Know Your Enemy: The Story of Rage Against the Machine

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CHAPTER 1

Before 1991

So many apparently random strands of activity lead to the formation of what is without a doubt the most politically outspoken rock band ever formed that it’s impossible to say which came first; the convictions, the life experiences or the music. Rage Against The Machine earned their right to speak out in anger, that’s for sure, although the dynamic of the band – vocalist Zack de la Rocha and guitarist Tom Morello the more expressive members, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk the quiet supporters – appears to have been firmly in place long before any of them were actually playing music.

Morello was born first, in Harlem, New York, on May 30, 1964, making him four years older than Commerford (February 26, 1968; Irvine, California) and Wilk (September 5, 1968; Portland, Oregon) and the veritable old man of the band compared to de la Rocha (January 12, 1970; Long Beach, California). A lot is known about the childhoods of Morello and de la Rocha, comparatively speaking, largely because the two men have talked at length about their family lives and also, it turns out, because their heritage makes them uniquely predisposed to a career in political commentary, if not politics itself. Less information is available about Commerford and Wilk, whose reluctance to do much press became all-encompassing after a few years in the public eye and who have always been happy, indeed obliged, to leave most of the talking to their more voluble bandmates.

We do have snippets of information about Commerford and Wilk to go on. The former describes himself as a ‘rough kid’, explaining that Halloween was an annual opportunity for him to wreak some havoc in his hometown. I was a mean-hearted, sort of jerk kid, he sighed. I was into my clique of people and we would torment all the other children. My Halloweens were filled with tormenting trick-or-treaters, you know, and looking for other kids who were dressed up.

Despite this, Commerford came from an educated, academic family. His father, Gerard, was an aerospace engineer and manager who began his career working on the X-15 rocket-propelled experimental plane that reached space in the sixties. He later worked on the Space Shuttle programme, playing an important role in the vehicle’s Return-To-Flight project in 1988 (the Shuttle’s first deployment since the Challenger disaster of 1986). Among his professional awards, Gerard won the 1976 Gas Turbine Award for the Most Outstanding Technical Paper. His wife, the mother of Tim and his five siblings, died of cancer in 1988; Gerard himself lived until 2012.

As for Wilk, he seems to have been more of a spiritual kid, explaining later that numerology held a lifelong fascination for him. Ever since I was eight or nine I’ve gravitated to the number three, he ruminated. It’s something that has always been a really heavy number for me. It’s tattooed on my arm, and I count in threes. Everyone in school was taught two, four, six, eight, 10: I’d count in threes in the way I’d walk, even in the decisions I’d make. It was all based on threes.

Unlike their future bandmates, Morello and de la Rocha were steeped in political struggle from birth. Both men experienced racism in their childhoods, and both were involved in reaction towards that prejudice because of the activism of their families. These are complex, sad stories in many ways, but they hold the key to almost all of the passion and venom that suffused the work of Rage Against The Machine in later years, and as such, worth examining closely.

Let’s start with Tom Morello. Although he was born in multicultural New York, he was raised by his mother, Mary Morello, who was of Irish and Sicilian descent, in the town of Libertyville in Illinois, her home state. Culturally and literally a great distance from Harlem, Libertyville – a largely Caucasian town – made the young Morello acutely aware that his ethnic makeup was different. Mary, an English teacher, had met Tom’s father Stephen Ngethe Njoroge during a three-year stay in his native country of Kenya, where he later became the first ambassador from Kenya to the United Nations. Njoroge had participated in the Mau Mau uprising in the fifties, although in what capacity and to what extent is not widely known, and his uncle Jomo Kenyatta was Kenya’s first elected president, having been voted into office in 1964. Mary and Njoroge met at a pro-democracy rally in Nairobi, formed a relationship and returned to New York together before their son was born.

