Tom Morello has been performing with his iconic “Arm The Homeless” guitar for pretty much his entire career. It’s a legendary “mongrel” instrument responsible for most of Rage Against The Machine’s biggest songs. It’s also been impossible to recreate. Until now.
This week, Morello and Fender announced the release of a recreation of “Arm The Homeless.” Fans can now own the same guitar on which Morello built his acclaimed musical catalog.
(photo credit: Fender)
I had a chance to chat with Morello about “Arm The Homeless,” and he offered a history lesson on how it came together. He explained that, after years of changing out components and trying to find the right sound, he realized that he was going to have to forge it himself.
“I was so frustrated. I was unable to make the guitar that I wanted,” he recalled. Morello continued, “I did not have the sound that I had in my head, so I finally just gave up, and I said, ‘I’m going to stop whining and start creating.’ I was stuck with this sound…this mutt, this mongrel of a guitar.”
Your favorite RATM song was probably written with “Arm The Homeless”
“Oh my god, I can’t make it sound like I want. So, I’m just going to use this sound,” he remembered thinking. That sound became the cornerstone of songs like “Bombtrack,” “Bulls on Parade“, “People of the Sun”, “Sleep Now in the Fire”, “Down Rodeo”, “Guerrilla Radio”, and many more.
“[This is] the guitar that I used touring for six years with Bruce Springsteen. I’ve played that guitar on 22 albums and on every show I’ve ever played over the course of the last 37 years,” Morello clarified. “So then, the challenge was, can we recreate the weirdness that makes that guitar unique? And it was a challenge.”
Morello explained that there are many “components” of his classic instrument that simply could not be exactly replicated. This is because even he doesn’t know where some of the parts came from. For example, the neck of the guitar came “out of a used neck bin at an off-brand guitar shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s not any brand that anyone knows of. There’s no machine that recreates that.”
Because he’s very “picky,” it was important to him that he and Fender get as close as possible on each element of “Arm The Homeless.” Ultimately, he says, they “might have gone through 1520 different iterations of that neck. I just kept sending it back. Like, ‘Nope.’”
The real “Arm The Homeless” guitar is a Frankenstein’s monster, of sorts
Finally, after years of working on it, everything clicked perfectly into place. The result is a Fender recreation that Morello says is nearly indistinguishable from his original guitar. They tested it out, placing the original alongside three newly produced ones, and almost no one could tell the difference.
There is one tell, however. “You will always be able to tell the real one [because] about 20 years ago or so, some animal chewed the headstock of the real one. So there’s, like, teeth marked in the headstock,” Morello said with a laugh. “It might have been a fan. It might have been a badger. I don’t know.”
Tom Morello says many fans have been “ripped off” trying to buy fake versions of his guitar
One of the big reasons Morello was keen to work with Fender on this is that he’s seen too many Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fans get ripped off when buying a recreation. “There are some really s***ty copies of ‘Arm the Homeless’ out in the world that people spend their good, hard-earned money on, and they’re total BS,” he said. “The people that made those have never touched my guitar.
“They have no idea [about] anything in it,” he added. “They just slap something on it that kind of looks like it, and sell it to good-hearted fans. That’s always kind of broken my heart. This is real. I use this. I used it on the last tour interchangeably with the real one.”
(Photo Credit: Fender)
So after all this, you’re probably wondering, “How much is it?” And that is a very fair question. The Fender recreation of “Arm The Homeless” retails at $1,699.99. This is pricey, and both Morello and the company are aware of that. “A guitar made of a bunch of scraps, recreating those scraps into the guitar is not an inexpensive process,” Morello explained.”I can’t be selling a guitar that says ‘Arm The Homeless’ without some sort of component to that.”
This is why they are also donating portions of the proceeds to two non-profit organizations: Midnight Mission and Covenant House. “This guitar is not $50. People are able to get the real, this is really it,” Morello finally said, “but there’s a component part that is actually giving back as well.”
Fans can visit Fender’s website to learn more about “Arm The Homeless” and order one directly from the manufacturer.
The post Tom Morello Rebuilt His Iconic ‘Arm the Homeless’ Guitar With Fender, He Told Us All About Crafting the ‘Mongrel’ Instrument (Exclusive) appeared first on VICE.
