“I think it was a way of exerting some control,” Morello says. Instead, he practiced daily, sometimes logging up to eight hours a day. Given my Catholic upbringing, that wasn’t really on the table.” “And that was Robert Johnson, the famed blues guitar player who had to sell his soul to the devil to get good. “I’ve only ever heard of one guitarist who started that late and made albums,” he says. She said, ‘Whenever you’re confronted with racism, you’re the one that has to resist it and has to fight back.’ I was like, ‘I’m 5.’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, even when you’re 5.’ ”Īt 17, Morello, by then a political science major at Harvard University, picked up his first guitar. My mom told me about a fella by the name of Malcolm X. There was this older kid who’d just pound me every day and N-word me.
“No, it happened at day care when I was 5 years old. “People will sometimes ask, ‘How were you politicized?,’ assuming it was reading a Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn text,” he says. It is no surprise, then, that she taught her son - the only Black kid in town - to fight for his rights from a young age. Mary, he says, “remains the most radical member of the Morello family.” At 98 years old, she continues to be an outspoken activist involved with a number of social justice organizations. The son of a Kenyan diplomat and an Italian American schoolteacher, Morello was raised by his single mother, Mary, in the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. Over the years, Morello has established himself as a barrier-breaking, genre-bending rock legend with a remarkable body of work. In fact, referring to Morello as simply “a guitar player” doesn’t do his work justice. Though he jokes that he likes to think he’s still 22, it recently dawned on him that it’s been nearly 30 years since his talents were introduced to the world through Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album in 1991.
I got my AARP card in the mail seven years ago. Tom Morello, most widely known as the guitarist for rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, laughs when he realizes he’s been an AARP member for years.
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