Morello later looked back on his family’s extraordinary history, saying: My mom trekked. What gave her wanderlust, I don’t know. She grew up in a town smaller and whiter than Libertyville called Marseilles, a coal mining town in central Illinois. It’s spelled like Marseilles, France, but pronounced ‘Marsales’. In her twenties, she just decided that she would, by herself, go around the world. She lived in China, in post-World War II Germany, Japan. Just everywhere. She was teaching in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurrection. She immediately abandoned all of her fellow white schoolteachers. She met my dad there, and was there for Kenya’s independence. They moved back to the States. My dad was part of Kenya’s first UN delegation, and that’s why I was born in New York City. They divorced, he moved back to Kenya, and she moved back to Illinois.

In effect, Tom Morello was born into a family embedded in African politics, although Njoroge returned to Kenya when his son was 16 months old, leaving Mary to raise Tom as a single parent. Reports indicate that she is made of stern stuff, however, working as an activist for many causes as her son grew and teaching American history at Libertyville High School, which Tom attended.

Morello recalled later: I integrated the town. It is an entirely white conservative northern suburb of Chicago, and I was the first person of colour to reside in the town. My mom and I moved there in 1965. She was applying to be a public high school teacher in communities around the northern suburbs. In more than one of them, they said, ‘You can work here, but your family cannot live here’. They were explicit about it. I was a one-year-old half-Kenyan kid, and they told my mom, ‘You’re an interracial family so you can live in the ghetto in Waukegan, or go to North Chicago or somewhere like that’. Libertyville was the first community that allowed us to court real estate agents to find an apartment. And even then, the real estate agent had to go door to door in the apartment complex where we rented to see if it was OK with people.

Little wonder Morello grew impassioned on the subject of race relations, or lack of them, as he matured. Other causes captured his attention, too: the war in Vietnam, which ended in his preteens, was a contemporary issue for him. I had always been mildly opposed to the Vietnam War – I mean, I was a 15-year-old in Libertyville, Illinois, give me a fucking break, yeah? he told the NME. I always thought the war was wrong, and then I read this book about the Weathermen [radicals who took their name from Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’] and I realised that the war was right, but it was the Vietnamese fighting the USA who were right. It was such a revelation that there were people in the United States who thought that way, that they were carrying Viet Cong flags to the demonstrations.

So here was Tom Morello circa 1975, struggling along through life in hick-town Illinois. In Long Beach, California, a kid named Zacharias Manuel de la Rocha was living between two households, as his parents had also split when he was young. His Mexican-American father, an artist called Roberto de la Rocha, was famous in the Chicano (a synonym for Mexican-American) community, creating huge canvases and exhibiting them locally and further afield. Beto, as he was known, was a member of Los Four, a Chicano art collective. Later in life, Zack was able to contextualise Beto’s work, saying: Back in 1974, my father’s paintings were part of the first Chicano art exhibit ever organised at the LA County Museum Of Art. That exhibit was something to be proud of. I want to make music that gives people that same sense of identity and lets them see that human rights, civil rights and spiritual rights are all part of the same struggle we all face to take the power back. It’s important to let people know not to lose that knowledge of self, to lose that knowledge of culture, but not to the point of separatism.

Of course, as a kid de la Rocha Junior had no frame of reference and no way of understanding what his father’s work represented in a wider context. From what he has told the media, his upbringing was unusual in many ways, with its more eccentric facets leading directly to his own activism. Living with Beto helped me to see a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t see, if I had grown up in a perfect family, he said. He read Mao, did a series of paintings for United Farm Workers and always had some incredible answers to all my questions. I also think that my upbringing as a Chicano in a white suburban environment had a lot of effect on my awareness … My parents separated when I was a year old, and I constantly moved back and forth between them and to very different neighbourhoods. From the poor East LA where my father lived and to the college in the rich Orange County where my mother lived, where Chicanos like me normally only would be if they had a broom in their hand or filling baskets with strawberries, there were some large oppositions, that I had to realise and learn to handle, and have probably founded my opinions today.

De la Rocha’s weekends with his father were occasionally of a grim nature. Mentally unstable since a nervous breakdown in 1981, Beto would spend periods of time fasting and reading the Bible while pulling the house curtains and maintaining a religious darkness. Sometimes his son was forced to fast alongside him, a potentially traumatic experience for a kid barely out of childhood.

