The story of Rage Against the Machine

Four roads to Los Angeles

Tom Morello was born in Harlem, New York, on the thirtieth of May 1964. His mother Mary was a teacher from Illinois. His father, Ngethe Njoroge, was a Kenyan who took part in the independence struggle and became Kenya's first ambassador to the United Nations, and Tom's great uncle was Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president. The marriage did not last. His father went back to Kenya when Tom was a toddler, and Mary raised him alone in the small town of Libertyville, Illinois, where she taught history at his high school. She was a radical in her own right, and in 1987 she founded a group called Parents for Rock and Rap to fight music censorship. Tom has said he always thought of himself as black, and as a boy he once found a noose hanging in his family's garage.[1] [2]

Morello got serious about the guitar in his late teens and practiced for hours every night, a habit he later described as almost compulsive. In 1982 he went to Harvard, where he studied social studies, wrote his thesis on student movements in South Africa and helped build a protest shantytown in Harvard Yard against the university's investments there. His college band won an Ivy League battle of the bands in 1986, with a keyboard player named Carolyn Bertozzi, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022. After graduating with honors he drove to Los Angeles with about a thousand dollars. He sold trash bags by phone, briefly worked as a stripper at bachelorette parties, and spent time in the office of Senator Alan Cranston, an experience that killed any wish he had to go into politics.[1] [2]

Zack de la Rocha was born Zacharias Manuel de la Rocha in Long Beach, California, on the twelfth of January 1970. His father Beto was a painter in Los Four, the first Chicano art collective to be shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his great grandfather had fought in the Mexican Revolution. When Zack was six his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to Irvine, a mostly white suburb, while she earned a doctorate in anthropology. He later told Rolling Stone about a day in class when a teacher used a racial slur for Mexicans and the whole room laughed. He sat there frozen and said nothing. That day, he said, he promised himself he would never stay silent again.[1] [2]

In Irvine, Zack met a boy named Tim Commerford at elementary school, and in junior high the two played guitar together in a band called Juvenile Expression. Zack fell for punk rock, then for the straight edge hardcore scene. He drummed and played guitar in local bands, and in 1988 he became the singer of Inside Out, a hardcore band on Revelation Records. Their only release was an EP called No Spiritual Surrender, in 1990. Near the end, Zack wanted a more political sound shaped by hip hop and Run DMC, while guitarist Vic DiCara was drawn toward the Hare Krishna faith and left to become a monk. Inside Out broke up in 1991. Among the songs they never recorded was one called Rage Against the Machine.[1] [2]

Tim Commerford was born in Irvine on the twenty sixth of February 1968 and grew up idolizing bass players like Geddy Lee of Rush and Steve Harris of Iron Maiden. Brad Wilk was born in Portland, Oregon, on the fifth of September 1968, lived for a while in Chicago, and started drumming at thirteen, with John Bonham and Keith Moon as his heroes. At Taft High School in the Los Angeles suburbs, one of his schoolmates was a young Ice Cube. Before Rage, Brad played in a band called Indian Style with Eddie Vedder and joined a hard rock band called Greta. He also auditioned, without success, for Tom Morello's band Lock Up, and he tried out for Pearl Jam as well.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A band is born, 1991 and 1992

Morello's first Los Angeles band of note was Lock Up, which he joined in 1988. They signed to Geffen Records and released one album in 1989, Something Bitchin' This Way Comes, named after the Ray Bradbury novel. It went nowhere and the band fell apart. Back then Morello played fast, flashy lead guitar. He later said a gig alongside two bands full of speed shredders convinced him that practicing scales all day was pointless. Instead he started chasing strange noises, flicking his pickup toggle switch on and off, and treating his mistakes as raw material. Lock Up's last drummer, Jon Knox, would play a small but crucial role in what came next.[1] [2] [3]

In 1991, after Lock Up split, Morello went looking for a new band. He saw Zack de la Rocha freestyle rapping at a Los Angeles club and was struck by his lyrics. Jon Knox encouraged Zack and his old friend Tim Commerford to jam with Morello, and Morello called Brad Wilk, the drummer who had once failed the Lock Up audition. The four clicked, and they took their name from the unrecorded Inside Out song. The phrase itself had appeared in 1989 in a hardcore zine called No Answers, written by Kent McClard, who was close to Inside Out. Zack later summed up the chemistry simply. He did not much care for Black Sabbath, and Tom did not much care for his hip hop riffs, but together they made something new.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They rehearsed in the San Fernando Valley, and on the twenty third of October 1991 they played their first show, at California State University, Northridge. They opened with an instrumental that would become Killing in the Name. Morello says the riff arrived while he was giving a guitar lesson, showing a student how drop D tuning works, a trick he had learned from Maynard James Keenan of Tool. The first pattern his fingers found was that riff, so he paused the lesson and recorded it on a little Radio Shack tape recorder. The next day the band worked it up, with Tim's heavy bass line and Brad's bouncing beat there from the very start. Zack added the words later.[1] [2] [3]

