“He builds another room”: The guitarist Bruce Springsteen thought created his own world
Not every musician wants to make a catchy song for people to sing along to. It’s nice to have millions of people chanting along to a tune every time that they start a guitar riff, but the goal is to trigger something in their brain like nothing else can or make them understand something about themselves that they had never even dreamed of. It’s not an easy mission to tackle, but while Bruce Springsteen got there by singing about the lives of real people, he thought nothing could compare to hearing Tom Morello play guitar.
But when Springsteen makes a record, everyone is automatically taken to another place. Most would just like to listen to ‘Born to Run’ for the massive chorus, but when unpacking tunes like ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Thunder Road’, there are vivid stories about people just wanting to make the world around them just a little bit better even if it means giving up pieces of themselves along the way.
All of that was baked into the words that ‘The Boss’ sang, but Morello was approaching things from a totally different perspective. He could certainly shred before putting together Rage Against the Machine, but when looking through the music scene happening when he was coming up, he didn’t want to become just another shredder. What he did needed to be different, which meant becoming a DJ, too.
Because as much as he has transformed himself after Rage, it would be hard to find too many times where Morello had a guitar solo that people could sing note-for-note. In fact, on tracks like ‘Bulls on Parade’, his work with the toggle switch and different inputs practically made the anti-guitar solo, where half of his licks sound like the kind of DJ scratches that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Public Enemy record.
Even when he wasn’t making scratching sounds, though, he often made the most of “found” noises rather than anything related to music theory. The entire hook of ‘People of the Sun’ is that strange scraping noise he gets out of the strings, and while ‘Ashes in the Fall’ gives way to a crushing riff, the opening is almost psychological thriller levels of tension as he pushes out different tones.
Springsteen was always more attuned to the sounds of standard bluesy players from his generation, but he didn’t need to do any research to know that Morello was on a totally different level when he became part of the E Street Band, saying, “ He’s one of the few guitarists that creates a world by himself. It’s like the Edge or Pete Townshend or Johnny Marr. The E Street Band is a big house, but when Tom is on stage, he builds another room.”
Then again, the reason why he’s in his own separate world is because he can be so unpredictable. There are many times when people would think that they would get a standard DJ-ified solo, but listening to him with Springsteen, he can also play with the same abandon as the kid who first idolised Randy Rhoads when he sat on his bed practising licks.
Any rockstar normally has their bag of tricks to pull from, but Springsteen knew enough about Morello to realise that it wasn’t just a list of different effects. It was an entire sonic landscape that had yet to be tapped into by anyone else.
