How the First Person Who Ever Heard Rage Against the Machine’s Music Reacted

How did the first person who ever heard Rage Against the Machine‘s music react?

If you were alive and listening to rock music in the ’90s, most would agree that Rage Against the Machine’s music delivered a wallop the first time you ever heard it. The groove, the heavy riffs, the aggressive lyrics all were something distinctive to what else was happening in music at the time. But can you imagine being the first person to catch what Rage Against the Machine were putting together?

What Tom Morello Recalled About the First Person to Hear Rage Against the Machine?

Tom Morello was a guest on Billy Corgan’s new The Magnificent Others podcast when he recounted his early days in Los Angeles that eventually led up to his forming what would become Rage Against the Machine.

“The first time anyone ever heard the music, no one had ever heard the music and we were playing an industrial park in the Valley. There was this dude, a worker guy, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘We’re a band.’ He said, ‘Can I hear it?’ So I said, ‘I can’t see why not.’ So he comes in and we have about five songs together and he sits down and we play five Rage Against the Machine songs, though the band doesn’t have a name [yet].”

“Afterward, we said, ‘What do you think?’ And he stands up and says, ‘Your music makes me want to fight.’ And his posture was that of a honey badger when he said it. And we’re like, ‘Oh, well that’s interesting.’ And sure enough, people have been wanting to fight to that music ever since.”

Tom Morello’s Vow That Led to Rage Against the Machine’s Sound

Rage Against the Machine was actually born after Morello’s first shot at success in the music industry ended in failure. Within the chat, Morello spoke of his pre-Rage band Lock Up and how he had joined the Los Angeles-based funk rock group at a young age when they eventually got signed to a record deal.

READ MORE: Tom Morello Says ‘Greatest Gift’ He Received in Music Was Failure

But the band’s debut album tanked and Morello speaks of seeing their tour support dwindle and band members drop out before he was the only one still remaining from when he joined. That led him to call drummer Brad Wilk and start the process of putting together Rage Against the Machine.

“I was crystal clear on the mistakes that had been made from my point of view was that I had listened to experts and look where it got me,” Morello told Corgan.

“I made a conscious, out loud solemn vow that I was never going to play another note of music that I didn’t believe in. I knew now that I would never make records, I would never be a rock star and I would never fulfill the dreams that I had in Circus magazine when I drove my Chevy Astrovan out to Hollywood, but I was still a musician and there was value in playing music that was still meaningful to me even if I was the only one to ever hear it.”

As for his thoughts on Rage Against the Machine’s prospects, Morello admits, “There was zero commercial ambition. There was no hope of booking a club show when that band formed. There were no L.A. club bands that had the ethnic diversity of that band that was singing Neo-Marxist lyrics with Black Sabbath riffs and a punk rock fury.”

He adds, “In that rehearsal room it was crystal clear that there was nowhere near where this music could be other than that we liked it. The sole goal …. My purpose, was to do the thing I was unable to do with Lock Up, which was to make a great cassette. So before playing any shows, we just made a cassette of 12 songs to have. That felt like it was enough.”

Luckily there was eventually a market for them, but not without some hurdles along the way. Morello revealed in a 2023 video shared by Spin a sneaky way in which Rage Against the Machine were able to “Freedom” on the MTV and radio airwaves after Zack de la Rocha had dropped a curse word extemporaneously outside the lyrics of the song.

As Morello recalled that rather than “Bring that shit in,” he offered that de la Rocha was saying something else. He recollects, “What if he’s saying, ‘Bring the shiteen,’ cause shiteen is the Aztec word for ‘freedom.’ So what if we are bringing the ‘shiteen’ in and there’s no cursing?”

The guitarist sheepishly admitted, “Now, is shiteen the Aztec word for freedom? As far as Viacom knows it is, and that record got on MTV and we sold 3 million copies of that record and let an entirely new generation know about Leonard Peltier.”

Not only does a whole generation know of the newly freed Peltier, but Rage Against the Machine went on to a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career.

Tom Morello Guests on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others Podcast