Tom Morello reveals the one band that made him “fall in love with rock and roll music”
Tom Morello, the salient guitarist known best for his work with Rage Against the Machine in the early 1990s, has stretched out over the past three decades into several fruitful collaborations, visiting a host of styles and genres. As he acquainted the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper and Ollie Sykes, Morello opened his mind to the vast expanse of rock music’s rich tapestry.
Through the 1980s and into his time with Rage, Morello adhered to a distinctively heavy guitar style with headbanging riffs aplenty. This aggressive sound perfectly framed the politically charged subject matter by which he and many of his early bandmates and collaborators became identified.
Long before the broadening of horizons or the genesis of his political persuasion, Morello’s introduction to music was mainly through classic heavy rock groups like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Alice Cooper. However, the one band that rose above all the rest during Morello’s youth was Kiss, whose influence was particularly palpable in his early music with future Tool member Adam Jones as they formed their first band, The Electric Sheep.
For a feature published in Pitchfork back in 2020, Morello was challenged to pick out the records that changed his life. Selecting Kiss’ Alive II, their second live album from 1977, Morello described the profound impact the makeup-clad rockers had on his early musical intrigue.
“Kiss was the band that really made me fall in love with rock and roll music,” Morello asserted. “I was a huge comic book collector, and it was a band composed of superheroes, as far as I could tell. It’s hard to paint you a picture of the mystique of a band like that at the time. Now, via reality TV and YouTube, you get to see every shrimp quesadilla that every rock and rap star ever eats. But back then, there were only these legends about a guy who spit blood from his tongue. Was it real? Did he bite his tongue at every show? How did he breathe fire after spitting the blood? They had a wall of Marshall stacks—how loud must that possibly be? It was like a legendary Loch Ness monster vibe of mystery and power. And that stood in very stark juxtaposition to Libertyville, Illinois, and was very intoxicating for a young man.”
Morello enjoyed the live presence he had encountered when seeing Kiss in concert. With his tight record budget, he sought the live album to recapture the magic. “I had already seen the band live, and I had a huge desire to listen to recordings from that tour,” he said. “Dog Ear Records was the record store in Libertyville, and I called them every day. They were like, ‘No, we don’t have it yet. But we have your number, and we promise to call you as soon as it comes in.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I might call later today.’ They’re like, ‘You don’t need to call later today.’ And I would call later that day.”
“My music consumption was very limited by budget,” he continued. “My mom was a single-parent public high school teacher. I had zero influence from my parents or older brothers, or friends. I was on a solo journey, and no one in my school liked the music that I liked. I’d wear my Kiss T-shirt to school, and kids would say the mean things that kids say. The Kiss Army, as we were encouraged to call ourselves by the Kiss merchandising department, really was an alternate family that I felt a belonging to that I did not have with a lot of peers.”
Listen to Tom Morello’s favourite Kiss album below.
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