The one band Tom Morello said blew him offstage: “kicked Rage Against The Machine’s ass”
Anyone who was going onstage with Rage Against the Machine was going to be entering at their own risk whenever Tom Morello kicked on his pedals.
They didn’t have to play the most challenging music in the world or anything, but the passion in their performances was what sold them every single time they played, to the point where it felt like the roof was going to concave when they kicked off ‘Bulls on Parade’. But even with Morello’s effects that sounded like they were coming from another planet, the guitarist could tell when someone was completely outpacing them onstage.
But it was going to take a lot for anyone to even take notice of the band when they first started performing. Considering where they were chronologically in pop culture history, the fact that they were playing some of the same clubs that Ratt and Warrant were playing a few years before was pretty hilarious, especially if you look at how hard their riffs were. This was Led Zeppelin crossed with James Brown, with lyrics that could have been written by Gil Scott-Heron in some sections.
They were wildly out of place, but none of that mattered. It was all about bringing the pain every single time they performed, and there wasn’t a soul who went to one of their shows without thinking that they had been changed. It must have been the same feeling that everyone had when seeing a band like The Clash for the first time, but bringing together rock and roll and hip-hop wasn’t all that different.
If anything, the whole reason why Rage was allowed to exist was because of what bands like Aerosmith and Run-DMC were doing years before. The hip-hop version of ‘Walk This Way’ was ground zero for that kind of sound, and when Anthrax teamed up with Public Enemy for ‘Bring the Noise’, it was clear that there was a change in the air that they seized upon when they started busting out the massive riffs.
If we’re being technical about the first “official” rap-rock band, though, Beastie Boys has that title hands down. They self-identified as a hip-hop act first and foremost, and you can hear the scratch breaks on a lot of their greatest work, but after they had gone through the beer-swigging Bowery Boy phase of their careers, they had grown into some of the most seasoned musicians that anyone had ever heard when they reached Ill Communication and Check Your Head.
And while Rage Against the Machine were coming from the same musical area, Morello felt that they were no match for the Beasties when they first played with them, saying, “But the Beastie Boys came out and were one of a handful of bands that ever kicked Rage Against The Machine’s ass. So I planned so hard for the next time that we saw those guys and, when that happened, they were so Zen that they made their setlist in alphabetical order. They couldn’t have cared less. It’s like I was all steroided up for the next meeting, thinking, ‘We’re going to take them down’ and they were having a nice time.”
But that sense of competition is half the reason why bands always work so well off each other. Not every band needs to screw the other group up beside them to be one of the greatest bands of all time, but sometimes it’s better to take a look at someone that absolutely smokes you and start to figure out what made their show so spectacular by comparison.
The Beasties were definitely the victors that particular day, but when you look at the band’s track record at that point, they had a few more miles under their belt to demolish anyone that stood in their path. Rage had more than a few classic tracks in their arsenal, but there’s no way to really argue with a band that can make a crowd bound the way that Beastie Boys could whenever ‘Sabotage’ came on.
