s group might never have come to fruition, and they wouldn’t be the only victims, either. Everybody from X-Ray Spex to Joy Division owed something to the Sex Pistols, and Tom Morello has never forgotten the inspiration that they provided to him during his youth, in the wake of the punk explosion.
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