Rage Against The Machine First Album Paycheck Revealed

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Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello revealed how much money the band were paid to spend for their debut album in a new Guitar World interview.

“When we were doing the demos for the first Rage Against the Machine record, we had an engineer called Auburn Burrell and I borrowed his Les Paul for the end part of ‘Bullet in the Head,’ the big outro section.

“When we were going in to make the record, I had my Telecaster and ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar, and we each had $600 to spend on gear.

“I wanted a Les Paul to double my principle guitars. I saw it on the wall of West LA Music in Santa Monica Boulevard and it was exactly the same color as Taco Bell hot sauce. The reason I know that is because Taco Bell was one of the main food staples of the squat I was living in.

“I thought to myself, ‘That guitar looks exactly like the taco sauce we eat all the time!’ and that’s why I bought it. It was not a particularly expensive guitar and rarely stayed in tune, but it became the main overdub guitar for all my drop-D songs from that day forward – including ‘Killing in the Name,’ the end of ‘Freedom,’ the end of ‘Take the Power Back’ and I used it just the other day on my newest recordings!”

He said about music theory, “There was a brilliant book called The Guitar Handbook which really helped flesh out some music theory for me, especially in terms of knowing what to call the scales I was using.

“I had figured out 86%of it on my own just from jamming so of course, I was very surprised to find out that the feel and scales of different solos actually had names. [Laughs]

“For harmonic minor, I would say Randy Rhoads was the principal influence for me. He had one foot firmly planted in this classical minor key, almost violin-like proficiency, and another in flat-out blues jamming to the nth degree. That always appealed to me.”

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Brett Buchanan
Brett previously hosted the BWR wrestling and MMA podcast, interviewing pro wrestling and MMA stars like Kurt Angle, Seth Rollins, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, Bruce Buffer, AJ Styles, Rob Van Dam, Jeff Hardy, Edge, and DDP. After ending BWR, Brett opened GrungeReport.net in May 2009. The site changed its name to AlternativeNation.net in June 2013.  Brett ran Scott Weiland's social media accounts for his final 'Master Blaster' tour in fall 2015 and continued to run the accounts after Weiland's death until July 2016. On Alternative Nation, Brett controls all aspects of the website and reports the day to day news.  He has interviewed members of Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Imagine Dragons, Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Stone Temple Pilots, and The Smiths. Brett has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal and on the Reelz Channel. You can reach Brett at contact @alternativenation.net