Within months they were handing out a twelve song cassette at their gigs. The cover showed the stock market pages of a newspaper, with a single match taped to the inlay card. Record labels came running. Michael Goldstone of Epic Records, the man who had also signed Pearl Jam, saw them in a rehearsal room and said he had never seen anything like it. The band signed with Epic, part of Sony, on the condition that they kept creative control. Critics called it hypocrisy for a revolutionary band to join a giant corporation. Morello's answer was that the left wing writer Noam Chomsky would not refuse to sell his books in a chain bookstore, because that was where people bought books.[1] [2] [3]

The debut and the breakthrough, 1992 to 1994

The debut album, simply called Rage Against the Machine, came out on the sixth of November 1992. It was produced by the Canadian Garth Richardson, who is credited as GGGarth, a nod to his own stutter. The cover used Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963, in protest at the persecution of Buddhists under the American backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Maynard James Keenan of Tool guested on Know Your Enemy. And the sleeve carried a proud note that no samples, keyboards or synthesizers had been used. Every strange sound, including the ones that sounded like a DJ scratching, came from Morello's guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Killing in the Name had gone to American radio a few weeks earlier, on the twentieth of October 1992. It has only a handful of lines. The song links police violence to racist hate groups, then builds to a furious chant of refusal that repeats again and again, swearing all the way. Critics have tied it to the police beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The band left the words out of the album booklet on purpose, letting that one stand on its own among the more poetic songs. The video, shot at two small Los Angeles club gigs by one of Morello's guitar students, was banned on American MTV but played heavily in Europe.[1] [2] [3]

In Britain the song had an early brush with scandal. On the twenty first of February 1993, the BBC Radio 1 DJ Bruno Brookes was busy recording an advert during his Top 40 countdown and accidentally let the uncensored version play in full. The station received one hundred and thirty eight complaints. The song reached number twenty five in the UK singles chart, and the band's popularity abroad grew faster than at home. Back in America, the album's first months were slow. Before the summer of 1993, it had sold around seventy five thousand copies in the United States.[1] [2] [3]

Everything changed on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour. Opening in the afternoon sun, Rage stunned crowds night after night, and the Los Angeles Times compared Zack's presence to Bob Marley and his rapping to Chuck D. American sales of the album jumped from about seventy five thousand before the tour to four hundred thousand by the end of the year. On one date the band staged a protest against the Parents Music Resource Center, the group behind the Parental Advisory sticker. Instead of playing, they stood on stage naked, with duct tape over their mouths and the letters PMRC painted on their bodies.[1] [2] [3]

By April 1996 the debut had sold over a million copies in the United States and three million worldwide, and it was later certified triple platinum. The band toured Europe with Suicidal Tendencies, and hip hop acts like House of Pain and Cypress Hill opened some of their shows. They also turned up on film soundtracks, with a reworked demo song called Darkness on The Crow in 1994 and Year of tha Boomerang in Higher Learning. The speed of their rise put a heavy strain on four very different people. Zack later described those years as a series of ego explosions that were hard to resolve. In 2020 Rolling Stone ranked the album two hundred and twenty first among the greatest of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Evil Empire, 1995 to 1998

In late 1994 Rage stopped touring, and rumors spread that they had split. According to an anonymous source quoted by MTV News, the band had recorded around twenty three tracks with producer Brendan O'Brien in Atlanta and briefly broken up over violent infighting, before regrouping to play the KROQ Weenie Roast in June 1995. Morello later said the fights were about musical direction, and that they were patched up. The compromise pushed the new songs further toward hip hop. Morello described the result as a middle ground between Public Enemy and the Clash. The album was finally recorded with O'Brien in late 1995.[1] [2]

Evil Empire came out on the sixteenth of April 1996 and went straight to number one on the Billboard 200, selling two hundred and forty nine thousand copies in its first week. The title borrowed Ronald Reagan's name for the Soviet Union, which the band said fit the United States just as well. The cover was an altered painting by Mel Ramos of a boy comic book hero, and the booklet showed a stack of radical books, from Howard Zinn and Karl Marx to Noam Chomsky and Mumia Abu-Jamal. The song Tire Me won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance, and Bulls on Parade, an attack on the arms industry with Morello's famous turntable style solo, became one of their signature songs.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirteenth of April 1996, Rage played Saturday Night Live. The guest host was the billionaire Steve Forbes, then running for the Republican presidential nomination. In protest, the band hung American flags upside down from their amplifiers, a traditional sign of distress. They played Bulls on Parade, but their second song, Bullet in the Head, was cancelled, and the band was not invited back. Morello's solo on Bulls on Parade shows his method at its best. He turns one pickup fully up and the other off, uses the toggle switch like a kill switch, and rubs his hand over the strings to mimic a DJ scratching a record.[1] [2] [3]

