Tom Morello on why Randy Rhoads is the ultimate guitar hero: “He’s a peerless talent”
Throughout the 1990s, the idea of the guitar hero started to go out the window. Even though rock still had a massive presence on the charts, the aesthetic of the grunge revolution centred around bands focused on songs rather than mind-melting solos, usually taking an instrumental break to strangle a guitar. Even though Tom Morello could play a mile a minute, his innovations on the guitar were about going against the grain of what guitars were supposed to do.
When first cutting his teeth playing music, Morello initially wanted to get as proficient on his instrument as possible. Playing for eight hours a day while going to college, Morello would study the textbook that Randy Rhoads had laid out for him.
Being a staple of Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band, Rhoads was responsible for pioneering the kind of virtuosic playing that would be seen across the 1980s hair metal scene. Even though he loved playing massive riffs on songs like ‘Crazy Train’, the crux of Rhoads’s playing came from classical compositions, even featuring an acoustic piece in the middle of Blizzard of Ozz on the song ‘Dee’.
It didn’t stop at strictly classical music, either. Across the songs on Diary of a Madman, Rhoads was still reaching for influences all the time, creating songs that had jazzy textures behind Osbourne’s vocals. Though Van Halen quickly became one of the most emulated guitar players in rock around the same time, Eddie Van Halen was known to look for Rhoads at different performance spots to see what his competition was up to.
While Rhoads could have continued creating amazing riffs for the rest of his career, he would only get to make two albums with ‘The Prince of Darkness’ before passing away in a tragic plane crash while on tour. Though Osbourne would continue with more flashy guitar players like Jake E Lee and Zakk Wylde, even they would admit that it would be living in the shadow of what Rhoads created.
When talking about the impact that Rhoads had on Morello’s generation, the guitarist thought that Rhoads was pivotal in crossing traditional boundaries on guitar, telling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “Randy Rhoads is a peerless talent. He revived Ozzy Osbourne’s career as his gunslinger sideman. And it was Randy Rhoads’ poster that I had on my wall… You could study Randy’s songs in a university-level musicology class and bang your heads to them in a 7-Eleven parking lot”.
Although Morello was thankful for the lessons that Rhoads bestowed upon him, he knew that he had to do something different when he put together Rage Against the Machine. While Morello did choose various times to show off his dexterity, most of his iconic moments in Rage were about taking the mechanics of the instrument and turning them on their head, like the scratching solo in ‘Bulls on Parade’ and the massive effects going into ‘Guerrilla Radio’.
Morello may have spent time studying to be the most elegant guitar player that he could; the name of the game had changed once he started making tunes of his own. The age of the virtuoso was gone, and it was time for Morello to take his place as the DJ in the band.
