TOM MORELLO

He’s the Harvard alumnus, political activist and eternal square peg whose sonic adventurism with Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave tore up the rules of electric guitar. Now, as Tom Morello releases a new photobook spanning his three-decade career, he shares memories of obsessive practice, bad gigs and nights behind bars…

- Henry Yates

Kid Rock

“As a kid, I had a little acoustic guitar that I probably plucked Smoke On The Water on. But at that age, I had no ambitions beyond jumping around on the sofa with it. Then, at 15, I had a couple of guitar lessons that didn’t really take because they wanted to teach me how to tune the guitar and play the B major scale – and I wanted to learn Black Dog and Detroit Rock City. But from 19 years old, I became obsessive-compulsive. Guitar felt like a religious calling. It bordered on some kind of mental disorder. I couldn’t not do it. It was a compulsion that steered my life.”

High Flyer

“In my high-school band, we practised so hard to play Born To Be Wild for a battle of the bands. When we got on stage, the piano player played the wrong chords, the bass player came in on the wrong note – it was a very inauspicious beginning to my musical career. But we were on a riser. And so when the chorus came in I leapt off the riser – and the place went apeshit. It was like, ‘We’ve spent four months learning the song but what we should have been practising is jumping up and down.’ It was a lesson I haven’t forgotten. I always had that track-and-field background, and for some reason, from early on I could always play guitar while aloft.”

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