YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Morello

lines on the record
71
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2022-04-29
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2022-04-29
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1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “I got the sex pistols cassette. I was literally in a band within 24 hours of purchasing the cassette without knowing how to play one note on the guitar. I ran into the Libertyville drama club and announced we're going to be a band. I've got a guitar, so I'm going to be the guitar player. The first three of you that raised their hands are in the band regardless of musical experience. Three guys raised their hands.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Led Zeppelin and Kiss song, so I plunked down my $5 at the music store and said, teach me these. And they said, no, son, today we have to learn to tune the guitar. That sounds like a huge waste of time to me. So I said, but you know, I'll put in my dues. I'll put in a week's worth of do's and learn how to tune this thing. So it came back the next week. He said, now it's time for Detroit Rock City, right? He's like, no, this week we're going to learn the C major scale. I'm like, I'm out. That is some BS, man. That's a waste of everybody's time. So the guitar sat in the closet for four years at 17. I had the punk rock revelation that many do. Like until that point, all the bands I loved, it was completely inaccessible. I had a basement in suburbia on which to practice, and these guys had castles on Scottish locks. And guitars that cost $10,000. I have a $50 guitar in a basement.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Oh, sure. And I'm like, hard songs to learn. I'm going to be correct. Lo and behold, demoralized a few weeks later, so I stopped. Yes, there's a lot of opportunity to be demoralized when beginning guitar. When I first purchased my guitar at 13, it took me four years to actually play it, but I took a couple of guitar lessons and I wanted to learn”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, I loved rock and roll from the time, you know, maybe 11 or 12 years old. And Kiss was my first concert. And it dovetailed with my love of comic books and sort of the superhero elements. But then the aggression of the electric guitars, of the bands like ACDC and Black Sabbath, I was full 7-Eleven suburban parking lot metal all up and down the line. And I love music. And I actually played in a band when I was 13 years old as the singer. Before my voice changed, I was able to do a pretty good Robert plant impression. But when it descended into the rich milk chocolate baritone you're here today, it was clear that I was not going to be auditioning for ACDC. So I had to switch to guitar.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've thought, I mean, while I'm genetically half white as the only black guy in an all-white town, you're pretty, I was the blackest black ever guy. Yeah, right, right, right. None more black, man.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “People ask how were you politicized? And it wasn't from reading Noam Chomsky in high school. It was recognizing that there was grave injustice on the playground. And that's something that's part of my DNA was that I had a very sort of strong base of support in my home and a feeling of self-worth that came in sharp contrast. And so it was with confidence that I went into the, you know, sometimes the troubled stuff that came up.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Losing the physical battle, but it causes such a ruckus that the person who ran the daycare for the first time paid attention to the disagreement and I got to with smug satisfaction watch as the young racist child's mouth was washed out with soap in front of the whole crew. I went, there might be some of this Malcolm X.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Story. The story gets pretty dramatic. So she said, you know, you have to stand up for yourself, you have to stand up against racism wherever and whenever it rears its head. I'm like, mom, I'm for. And she gave me something. The person had a particular litany of epithets that they were calling me. And so she gave me, I had to memorize something to say back. I forget was like, you know, cracker ass crackers. I don't know what it was. I didn't know what any of the words meant, but I'm like, this sounds like this is going to be trouble tomorrow, mom. And then she bawled up my fist and said, you go at it. I'm like, this sounds horrible. This is a big kid. Horrible. So I go there, like, dreading daycare the following day. And I'm there and the kid's on me and they're N-wording me and they're attacking me. And I'm like, you hacker ass smacker, whatever I can't really remember. And I start going at him and it causes such a ruckus.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, my mom remains the most radical member of the Morella family to this day. And I was at a daycare place. I was probably four years old. And there was an older kid a couple years older who was. Race taunting me and beating me up or being very physical with me on a daily basis. I would come home know my mom and she at four years old taught me about a fellow by the name of Malcolm X. She said, you must stand up. That's your full document. You must.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I saw a couple of nooses growing up. One was in the garage when I was 13, other was when I was 15 just walking past the Brown's chicken. And so that was a part of those were threads in the cloth of growing up there, which I kind of took for granted. I had great friends and great experiences, but it was not a racist-free environment.