Tom Morello has revealed the unlikely inspiration a future hard rock guitar hero had on him years before he founded Rage Against The Machine.
Morello was a student at Harvard University in the mid-80s when he stumbled across a rising Boston band named Extreme and their guitarist Nuno Bettencourt.
“When I was at Harvard University, on Wednesday nights there was a metal night at a club in downtown Boston,” Morello tells Classic Rock in a new interview. “Our favourite band was called Extreme, which featured, at the time, a 16 or 17-year-old-guitar wunderkind, Nuno Bettencourt. I remember thinking: ‘This is one of the best guitar players in the world, and he’s a high-school kid.’ I couldn’t believe it. He was one of my guitar heroes. This would’ve been 1985, 1986.’”
Morello’s sense of impending greatness wasn’t off. Within a few years, Extreme had bagged a major label deal and would go on to release 1990’s multi-platinum Pornograffitti album and the single More Than Words, which reached No.1 in the US. Bettencourt himself would be hailed as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation – something Morello was fully aware of.
“Cut to 1999, and it’s the Rage Against The Machine Battle Of Los Angeles tour,” he tells Classic Rock. “We’re playing in Boston, and there’s a meet-and-greet thing. I’m looking at the names of who’s on the list, and the name Nuno Bettencourt is there. I’m like: ‘Make sure I see that guy.’ So Nuno comes up to me and says: ‘Great show.’ I was like: ‘Dude, you have no idea. I’ve been a fan of yours for fifteen years.’ And since that day we’ve been great friends.”
Morello also reveals that he’s one of only a handful of people to have held the guitar played by his hero Randy Rhoads.
“I was instrumental in getting Randy Rhoads into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame,” the RATM man says of the guitarist, who famously played with Ozzy Osbourne and died in 1982. His sister, who’s lovely, is very protective of all the stuff. It’s sealed away somewhere in a secret vault and no one knows where it is. I’d asked her if I could see it, and she said: “Nobody sees it.’ You gotta respect that.
“Cut to about a year later, and she texts me saying the guitar is at her house that afternoon, on its way back from the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and now would I like to go see it? His mom didn’t want anyone else to ever play it again, but I got to hold it. That was pretty emotional for me. The crazy thing was that the leather guitar strap still smelled of cigarette smoke. He was performing up until the day he died, so that strap had smoke from 1982 left in it.”
Read the full interview with Tom Morello in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, on sale now. Order it online here.
