Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has been called many things. Guitar god. Living rock legend. Warrior activist. But, interestingly, he once thought of himself as a DJ. Sort of.
In the early days of RATM, the iconic musician learned to push the boundaries of his instrument. Very specifically, though, we are going to talk about the song “Bulls on Parade” from RATM’s second album, Evil Empire.
Morello previously spoke with Music Radar about deciding “to be the DJ” in RATM. During the conversation, he shared some insight into how he crafted the wild, turntable-esque sounds that appear near the end of “Bulls on Parade”.
“Tipping over the apple carts of the powers that be was always at the forefront of everything Rage did,” Morello told the outlet in 2011. “At the same time, when we got down to the very serious business of making music, we were hellbent on making equally strong statements.”
Tom Morello’s guitar work in Rage Against the Machine was revolutionary in the early 90s
“To that end, I decided to rail against the accepted rules of ‘shred’ guitar, which in my opinion were making every six-stringer around sound the same,” he continued, “One night, I decided to be the DJ in Rage Against the Machine, but I was going to do it all on the guitar. Discovering how to ‘scratch’ on the guitar and how to work the toggle switch like two turntables was key.”
In a separate interview with Guitar World, Morello described the gear he was working with at the time, which would have been his Arm The Homeless guitar.
The infamous Arm The Homeless Guitar that Morello built himself is now available to own from Fender
“Everyone else had those really cool Eddie Van Halen guitars with only one knob,” Morello said. “So I thought, I might as well make use of these knobs, since I can’t afford a different guitar right now.”
“That was when I stumbled on the toggle switch,” he added. “I combined it with a wah-wah pedal, and all of a sudden, there was a noise that I had never heard a guitar player make. It sounded more like a sort of synthesizer.”
The post How Tom Morello, Guitar DJ, Pushed His Instrument to New Levels on One of Rage Against the Machine’s Biggest Hits appeared first on VICE.