I’d spend three weekends out of the month at my father’s house, eat on Friday night and not eat again until Monday morning when I’d get back to my mother, he recalled. I was so young at the time that I didn’t really question it too much. I love my father dearly, and didn’t understand the level of abuse that was happening. I’m not sure that he did, either.

The writer RJ Smith of Spin magazine interviewed father and son in 1996 for the most in-depth portrait of the de la Rochas which has yet been attempted, and discovered that Beto also obliged his son to participate in the mass destruction of his (Beto’s) artwork. During one visit, wrote Smith, Zack pointed to a painting on the wall and asked, ‘Daddy, can I have that?’ ‘Hey, that’s mine,’ Beto snapped. And then, flushed with guilt for denying his son, Beto began pulling down all his artwork – paintings, prints, drawings – and shredding them all. The frames he smashed. Then he took his paint and brushes and hurled them into a trash can that he set on fire. ‘He burned over 60 percent of his artwork,’ says Zack. The art that had given Zack a sense of identity was going up in flames. ‘It was very, very, very difficult, and at one point he forced me to burn it for him. These were paintings that I grew up around and loved and admired him for creating. I had no clue why he’d want to destroy them … I worry about what that experience did to me, how it affected my way of thinking. I think it affected me in good ways too, because I feel like at this point, what could anyone possibly do to me that could hurt me more?’

When Smith asked Beto about his earlier treatment of his son, the old man told him, I took [the Bible] too literally … It says, ‘Make no image’. I was an image maker and so I said, ‘Okay, I quit’. I quit being an artist and destroyed my work. Which was good, because I was being so possessive. Of the fasting, he acknowledged that Zack was too young for that, but also I don’t regret it. It’s a learning experience.

Like Morello, slogging it out in Libertyville, Illinois, de la Rocha was keenly aware of the deep-rooted prejudices of his surroundings. Living in Irvine, California, which he later described as one of the most racist cities imaginable, he was alienated further by an incident in a school geology class, when a teacher referred to a California border checkpoint as the wetback station, with the term referring to illegal Mexican immigrants who supposedly swim across rivers to evade detection at the border. I remember it like it was yesterday, he said. I remember being very silent and feeling as if I could do nothing to raise my voice. At that point, I decided that when I started a band, I would never be silent again.

Music was also an obvious outlet for Morello, who discovered heavy rock in his teens. He has referred to singing in a Led Zeppelin cover band at 13, which would have been in 1977, just as punk broke. The band, Nebula, featured Morello on vocals, he later said, because my voice hadn’t changed to the rich baritone you hear now. And I was able to squeak out the Robert Plant wails on ‘Heartbreaker’ … I had a seventies full-on JJ Walker afro, the brown lift shoes and Italian horn necklace, the John Travolta satin shirt open to the navel.

His bedroom door was always open,’ Morello’s mother later recalled of her son, and when he listened to anything – Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper – he’d always call me in to listen. And I listened. Twice I took him to Alice Cooper concerts.

The sheer over-the-topness of heavy music attracted Morello, he recalled. I was a big fan of heavy metal music, which involved extravagance. You had to have huge walls of Marshall amplifiers and expensive shiny Gibson Les Paul guitars. You had to know how to play ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and have a castle on a Scottish loch, limos, groupies, and things like that. All I had was a basement in Illinois. None of that was going to come together for me. Punk rock was the catalyst that transformed him from passive listener to active participant, he added, because the music was so much easier to play: "When I heard the Sex Pistols and The Clash and Devo, it was immediately attainable. I thought, this music is as good as anything I have ever heard, but I can play it this afternoon. I got the Sex Pistols record [Never Mind The Bollocks … Here’s The Sex Pistols], and within 24 hours I was in a band."

