Rage Against The Machine

Following are quotes from Rage Against The Machine about their lives and music:

Tom Morello was born in New York City in 1964 and grew up in Libertyville, Illinois. His father was a member of the Mau Mau guerilla army which freed Kenya from British colonial rule; his mother is a founder of Parents For Rock & Rap, an anti-censorship organization. Tom entered Harvard University in 1982, was active in the campaign for university divestment from South Africa, and graduated with honors in 1986.

“I lived in Libertyville for 18 years, and in the whole town there were maybe three or four other blacks and an equal number of Asians. My mom used to play the Temptations, War, and James Brown at home. I got a guitar when I was 13 or 14, and I was determined to become Jimmy Page or Ace Frehley of KISS. But I got disenchanted with taking lessons and stopped playing for four years. I didn’t pick it up again until I heard the Sex Pistols album. Seeing the Clash in Chicago was a life-changing experience. They were more powerful than any band I’d ever seen because of the conviction, the realness behind it.”

“My Harvard friends went on to become professors, doctors, lawyers, bankers. They had a difficult time understanding why I wanted to be a socialist rock musician. My musician friends had the opposite problem…In `86, I moved to Los Angeles. The glam scene was in full effect–I was appalled! In `88 I joined Lock Up. We made an album for Geffen, toured, eventually broke up. I met Brad Wilk when he auditioned for Lock Up, and he and I had a great playing chemistry together. He was the first guy I called when I left the band. We started auditioning a lot of people, looking for the right chemistry, while I taught guitar to support myself.”

“Rage heightens the contradictions: in the intensity of the live show, in the brutality of the music, in the content of the lyrics. It’s a political assault which might force you to consider the ideas that are put forward.”

Brad Wilk was born in Portland, Oregon and lived in Chicago before settling in Southern California.

“In grade school I listened to Led Zep, the Who. John Bonham had a unique feel, not straight time and not quite swing but somewhere in-between–just amazing. Then I heard the Sex Pistols, and that changed me. In high school I started getting into George Clinton, James Brown, and the Meters.”

Timmy C. plays bass, listens to Inside Out and the Bad Brains, and is happy to be alive.

Zack de la Rocha was born in Long Beach, California in 1970 and raised by his mother in Irvine, California. “In junior high I got into the Sex Pistols, Bad Religion, Social Distortion. Then I got into hardcore at sixteen, seventeen. Hardcore was the whole expression of my being: Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Teen Idles, State Of Alert with Henry Rollins.”

“I lived [in Irvine], but I never felt totally accepted as one of these rich white suburban kids. I wasn’t economically deprived like so many of my Chicano brothers and sisters, but I felt the tension and the rejection–and that’s when I started getting into hip-hop, started break-dancing. `The Message,’ `Rapper’s Delight,’ Run-DMC…that was what was happening around that time.”

“Inside Out was the first band I ever fronted. I channeled all my pain through that band. It was about completely detaching ourselves from society to see ourselves as…as spirits, and not bowing down to a system that sees you as just another pebble on a beach. But Inside Out went through were a ton of lineup changes.”

“You can’t ignore what some bands have done. I know that from my own experience, from the way my life was changed by F**k Armageddon, This Is Hell by Bad Religion. I know our record will be in a bin next to Lionel Richie–but so are John Coltrane, KRS-1 and Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy.”