In 1997 Rage opened for U2 on the huge PopMart tour and gave their earnings to causes including a garment workers union, the women's HIV group Women Alive and the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Zack had visited Chiapas, and songs like People of the Sun grew out of the Zapatista uprising. Next came a headline tour with the Wu-Tang Clan. Police in several cities tried and failed to get the shows cancelled, citing what they called the band's violent and anti police views. After the Wu-Tang Clan failed to turn up to a show at Riverport, they were dropped and replaced by the Roots. In 1998 a live and rare collection came out in Japan.[1] [2] [3]

One cause mattered to Zack above almost all others. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and former Black Panther, had been sentenced to death for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, and Zack believed he deserved a new trial. In 1995 the band played a benefit for him in Washington, and in January 1999 they co headlined a benefit concert with the Beastie Boys in New Jersey. The state's governor, Christine Todd Whitman, urged people to stay away, and the show sold out anyway. That spring Zack put on a suit and tie and spoke before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. His death sentence was later overturned, and in 2011 he was resentenced to life in prison. Police groups, for their part, called for a boycott of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Battle of Los Angeles and the break, 1999 and 2000

In July 1999 Rage played Woodstock 99 in upstate New York, a festival later remembered for rioting, arson, three deaths and many reports of sexual assault. The Associated Press named Rage one of the breakout acts of the weekend, and a flag was set on fire on stage during Killing in the Name. Zack used the set to call for justice for the jailed American Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Two weeks later, at a show in Honolulu, he stopped the music to scold men in the pit who were harassing women crowd surfers. Around the same time, Wake Up played over the closing credits of The Matrix, introducing the band to a huge new audience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, took more than a year to finish amid tension inside the band. It came out on the second of November 1999, and it debuted at number one with over four hundred thousand copies sold in its first week, keeping Mariah Carey's new album off the top. Both Time and Rolling Stone named it the best album of 1999. Guerrilla Radio won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance and became the band's only entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number sixty nine. When they played it on David Letterman's show, Zack wore a Free Mumia shirt and made a rude gesture on live television.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty sixth of January 2000, the filmmaker Michael Moore shot the video for Sleep Now in the Fire on the steps of Federal Hall, right across from the New York Stock Exchange. The city did not allow weekday filming on Wall Street, and Moore's permits only covered the steps. His one instruction to the band, Morello recalled, was to keep playing no matter what. Police eventually led Moore away, and he shouted to the band to take the Stock Exchange. Morello said a crowd of about two hundred rushed the first set of doors before the exchange's security doors came crashing down. The finished video ends with a Republican politician calling the band anti family.[1] [2]

In August 2000, during the Democratic National Convention, Rage played outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles to thousands of people. After some in the crowd threw rocks, the Los Angeles police cut the power and fired rubber bullets and pepper spray to clear the area. Weeks later, on the seventh of September, came the MTV Video Music Awards. When Limp Bizkit beat Sleep Now in the Fire for Best Rock Video, Tim Commerford climbed high onto the set's scaffolding and rocked back and forth. He and his bodyguard spent a night in jail. Zack left the building straight away and later said he had felt humiliated.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twelfth and thirteenth of September 2000, Rage played two shows at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Nobody knew they would be the last. On the eighteenth of October Zack announced he was leaving, saying the band's decision making process had completely failed. Morello later said they argued over everything, even the color of their T shirts, and that the band had been ugly inside for a long time. Kerrang readers voted Zack's exit the worst thing that happened in 2000. Two months later came Renegades, a covers album produced by Rick Rubin, with songs by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Stooges, Afrika Bambaataa and others. It went platinum within weeks, but there was no band left to tour it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Separate ways, 2001 to 2006

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, a memo circulated among Clear Channel radio stations listing songs thought unsuitable for the airwaves. It was the only list to name every song by a single band, and that band was Rage. Meanwhile Morello, Commerford and Wilk decided to stay together. There was talk of them becoming a backing band for Ozzy Osbourne or even Macy Gray, but they wanted a band of their own. Their friend Rick Rubin suggested they try Chris Cornell, who had been the singer of Soundgarden. Rubin also got them into group therapy with a performance coach, Phil Towle. In nineteen days of rehearsals the new foursome wrote twenty one songs.[1] [2] [3]

The new band nearly collapsed before it began. In March 2002, Cornell walked away briefly amid a fight between the two sides' managers, and unfinished demos leaked online under the name Civilian. The band fired both management companies and regrouped. Cornell was also struggling. He later said he went through a horrible personal crisis during that first record and spent two months in rehab, mainly for drinking. At their first paying show that December, he told the crowd that his bandmates had saved his life that year. Their debut album, Audioslave, came out on the nineteenth of November 2002 and went triple platinum, helped by the single Like a Stone.[1] [2]

Audioslave's first ever public performance was on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York for David Letterman, the first time any band had played on the show's marquee. On the sixth of May 2005 they became the first American rock band to play an open air concert in Cuba, drawing about fifty thousand people in Havana. Their second album, Out of Exile, went to number one, and Revelations followed in 2006. Then on the fifteenth of February 2007, Cornell announced he was quitting for good, citing personality conflicts and musical differences. He later admitted he had played his own part in the drama.[1] [2]

Morello also found another outlet. Around 2003 he began turning up at open mic nights with an acoustic guitar under the name the Nightwatchman, singing political folk songs that did not fit Audioslave. His first Nightwatchman album, One Man Revolution, came out in April 2007. With Serj Tankian of System of a Down he founded Axis of Justice, which links music fans with grassroots political groups. He marched with striking workers and joined labor campaigns, and in September 2006 he was one of about four hundred people arrested at a protest supporting immigrant hotel workers in Los Angeles. He spent a night in jail and used his one phone call to ring the rock station KROQ.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Zack, meanwhile, all but vanished. He worked on a solo album with DJ Shadow, Questlove and others, then switched to working with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who said they made around twenty tracks. None of it came out, apart from a few songs. In 2003 Zack and DJ Shadow released March of Death free online to protest the coming invasion of Iraq, and in 2004 one of the Reznor songs appeared on an album linked to the film Fahrenheit 9/11. He later admitted he had been heartbroken after leaving Rage and had become obsessed with reinventing himself. In 2005 he played the jarana, a small Mexican guitar, with the son jarocho band Son de Madera.[1] [2]

Back together, 2007 to 2011

The four members had stayed in touch. Tim and Zack went surfing together, and Tom and Zack ran into each other at a 2005 protest for the South Central Farm in Los Angeles. On the fourteenth of April 2007, Zack and Tom played a short acoustic set together at a Chicago rally for farm workers from Immokalee, Florida. Two weeks later, on the twenty ninth of April, Rage Against the Machine headlined the final night of the Coachella festival and drew the biggest crowd of the weekend. Zack kept it simple, introducing them as a band from Los Angeles. Morello said they had reunited to speak out against what he saw as the right wing slide of America under George W. Bush.[1] [2] [3]

At Coachella, Zack used the spoken middle section of Wake Up, where the band usually read from an old FBI memo about suppressing black activists, to make a speech. Citing a remark by Noam Chomsky, he said that if the laws used against the Nazis after World War Two were applied to American presidents, every one of them since Truman would be tried as a war criminal, and the current administration was no exception. Fox News ran the clip under a headline claiming the band wanted the Bush administration shot, and the commentator Ann Coulter called the band and its fans losers. At a New York show that July, Zack said Fox had twisted his words, and repeated that the leaders should face a war crimes trial.[1] [2]

What was meant as one show became a four year run. Rage played the Rock the Bells hip hop festival, then Australia and New Zealand in January 2008, then Reading, Leeds and Lollapalooza. In August 2008, during the Democratic convention in Denver, they headlined a free antiwar festival and then led about eight thousand people on a six mile march behind uniformed members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. After a four hour standoff with police, the Obama campaign agreed to meet the veterans. At the Republican convention in St. Paul, police stopped a surprise set, so Zack and Tom performed through a megaphone instead.[1] [2] [3]

There was a darker side to the band's reach. In 2008 the Guardian reported that American interrogators in the war on terror had blasted Killing in the Name, along with other loud music, at detainees for hours on end. In October 2009 Morello joined other musicians in pressing the United States government to declassify records about the use of music in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. He said it sickened him that music he helped create had been used in what he called crimes against humanity. The band also saw its songs adopted by people it opposed. That fight would come back again and again over the next decade.[1] [2] [3]

In December 2009 a British couple, Jon and Tracy Morter, started a Facebook campaign to stop the X Factor winner claiming the Christmas number one for a fifth year running. Their weapon was Killing in the Name. Simon Cowell called the campaign stupid, while Paul McCartney said a Rage win would be funny. Morello called it a wonderful dose of anarchy. On BBC Radio 5 Live, the band agreed to play a clean version, but Zack sang the uncensored chorus anyway and the song was cut off. On the twentieth of December, Killing in the Name was named Christmas number one, selling about half a million downloads and beating Joe McElderry's The Climb by around fifty thousand.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rage kept their promise to celebrate with British fans. On the sixth of June 2010 they played a free show for about forty thousand people at Finsbury Park in London, nicknamed the Rage Factor, with tickets given out by lottery to people who uploaded a photo, to beat the touts. On stage, the Morters were handed a cheque for more than one hundred and sixty two thousand pounds, raised for the homeless charity Shelter and other causes. In July the band played a Los Angeles benefit against Arizona's SB 1070 immigration law, and that October they played South America for the first time. Their last show of this era was their own festival, L.A. Rising, at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the thirtieth of July 2011.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Between the storms, 2012 to 2019

In November 2012 the band marked twenty years of their debut with a box set that included the Finsbury Park concert and, for the first time on disc, their original demo tape. That August, Mitt Romney had picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, and Ryan had named Rage Against the Machine among his favorite bands. Morello answered in a Rolling Stone essay. He called Ryan the embodiment of the very machine the band had raged against for two decades, and joked that perhaps Ryan was a secret mole who might pardon Leonard Peltier. Rage had no label, no manager and no plans, Morello said. When the four wanted to do something, they would.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The others kept busy. Brad Wilk played drums on Black Sabbath's final studio album, 13, released in 2013, and later toured with the Smashing Pumpkins. He had lived with type one diabetes since 1997. Tim Commerford started an electronic rock band called Future User with Jon Knox and producer Brendan O'Brien, and in its videos he waterboarded John McEnroe in a sketch and teamed up with the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, Commerford called himself a conspiracy theorist, claimed the moon landings were faked and doubted that ISIS was real. He also said he might skip the Rock Hall if Rage were ever inducted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morello found an unlikely second home in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. Rage had covered Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Springsteen began inviting Morello to shred on it at his own shows. In 2013 Morello filled in for Steven Van Zandt on an Australian tour, and on the 2014 album High Hopes he played on eight of eleven tracks. Springsteen called him his muse. Zack stayed mostly out of sight, though he made fiery guest appearances with the rap duo Run the Jewels, starting in 2014. In 2016 he released a song called Digging for Windows, produced by El-P, and a solo album was promised for 2017. As of 2026 it has never appeared.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2016, election year, Morello, Commerford and Wilk formed Prophets of Rage with Chuck D and DJ Lord of Public Enemy and B-Real of Cypress Hill. The name came from a Public Enemy song. They toured on the Make America Rage Again tour, playing songs from all three bands, and put out an EP and a full album. Morello said that for now, this was where people would hear Rage's music. On the twentieth of January 2017, the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, Audioslave reunited at the Prophets' Anti Inaugural Ball, their first show together in twelve years. Cornell said more Audioslave shows were always a possibility.[1] [2] [3]

Those shows never happened. On the eighteenth of May 2017, a few hours after a Soundgarden concert at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Chris Cornell was found dead in his hotel room. He was fifty two. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging. Cornell had struggled with depression for most of his life, and his wife said he had told her on the phone that night that he had taken an extra dose of his anxiety medication. Morello posted a tribute thanking Cornell for his friendship, his humor and his unmatched talent. A year later Brad Wilk said nothing would make him happier than a Rage reunion, but getting all four magnets to stick together was always the problem.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The final reunion, 2019 to 2024

On the first of November 2019, news broke that Rage Against the Machine would reunite in 2020, including two headline slots at Coachella. Chuck D said Prophets of Rage had simply been keeping Zack's seat warm, and that band came to an end. In February 2020 Rage announced the Public Service Announcement Tour, their first full world tour in twenty years, with Run the Jewels opening. All profits from the first three shows, in El Paso, Las Cruces and Glendale, Arizona, were pledged to immigrant rights groups. Then the pandemic hit. The tour was pushed from 2020 to 2021, and then again to 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

While the band sat idle, its music came roaring back. After the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, every Rage album climbed Apple Music's rock chart, and the debut re entered the Billboard 200. That summer protesters in Portland, Oregon chanted the defiant chorus of Killing in the Name at federal agents. Morello compared its spirit to Frederick Douglass, who said he truly became free the moment he told his master no. After the 2020 election, a video of Trump supporters dancing to the same song went viral, and the band's account replied that some people just did not get it. In 2021 the band released a short documentary about the song and the history of racism.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the ninth of July 2022, Rage finally returned, playing their first concert in eleven years to about thirty thousand people at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin. The band barely spoke between songs. Instead, the screens did the talking. Two weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe versus Wade, and the band had announced it would donate four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars from charity tickets to reproductive rights groups in Wisconsin and Illinois. At the show, messages about forced birth flashed across the screens, followed by the words abort the Supreme Court. Morello also shared that his great grandmother had died from an illegal, unsafe abortion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Two nights later, at the United Center in Chicago, Zack badly hurt his leg a few songs into the set. He finished the show sitting on a speaker, and his bandmates hugged him before crew members carried him off. It was a torn Achilles tendon. He sang the rest of the North American run seated, including sold out nights at Madison Square Garden, but in August the European leg was cancelled, including headline sets at Reading and Leeds. In October the band cancelled the remaining dates too. Zack wrote that he still looked down at his leg in disbelief, and that it felt like a sick joke the universe had played on him. In December, Tim Commerford revealed he had been treated for prostate cancer that year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

On the third of November 2023, Rage Against the Machine were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, introduced by Ice-T. Only Tom Morello turned up. He told the crowd that like most bands they had different views on things, including the Hall of Fame, and he dedicated the night to the fans, whom he called the fifth member of the band. Then, on the third of January 2024, Brad Wilk posted a message to fans. He did not want to string anyone along, he wrote, and the four of them would not be touring or playing live again. It was the band's third break up. In 2022 they had played just nineteen shows.[1] [2] [3]

Legacy and life after Rage

Rage Against the Machine released only three albums of original songs and one of covers, yet by 2010 they had sold more than sixteen million records. They fused heavy metal, rap, punk and funk with openly revolutionary lyrics, and their sound was borrowed by a wave of nu metal bands in the late nineties, though Rage are usually seen as forerunners rather than part of that scene. They won two Grammy Awards. Tom Morello, the guitarist who made his instrument sound like sirens, scratching records and falling bombs, was ranked eighteenth on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest guitarists of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Their most famous song keeps finding new life. In a 2009 poll by the Australian station Triple J, Killing in the Name came second in the Hottest 100 of all time. In 2021 British voters named it the UK's favourite Christmas number one ever, beating the Spice Girls with fifty one percent of the final vote. In January 2025 it became the first Rage song to pass one billion streams on Spotify. Morello thanked everyone who loved it, everyone who hated it, and everyone who enjoyed it without understanding it, calling that proof that rebel music and irony were alive and well.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello has stayed the busiest member. He has released solo albums under his own name, including The Atlas Underground in 2018, and has recorded with his son Roman. On the fifth of July 2025 he was musical director of Back to the Beginning, Black Sabbath's farewell concert at Villa Park in Birmingham, a ten hour show that he said he wanted to be the most important day in heavy metal history. Ozzy Osbourne sang seated on a throne, and died seventeen days later, aged seventy six. As of 2026, Zack de la Rocha's long promised solo album remains unreleased, and the band has kept to its word that it will not play live again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Rage Against the Machine

Zack de la Rocha and Tim Commerford. Zack and Tim met at elementary school in Irvine and played guitar together in a junior high band called Juvenile Expression. When Morello was looking for a rhythm section, Zack brought in his old friend as bassist. Their bond outlasted the band's first split. During the years apart, when rumors said Zack was estranged from the others, Tim said the two saw each other often and went surfing together.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha. Morello, a metal loving Harvard graduate, and de la Rocha, a hardcore punk singer obsessed with hip hop, were the band's creative engine and its main fault line. Their clashes shaped the music and eventually broke the band in 2000. Yet they reunited on stage in 2007, and in 2008 Zack said their relationship was better than it had ever been, even great. Their final shared stage was the injury shortened 2022 tour.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello and Chris Cornell. Cornell joined Morello, Commerford and Wilk in Audioslave in 2001, and they made three albums together. Cornell said the band helped save his life during a crisis with drink, though he left in 2007 amid personality clashes. The two later made peace, sharing stages in 2013 and 2014, and Morello called him one of the greatest singers ever. After Cornell's suicide in 2017, Morello paid tribute to his friendship, humor and talent.[1] [2] [3]

Rage Against the Machine and Rick Rubin. The producer Rick Rubin produced Renegades in 2000, and after Zack left he became the three remaining members' guide. He suggested Chris Cornell, sent them to group therapy, and produced Audioslave's first two albums. Rubin believed that with the right voice they could evolve the way the Yardbirds became Led Zeppelin. Commerford called him the angel at the crossroads, and Morello likened him to a fifth Beatle.[1] [2] [3]

Rage Against the Machine and Brendan O'Brien. The Atlanta producer Brendan O'Brien produced Evil Empire and The Battle of Los Angeles, and stayed in the band's orbit for decades. He later produced Audioslave's Revelations and the Prophets of Rage records, produced an album for a band Brad Wilk joined, and even played guitar on Tim Commerford's Future User album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Rage Against the Machine and Michael Moore. The documentary maker Michael Moore directed the videos for Sleep Now in the Fire and Testify. The first led to the chaotic 2000 shoot outside the New York Stock Exchange, where Moore was led away by police. The second mocked George W. Bush and Al Gore as two faces of the same candidate. Moore was also with the band at the 2000 MTV awards and joked afterwards that Commerford was simply bored.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen. Rage covered Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Springsteen later invited Morello to play it with him. Morello became a regular guest of the E Street Band, filled in for Steven Van Zandt in 2013 and played on most of the 2014 album High Hopes, which grew from his suggestion to revive its title song. Springsteen called Morello his muse.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello and Serj Tankian. Morello and Serj Tankian of System of a Down co founded Axis of Justice, a group linking music fans with grassroots causes such as immigrant rights and ending the death penalty. It released a live album with guests including Flea and Maynard James Keenan, and set up tents at Audioslave shows. The pair have kept working together for years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Morello and Paul Ryan. In 2012 the Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan named Rage among his favorite bands, saying he liked the sound but not the lyrics. Morello replied in Rolling Stone that Ryan was the embodiment of the machine the band raged against, and wondered aloud which anti capitalist song was Ryan's favorite. Rolling Stone noted Ryan again when reviewing the 2022 reunion show.[1] [2] [3]

Rage Against the Machine and Jon and Tracy Morter. Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple from Essex, launched the 2009 Facebook campaign that made Killing in the Name the UK Christmas number one. The band backed them publicly and gave the proceeds to charity, and at the free Finsbury Park show in 2010 the Morters were handed a cheque on stage for the money raised.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Morello and Maynard James Keenan. Morello's high school friend Adam Jones moved to Los Angeles too, and Morello introduced Jones and Maynard James Keenan to the drummer Danny Carey, helping to form Tool. Keenan taught Morello drop D tuning, which led to the riff of Killing in the Name, and he sang guest vocals on Know Your Enemy on Rage's debut.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Rage Against the Machine

