Tom Morello, the lead guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, was born May 30, 1964, in Harlem, New York. His mother is a white American teacher and activist, and his father was a Kenyan who fought for the country’s independence from the British. Raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, he picked up the guitar at age 17, inspired by his love of punk and metal.
Morello is of Irish and Sicilian descent on his maternal side, and Kikuyu Kenyan descent on his paternal side. His mother was a schoolteacher from Marseilles, Illinois, who earned a Master of Arts at Loyola University, Chicago and travelled to Germany, Spain, Japan, and Kenya as an English language teacher between 1977 to 1983. His father was a Kenyan participant in the Mau Mau Uprising, and served as Kenya's first ambassador to the United Nations. Morello's paternal great-uncle, Jomo Kenyatta, was the first elected president in Kenyan history.[2] His parents met in August 1963 while attending a pro-democracy protest in Nairobi, Kenya. After discovering her pregnancy, Mary returned to the United States with Njoroge in November, and married in New York City.
When Morello was 16 months old, Njoroge returned to his native Kenya, and denied his paternity of his son. Morello was raised solely by his mother in Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. There he attended Libertyville High School, where his mother was a U.S. history teacher. She was the homeroom teacher for Tom's classmate and fellow guitarist Adam Jones, of the band Tool, while teaching at Libertyville. Morello sang in the school choir and was active in speech and drama club; a prominent role was Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Morello developed leftist political leanings early, and has described himself as having been "the only anarchist in a conservative high school", and has since identified as a nonsectarian socialist. In the 1980 mock elections at Libertyville, he campaigned for a fictitious anarchist "candidate" named Hubie Maxwell, who came in fourth place in the election. He also wrote a piece headlined "South Africa: Racist Fascism That We Support" for the school alternative newspaper The Student Pulse.
Morello graduated from high school with honors in June 1982, and enrolled at Harvard University as a political science student that autumn. He was the first student at his high school to be accepted at Harvard, and was in fact the first person from Libertyville, Illinois ever to enroll there.[3] Morello graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies.[5] He moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself, first by working as an exotic male stripper.[6]
"When I graduated from Harvard and moved to Hollywood, I was unemployable. I was literally starving, so I had to work menial labour and, at one point, I even worked as an exotic dancer. 'Brick House' (by The Commodores) was my jam! I did bachelorette parties and I'd go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank God it was in the time before YouTube! You could make decent money doing that job – people do what they have to do.
After graduating from Harvard, Morello worked in Senator Alan Cranston’s office before pursuing music as a career.
He has appeared in two of director Jon Favreau’s films, Iron Man and Made, and had brief cameos in Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Voyager.
At age 13, Morello joined his first band; a Led Zeppelin cover band as the lead singer. At this same age, Morello purchased his first guitar. Around 1984, Morello first started studying the guitar seriously. He had formed a band in the same year called the Electric Sheep which featured future Tool guitarist Adam Jones on bass.The band wrote original material that included politically charged lyrics. None of the songs composed by the Sheep contained solos; soloing was a skill that Morello began learning in college. He has said that he was profoundly influenced by Run-D.M.C, and Jam Master Jay in particular. This influence can be heard in the song Bulls on Parade where his guitar solo sounds like a DJ scratch. Additionally, the Bomb Squad and Public Enemy has had a large impact on his musical style.
At the time, Morello's musical tastes lay in the direction of hard rock and heavy metal, particularly Kiss and Iron Maiden. As he stated in Flight 666, he is a huge fan of Piece of Mind, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. Morello developed his own unique sound through the electric guitar. Later, his musical style and politics were greatly influenced by punk rock bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and Devo.
After graduating from Harvard, Morello briefly joined the band Lock Up. But by the end of the ‘80s, Lock Up and Morello had parted ways. Morello quickly teamed up with singer Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk to form Rage Against the Machine, one of the premier protest bands of the 1990s. It was with Rage that Morello become famous for his furious scratch-style guitar solos, a canny mixing of hip-hop and metal. Morello’s expressive, combative guitar was able to replicate the sounds of wailing harmonicas and turntables – indeed, his instrument proved as defiant as de la Rocha’s cadences.
After Rage Against the Machine went on hiatus in the wake of Zack de la Rocha’s departure, Morello (along with Commerford and Wilk) joined forces with Chris Cornell, formerly of Soundgarden, to become Audioslave. Although they had the usual strengths and weaknesses of any supergroup – instant name recognition but an air of familiarity – Audioslave managed to make three commercially successful albums. Morello continued to refine the distinctive guitar phrasing that helped make Rage so memorable, but Cornell’s interest in moody mid-tempo songs served as an interesting counterpoint to his thrash-heavy style.
Around the same time as Audioslave’s formation, Morello got involved in a non-music project as well. With System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, Morello organized Axis of Justice, a nonprofit whose mission, according to its website, “is to bring together musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations to fight for social justice.” Axis of Justice has organized protests, concerts, rallies and walkouts to promote the group’s agenda.
Since the collapse of Audioslave after their 2005 album, Morello has remained involved in music. Creating an alter ego named the Nightwatchman, Morello recorded his first solo album, One Man Revolution, in 2007. As opposed to the guitar-driven hard rock for which he’s known, the Nightwatchman is acoustic-based folk music that recalls Bob Dylan’s earliest protest songs. His second album, The Fabled City, came out in September 2008.
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