Tom Morello has discussed his time in Rage Against The Machine, revealing why the group broke up, and effectively dashing any hopes of a reunion in the future.
Back in 1991, four young American musicians came together to form Rage Against The Machine. Within a couple of years, the group were receiving unanimous praise and acclaim for their mixing of heavily political lyrics, and just plain heavy tunes.
Sadly, the group broke up in 2000, but reformed in 2007 for a series of reunion shows which saw them hit up Aussie shores for the 2008 Big Day Out festival.
Since then, the closest thing that fans have received to a full-blown reunion is Prophets Of Rage, a supergroup which combines members of Rage Against The Machine with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and DJ Lord, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real.
Now, in a new interview with Metallica’s Lars Ulrich for is It’s Electric radio show for Beats 1 on Apple Music, Morello talked about his new project, Atlas Underground, while discussing the reasons why Rage Against The Machine broke up when they did.
“I’ll put myself first and foremost,” Morello began. “It was a lack of emotional maturity in being able to deal with each other as people. We had political vision and the shows never suffered, but we just couldn’t agree on stuff and that sort of unearthed feelings that made it hard to make records.”
I think there were competing visions of what Rage was supposed to be and competing feelings about what it was like to be in the band that we didn’t deal with.”
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“My glass half full version is that for a band that had extremely combustible elements, to be able to have made four records and to be able to have played the shows that we did, I think it’s a miracle.”
Tom Morello also revealed that while it was fun for the group to reunite back in 2007, it sounds like fans shouldn’t be expecting any more reunion shows in the future.
“We got together in 2007 and we had a great time,” Morello recalled. “We had fun onstage, offstage, playing ping pong, going out, to me it felt like there was a lot of camaraderie, but one of the things we kind of helped that and took off the table was everything that had been controversial before—writing music, doing interviews, having a manager—we’re just not going to do that stuff. We’re just going to play shows and have a nice time and be able to look each other in the eye and have a nice time and not be anything that had stirred controversy in the past.”
While Prophets Of Rage have just released the first taste of their upcoming second album, Morello’s Atlas Underground project is also teasing the release of new tunes. There’s no word yet on when we’ll be receiving the full-length releases from both acts, but they’ll be enough to help us briefly forget we’re unlikely to see Rage Against The Machine ever perform live again.
Check out Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Bulls On Parade’:
