Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello admitted that he tried to imitate late Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads when he started playing guitar in a new Backstory interview, as transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.
“I don’t think guitar players got lazy. There tends to be – like, when you pick up a guitar, the reason you pick it up is because you love other guitar players, right, and you consider good guitar playing to sound like the guitar players you like and love.
“There’s nothing wrong in that, there’s an inherent conservatism in that. I started playing when I was 17 years old, so I started playing rather late, and I tried to play like my heroes – Randy Rhoads, Steve Vai, players like that.
“An epiphany was a moment in the early ’90s, in the very beginning days of Rage Against the Machine. We were opening up for two cover bands at a college somewhere in the San Fernando Valley and each of the cover bands that we were opening up for had a shredding guitar player, like, a really talented technician in the band.
“I thought, ‘If this early, in this crappy gig, like, on a Wednesday night in the Valley, there are two guitar players with this incredible technique…’, I thought, ‘There doesn’t need to be three.’
“I really began practicing my eccentricities in my playing and trying to find my own lane and my own voice, which opened up a world of sonic possibilities.”
He later said, “I think there’s a distinction between musicians and artists. Both are great, both can make great music, but there are plenty of artists on the guitar who have limited technical capabilities.
“If you look at The Ramones, The Clash, to the Sex Pistols, to whoever, I think that’s really what the challenge is. It’s fine if your aspirations are to sound exactly like your guitar heroes, that’s something you can do.
“If your aspirations are to have a thing in common with your guitar heroes, that is finding your own voice, that’s something that’s possible as well but maybe takes a little bit more inspiration.”
Morello also discussed the digital world of gear, “I personally never went into the digital world, I’ve used the same setup since 1988. I’m very much a creature of, like, embracing limitations in that regard.
“As a young man, I quested for the perfect sound with the wrong guitar and the wrong amp, and then one day in late 1988, frustrated, I spent a couple of hours at rehearsal and I dialed my amp to the best I could make it.
“I marked those settings and they haven’t changed since. That amp and that guitar will be played at the show tonight here with those same settings and that same guitar that I decided to settle for.
“And rather than worrying about chasing some imagined tone, I said, ‘This is my tone, and now I’m going to create with that and let the chips fall where they may.'”
