Tom Morello says RATM had ‘zero commercial ambition’ from day one

Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has revealed the band had “zero commercial ambition” when they first formed. 

In an interview on Canada’s CBC Radio One (via blabbermouth.net), the guitarist opened up about being “surprised” by the band’s swift commercial success.

“I was surprised that we were ever even able to book a club gig. It’s hard to paint a picture — in 1991, there were no neo-Marxist, multi-ethnic rap-punk-metal bands. There was zero — zero — commercial ambition,” Morello began.

He continued: “We wrote those songs, and the only goal was to make a cassette demo. I had had a record deal before, with a band that had more commercial leanings, and I knew that a record deal didn’t mean — my life got worse, not better, when I had a record deal. So that didn’t matter. So we just made music as a means of self-expression, with Zack’s [De La Rocha] tremendous lyrics and the band’s musical chemistry, and that was it.”

Morello went on to recall the memorable moment the band first played their music for someone else.

“We were rehearsing at this industrial complex, and this worker guy would pass by every once in a while, and he said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ I said, ‘We’re a band.’ And he said, ‘Can I listen?’ I was, like, ‘I suppose so.’ At the time, we only had a few songs together. So he sat down in our rehearsal room. He was the first guy to ever hear Rage Against the Machine. We didn’t have a name or anything. And we played him a few songs, and the cymbals die away at the end of the last song. [I was], like, ‘What do you think?’ And he stood up and he said, ‘Your music makes me wanna fight’ [Laughs],” he said.

“From the very first time that we performed in public, it was obvious that there was a connection to an audience that was very different than anything I’d ever been around,” he concluded.

Check out Tom Morello discussing Rage Against the Machine’s original lack of commercial ambition:

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