• Tom Morello's great uncle was Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya. Morello's father, Ngethe Njoroge, took part in the Mau Mau uprising and became Kenya's first ambassador to the United Nations. His great uncle Jomo Kenyatta led Kenya as its first elected president.[1]
• Morello's college band won an Ivy League contest with a future Nobel Prize winner on keyboards. At Harvard, Morello's band Bored of Education won the Ivy League Battle of the Bands in 1986. Their keyboard player was Carolyn Bertozzi, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022.[1]
• Before Rage, Tom Morello briefly worked as a stripper at bachelorette parties. Broke after moving to Los Angeles, Morello did a few bachelorette party gigs as an exotic dancer. He told Rolling Stone that a Commodores funk classic was his go to song.[1] [2]
• Morello helped bring together the founding members of Tool. His high school friend Adam Jones also moved to Los Angeles, and Morello introduced Jones and Maynard James Keenan to drummer Danny Carey. Those three went on to form Tool.[1]
• The Killing in the Name riff was born during a guitar lesson and saved on a Radio Shack recorder. Morello was showing a student drop D tuning, a trick he had learned from Maynard James Keenan. The first pattern he played was the riff, so he paused the lesson to record it.[1] [2]
• Rage's A and R man wanted to cut the famous stop start section of Killing in the Name. Morello said Epic's Michael Goldstone heard a hit single but asked them to drop the part where the song keeps stopping. The band kept it, and Morello says history proved them right.[1]
• The lyrics to Killing in the Name were deliberately left out of the debut album's booklet. The booklet lists the song's title and then skips straight to the next track. Morello said they wanted that one to stand on its own among the band's more poetic songs.[1] [2]
• Rage albums carried a note that no samples, keyboards or synthesizers were used. Because Morello's guitar tricks sounded like turntables and sirens, the band stated in their sleeve notes that every sound was played live. Audioslave later printed a similar note.[1] [2]
• Morello used the same amp settings for decades after his old amp was stolen. He bought a Marshall JCM800 head after his previous amp was stolen from his van, chose his settings around 1988, and never changed them. He even etched marks on the knobs.[1] [2]
• The boy on the Evil Empire cover later became an author and businessman. The cover is an altered Mel Ramos painting of the comic hero Crimebuster. The model was Ari Meisel at age eleven, and the original painting was a birthday present to him from Ramos.[1]
• Producer Garth Richardson's professional name, GGGarth, is a joke about his own stutter. Richardson, who produced Rage's debut, is the son of the Guess Who producer Jack Richardson. The debut earned him a Grammy nomination for engineering.[1]
• Guerrilla Radio is Rage's only song ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100. Despite two number one albums, the band's lone Hot 100 entry was Guerrilla Radio in 1999, peaking at number sixty nine. It also won a Grammy.[1]
• The Battle of Los Angeles stopped Mariah Carey's Rainbow from reaching number one. Rage's third album sold around four hundred and twenty thousand copies in its first week in November 1999, enough to top the Billboard 200 ahead of Carey's new release.[1]
• Sleep Now in the Fire ends with a snippet of Korean pop radio picked up by a guitar pedal. At the very end of the track you can hear a fragment of a Korean pop station, accidentally caught through one of Tom Morello's effects pedals and left in.[1]
• The Sleep Now in the Fire video shows a man holding a Donald Trump for President sign. Shot in January 2000, when Trump was flirting with a presidential run, the video caught a supporter with a placard. People noticed it again during the 2016 election.[1]
• A BBC Radio 1 DJ accidentally played the uncensored Killing in the Name in 1993. On the twenty first of February 1993, Bruno Brookes was busy recording an advert during his chart show and the full version went out. Listeners made one hundred and thirty eight complaints.[1] [2]
• In 2008 an Asda supermarket in Preston played Killing in the Name over its speakers. Shoppers complained about the swearing echoing through the aisles in Lancashire, and the supermarket chain issued an apology.[1]
• Killing in the Name holds a Guinness record as the UK's fastest selling digital track. In its Christmas 2009 chart week it sold five hundred and two thousand six hundred and seventy two downloads, earning a place in the 2011 Guinness World Records.[1]
• Killing in the Name was the first download only single to become UK Christmas number one. The BBC reported that it was also the biggest first week download total in UK chart history at the time.[1] [2]
• Bulls on Parade is the defensive theme of the NFL's Houston Texans. It plays at home games to fire up the crowd and after big defensive stops. The New York Red Bulls football club also use it as their goal song.[1]
• Stone Cold Steve Austin said Bulls on Parade inspired his wrestling entrance music. When the wrestler changed his character, he pointed to Bulls on Parade when pitching his new entrance theme to the WWE music producer Jim Johnston.[1]
• Defeating Tom Morello unlocks Bulls on Parade in the video game Guitar Hero III. Morello appears as the first boss in the game's career mode, dueling the player in a nightclub. Beat him and you play Bulls on Parade together as an encore.[1] [2]
• Brad Wilk drummed on Black Sabbath's final studio album, 13. Sabbath recruited Wilk to play on 13, released in June 2013, their first album with Ozzy Osbourne in decades. He had grown up worshipping drummers like John Bonham.[1]
• Brad Wilk has type one diabetes and helped create a sugar free lemonade. Diagnosed in 1997, Wilk has raised money for diabetes research. He developed a sugar free drink called Olade, cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in 2009.[1]
• Tim Commerford used his own blood to help color a limited vinyl pressing. For Record Store Day in 2015, his band Future User released a red vinyl edition of their album SteroidsOrHeroin, and Commerford added his own blood to the coloring.[1]
• Zack de la Rocha's father was part of the first Chicano art collective shown at a major museum. Beto de la Rocha was a muralist in Los Four, whose work was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1973.[1]
• Zack de la Rocha once played drums in the hardcore band No For An Answer. Before he sang for Inside Out, Zack drummed briefly for No For An Answer in 1988 and played guitar in the bands Hard Stance and Farside.[1]
• Zack de la Rocha testified before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. In 1999 he wore a suit and tie to speak at the United Nations in support of a new trial for the death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.[1] [2]
• After the September 11 attacks, a Clear Channel memo listed every single Rage Against the Machine song. The 2001 memo named songs it considered questionable for radio. Rage were uniquely listed with their entire catalog.[1]
• Audioslave paid a Liverpool band thirty thousand dollars to share the name. An unsigned Liverpool group was already called Audioslave. After the settlement, the British band renamed itself The Most Terrifying Thing.[1]
• Audioslave were the first band ever to play on the marquee of David Letterman's theater. Their first public show, in November 2002, was a short set on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway.[1]
• Morello named his sons after guitarist Randy Rhoads and quarterback Roman Gabriel. Both men had posters on his bedroom wall as a boy. Rhoads played guitar for Ozzy Osbourne, and Gabriel was a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams.[1] [2]
• Tom Morello had an uncredited role as an alien officer in Star Trek: Insurrection. A lifelong science fiction fan, he played a Son'a officer in the 1998 film and later made a cameo in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.[1]
• Morello's mother founded Parents for Rock and Rap to fight music censorship. Mary Morello, a schoolteacher and socialist, set up the group in 1987 to counter Tipper Gore's campaign for warning labels, years before her son was famous.[1]
• Rage's first ever gig opened with an instrumental version of Killing in the Name. At California State University, Northridge, on the twenty third of October 1991, the song had no words yet. Zack wrote them later.[1] [2] [3]
• Before Rage, Brad Wilk played in a band with Eddie Vedder. Wilk was in a group called Indian Style with Vedder, and he later tried out for Pearl Jam as well.[1]
• A Vancouver radio station once looped Killing in the Name for about thirty hours. In June 2022, after its staff were laid off, KISS radio played the song over and over before relaunching as a rock station called Sonic.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.