Talking to MTV, Morello added: I was very influenced to pick up the guitar by people like Jimmy Page, and Ace Frehley of Kiss … They were the posters I had on my bedroom wall that made me dream of one day being in a rock and roll band. But it was really the punk rock revolution that made me pick up the instrument [because I] was very inspired by the fact that it was tremendously powerful music but it was made by people with limited technical abilities … This made great music seem to be within my grasp, and I immediately formed a band before I even knew how to play any chords on the guitar.

Unusually for a musician who went on to scale great heights, Morello didn’t get started on the guitar until he was 17, which would have been 1981. By then punk’s first wave had effectively been and gone, leaving punk-influenced acts such as Devo in its wake, and making space for a new movement of heavy metal guitar heroes, focused on technique as much as melody. One of these was Morello’s lifelong idol Randy Rhoads, guitarist on sometime Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne’s first two solo albums. Although Randy was killed in a plane crash in March 1982, he made a huge impact on the metal scene with his playing, which was heavily indebted to the pioneering style of Eddie Van Halen but which was also based on solid virtuoso principles. Rhoads had his own voice on the instrument, a fact which Morello noted, as well as a superb, highly evolved neoclassical style which suited Ozzy’s anthemic tunes perfectly.

Asked when he had first heard Rhoads’ guitar playing, Morello replied: "I remember the exact moment. I was packed in the back of somebody’s mom’s hatchback in Libertyville. The radio was turned to The Loop in Chicago, and this song called ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne came on. The other people in the car were more New Wave fans, and they were talking over it, but suddenly I was yelling, ‘Everybody, shut up! What is that?’ This blistering riff came at me, followed by an incredible solo, and of course, there was Ozzy – I recognised his voice as the guy from Black Sabbath – and by the end of it, I was like, ‘What just happened?’ There was no ‘interweb’ at the time, so I had to wait for the next Circus magazine to explain to me what it was. And then I ran out and bought the Blizzard Of Ozz cassette. I had already started playing, but it was right around the same time. I was a big fan of punk rock and the whole do-it-yourself ethic, so for a guitar player to come along and rekindle the spirit and reset the bar for hard rock guitar players was a pretty big deal."

Fans of Rage Against The Machine may not immediately grasp the similarities between Morello’s taut, staccato guitar style and Randy Rhoads’ flamboyant theatrics, and indeed Morello acknowledged this, saying: "Now, you might not hear Randy’s influence in the cow and duck noises that I sometimes make with the guitar, but what got me to that point was being serious about the instrument … I was never a big fan of the whole ‘party-hard-we’re-gonna-rock-harder’ world. I liked music. But I could see myself in Randy, how he was a real student of music. The fact that he practised for hours on end really appealed to me. He was serious, and he wanted only to get better at his craft. When I was practising eight hours a day, his was the poster I had on my wall … I remember buying [Ozzy’s second album] Diary Of A Madman when it came out, and somebody at the record store was making fun of me because of the album cover. I had to explain to this person that, while I certainly liked Ozzy, I was really a big Randy Rhoads fan – that’s why I was buying the record. It was like, ‘Well, the guitar player doesn’t have raspberry jelly coming out of his mouth …’ Randy was serious, you know?"

Having taken up the guitar in earnest, Morello formed a band at Libertyville High School with a friend, Adam Jones, who later became famous in the alternative rock band Tool. Their group didn’t go anywhere outside of Morello’s garage and a handful of gigs that included a school talent show: Electric Sheep (apparently not named after Philip K. Dick’s 1968 sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?) recorded a version of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born To Be Wild’ which appeared on a soundtrack album issued by the school under the title All Shook Up.

Electric Sheep were not meant to be taken seriously by any means. Featuring Jones on bass, Morello showing off his rudimentary skills as a guitarist, singer Chris George (and Geoff Johnson in George’s occasional absence), keyboardist Randy Cotton and drummer Ward Wilson, the group veered from heavy metal to punk and back again depending on definitions, and fizzled out after 1983. Along the way the band managed to soundtrack a primitive horror film written by Jones and Morello, called Season Of The Snow Bitch.