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, yeah. Well, on the one hand, it's this idyllic Chicago suburb. You can ride your bike, you can fish, there's fields to play football in. It has a tremendous public high school system, public school system. But then every once in a while there might be, you might find a noose in your family's garage.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “For exotic, but I got bad news. So that was my introduction. I literally integrated the town of Libertyville, Illinois, according to the real estate. Prior to my arrival, there were no people of color residing within its borders.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “They sold us to the locals was basically saying, look, this is not an American Negro. This is a very exotic African child. And that worked swimmingly well until I was old enough to date their daughters. And then you could be the king of Nigeria. No dads are going to be like, all right.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, so we live as a single mom now living in the big city. She moved back where she had support from family. And then the challenge then became finding a tea mom was overly qualified to teach world history and U.S. history, not just from her travels, but from her studies. She had a master's degree, found it difficult to find a place for us to live because this was 1965. And while the high schools in the northern suburbs were happy to have her as a teacher, they warned her that we as an interracial family, meaning me a half African one-year-old and her an Irish Italian white lady, would be unwelcome to dwell within the city, but they could teach there. We'd have to live somewhere else. And the real estate agent, though, had to go door to door in the apartment building where we were renting to ask permission from the other tenants, letting them know that this was going to be an interracial family and how they...”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yeah, it's a question that she hasn't been able to answer to my satisfaction. My mom is 93 now, and I still ask her that periodically. But there's something sort of unique in her constitution that made her boldly, she lived in Spain, Japan, Germany, right after World War II, East Africa. She was fearless in her travels, and I've inherited at least a pinch of that.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I was born in the US, yeah, yeah. They parted ways, and my dad was part of the first UN delegation, and then they split. He went back to Kenya. She went back to Illinois.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “My mom comes from a small coal mining town in central Illinois called Marseilles, Illinois. It's spelled like Marseille, France, but it's in central Illinois is what's pronounced Marseilles. And for some reason, my mom is a single woman in the mid-1940s left to travel the world by herself for about 20 years. She taught all around the globe and eventually found herself in East Africa teaching in Kenya where she met my dad.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “A catalog of noises and textures and rhythms that were totally unconventional and then building them into the rock and roll songs of Rage Against the Machine.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Useless technique, I don't need to be the fourth one. And so I veered the ship dramatically towards concentrating on the eccentricities in my playing and things that were very unique and then trying to forge that into music. Now, that did not always meet with popular acclaim, but within my band and in the world at large, because I would be, I'd play the guitar with a pen or with an Allen wrench, which is the thing that used to kind of change the tuning on it. And then I began, rather than trying to practicing other guitar players' licks, I would just look at the world of sound. And sometimes I would sit in just listen. And if there was a lawnmower outside, I'd do my best to approximate that. If there was a television program with about World War II or about the lions of the Serengeti, whatever was coming out, I would just do my best to approximate it. And while I couldn't play those sounds exactly, I was amassing.”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “One of the pickups on zero, the other on 10, it worked as kind of a kill switch. And then I could Play notes here, and it sounded like it was a staccato. Kind of playing that I had never heard Guitar make. Then I began practicing the eccentricities in my playing. And once I got out of the rut of thinking that I needed to sound like other guitar players, the horizons were wide open. And the nail in the coffin of traditional guitar playing for me was an early rage against the machine gig. In the San Fernando Valley, we were opening up for two cover bands. And the cover bands had Technically Talented guitar”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “To an audience. Well, as a guitar. When you pick up a guitar, you do so because you like. So the natural instinct is to play. Like your favorites In my case, it was sort of my punk rock heroes and then Randy Rhodes and some of the heavy metal guitar players. Amassing that technique. Wasn't until, like maybe late College career when I was saddled with at the time everybody liked the Edward Van Halen guitar because it only had one knob on it, the volume knob. That was the coolest thing. I didn't have one of those. I had a guitar with a whole bunch of knobs on it, so it was Quite uncool. But one of the knobs that did have on it was Pickup selector switch. Which chooses between the two. Up, you're going to hear sound out of And I found that if I manipulated that, the toggle switch”

    2022-04-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #591: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Fame — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT