TOM MORELLO
What guitars do you mainly use live and
for recording?
I’ve used a lot, but I only have two main
guitars. One is sort of a Frankenstein guitar, which is called “Arm the Homeless,”
and I have been customizing piece by
piece for years. It features a Kramer neck,
EMG pickups, Floyd Rose Tremolo and
other knob and switch modifications.
The other one is my stock 1982 Fender
Telecaster: “Sendero Luminoso.”
At the time I was writing songs in drop-D tuning and my only other guitar had a
locking nut so I couldn’t do the tuning.
My roommate needed a Marshall head
and I had an extra, so I traded him the
head for that ’ 82 Tele. And that’s how I
got my main guitars [laughs]—by piecing
one together and trading equipment for
the other. It wasn’t based on research and
development with experiments, but just
Photo: Ali Mclean, aliontheair.blogspot.com
the guitars that fell into my hands. I just
decided to stop worrying so much about
seeking some magical guitar and tone, but
instead using what I had to write music
effectively and incorporate a unique tone
that I did have.
When doing covers like Dylan’s “Maggie’s
Farm,” Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom
Joad” and Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just
Kill A Man,” for the Renegades album, how
did you balance lending your own touch
and doing justice to the originals?
All of the music, except for maybe one or
two songs, was written pretty independently of any lyrical content. So, we basically
wrote songs with strong riffs and good
arrangements that we thought were rocking and Zach decided what he was going
to sing on. The riffs on “Maggie’s Farm”
were written as a cool Rage Against the
Machine riff or jam and it later had