Their final, and probably finest, hour was a pseudo-documentary film called The Electric Sheep Video that included footage from ‘The Electric Sheep Farewell Tour Of The Americas’, a gig in the Mundelein Cinema in Mundelein, Illinois. During the group’s tenure, the only real hint that deeper things were to come, musically, was a song by Morello called ‘Salvador Death Squad Blues’: Electric Sheep’s greatest claim to fame came in 2007 when Tool singer Maynard James Keenan recorded a version of their song ‘My Country Boner’ (renamed ‘Cuntry Boner’) in a mock-country style.

Looking back on Electric Sheep, Morello recalled: Adam wasn’t in the original line-up. There was this one guy who was sort of the principal player in the band – he was the only one in the group with any working knowledge of music – but he quit because he thought that he was far above us. Adam was his replacement. Jones added: I was just so excited to officially be in a band. Of course, I had to borrow a bass because I didn’t have one of my own … I played stand-up bass in the orchestra and I’d play bass with my brother, too. He’d play the guitar parts, and I’d play all the bass parts to Police songs or Fleetwood Mac or Chicago or whatever he was into at the time. Morello summed the group up as the bad boys of Midwestern punk, presumably in good humour, while Jones described Electric Sheep as a terrible band, but great to see.

By the mid-eighties, Zack de la Rocha had become a fan of hardcore punk, and of the band Minor Threat in particular. A skater kid and a vegetarian from his early teens (as he put it, An animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed … I just don’t think it’s worth eating that animal. There’s so much other food out there that doesn’t have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death), he had found a position somewhat outside that of the other teenagers he knew. That position was consolidated by his friendship with Tim Commerford, a fellow punk fan, who he had first met in elementary school.

Of de la Rocha, Commerford later recalled: We played a lot of basketball, even though he was real small: we skateboarded all over. When I first met him at his house, he had this acoustic guitar, and he eventually taught me how to play the entire Sex Pistols album. He was breakin’ [breakdancing] at school when nobody else knew what hip-hop was. That kid was on it from day one. He added that his youth, disrupted by the premature death of his mother from cancer, had been unconventional: I had no traditional upbringing of any sort. Zack is one of the few people still in my life who knew my mom and who can talk to me about that time.

In junior high, de la Rocha and Commerford played guitar in a band known as Juvenile Expression, about whom little is known: there’s much more available data about his next group, Hardstance, in particular when the band changed its name to Inside Out in 1988 and became something of a legendary act among fans of American hardcore.

Right from the beginning, de la Rocha engaged fully with Inside Out. He later described the band as about completely detaching ourselves from society to see ourselves as spirits, and not bowing down to a system that sees you as just another pebble on a beach. I channelled all my anger out through that band. The other members came and went, but stalwarts among them included bassist Mark Hayworth (also of Gorilla Biscuits), sometime Wool drummer Chris Bratton and guitarist Vic DiCara, who has kindly agreed to give an interview for this book.

DiCara recalls how he met de la Rocha. I moved to South California, and some people from a band called me and said they wanted to do a band with me, he says. I went and jammed with them. Nothing ever happened – but some of those guys were in the prototype stage of a band called Inside Out. They got the idea that I would be perfect for that band. So I went to a friend’s house one day, with my guitar and amp. And Zack was already there waiting for me, as far as I remember. He was jamming out with Alex the drummer. When I got there they showed me a few of their songs, I picked them up right away, and we enjoyed playing together so much that we were leaping around the room, thrashing away. It was obviously a really good chemistry right from the beginning.

In their three-year existence, Inside Out released a sole recording – a 7" EP called No Spiritual Surrender, released by the Revelation label and reissued on CD some years later – and toured several times, playing on the West and East coasts of America. When it came to songwriting, recalls DiCara, "Zack and I were 50/50 writers. Some songs he would write the music and lyrics; some songs I would write the music and lyrics. On some he would write the music and I would write the lyrics, on others I would write the music and he would write the lyrics. We worked well together. It was easy. One of the pre-existing song ideas they had from before I came in was the