As guitarist for both Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, Harvard-educated Tom Morello (the nephew of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president) trafficked in a fiery brand of electrified thrash pitched somewhere between metal’s repetitive riffing, punk’s angry noise and hip hop’s improvised beatboxing. On One Man Revolution (a solo album under the name the Nightwatchman, recently issued on Epic), Morello has exchanged his inner Jimmy Page for Springsteen’s Nebraska-era Woody Guthrie, singing Marxist-leaning songs of protest and giving vent to his most passionate antiwar rants.

I’m not sure that I’d characterize The Nightwatchman as “anti-war” so much as “anti-.”
[Laughs] Sure, sure. Fanning the flames of discontent. Bring the war on home.

Where did the name the Nightwatchman come from? It’s almost like a character you inhabit, some kind of leftist comic-book vigilante or Marxist Batman.
I began by playing open-mic nights at little coffeehouses around L.A. around four years ago. It occurred to me the first couple of times to not sign up under my own name to keep my rock power anonymous, but it also seemed like the body of songs I was writing was very different than my work as “the Daywatchman,” an electric guitar player. It felt right from the very beginning and the moniker stuck.

In terms of personae, to go from a Rolling Stone “top-20-of-all-time” guitarist to Billy Bragg’s more pissed-off musical cousin is quite a leap of faith. Most fans of one style or the other may not weather the transition quite as easily as you seem to have done.
I’ve always been a fan of music that’s on the darker side and heavy. It’s occurred to me over the last few years that sometimes the darkest, heaviest music isn’t necessarily played through Marshall stacks or with electric guitars, but rather with nylon strings and harmonica. If you look at Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, or some of the latter-day Johnny Cash songs, “When The Man Comes Around” for example, or some of Leonard Cohen’s best songs, they’re deeper and darker than any Metallica song. And there’s certainly a corner of my artistic soul that is black as pitch, and these songs came out of those recesses.

Given the anti-everything theme that’s so pervasive on this album—and I’m familiar with your Axis Of Justice [a non-profit social organization Morello co-founded—Ed.] work, to be clear—I’m wondering if there was a specific moment during the last six years of the current administration when you said, “I have to make this album.”
It really was the day after the 2004 elections, the very next morning. Until that time, this had been a side project. But at that point, I said, “This Nightwatchman music is going to be an important part of what I do from now on.” And I started to record the songs and began playing hundreds more shows, whether they were pro-union rallies, at anarchist bicycle shops, or at (Los Angeles’) Hotel Café. The genesis of the record was that I played an Amnesty International benefit show with Incubus in Portland. At the time they were making a record with Brendan O’Brien, and they gave him a positive review of the Nightwatchman show. And he called me up and said, “Send me some demos.” So I sent him two and then he phoned me again and said, “Let’s make a record!”

I live in Portland, and the place is well-suited to be the birthplace of such a character. Bush the First used to call Portland “Little Beirut” because of all the protesters he encountered the few times he ever visited here.
[Laughs] Well, there’s something to hang your hat on, I guess.

Do you think it’s possible to plumb all the shit out of our system from the past eight years and get back on track by the 2008 elections? Watching all the warm-ups and political posturing from the presidential candidates, I’m starting to doubt it. It’s like they’re already part of the problem.
I think it’s highly unlikely. Certainly, all the progressive and radical change we’ve seen in this country—things that used to be considered beyond the pale of discussion, they were so radical, like the idea that women could vote, or lunch counters in the South should be desegregated, or if we should limit the workday to eight hours—those were insane notions at the time. And they didn’t come to pass because of the wisdom of a particular administration or the benevolence of a particular Supreme Court. They happened because of people like you and me, people who are reading this article. People whose names aren’t in history books stood up for their rights where they lived, where they worked, where they went to school, and fought, struggled and sometimes died for social justice.

This makes me think of something you said recently to another journalist—that the converted in the U.S. need a serious kick up the ass. It makes me think that liberalism in this country is more concerned with political correctness and posturing than actually achieving hard results, getting change to happen.
Yeah, this record is definitely not designed for the moderate left, you know? This is shaking the tree to find zealots, martyrs, rebels, revolutionaries and pure souls who are willing to live their commitment to fight for change.

I worry that by the time we get to the election we’ll have discovered that there aren’t any candidates truly committed to laying down on the tracks for their beliefs.
I don’t think you can sit back and think that casting your ballot into the void every four years is how change is affected in this country or anywhere else. That’s not how things have happened before. It’s not how the Berlin Wall fell, it’s not how Apartheid ended; it happens through people organizing and fighting for their rights. [There is] revulsion over what is undoubtedly the worst administration in the history of our republic. In some ways, even though it’s the worst ever, it’s been very successful in achieving its aims. It’s not at all ironic when you see Bush in some flyboy suit standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with this sign behind him saying “Mission Accomplished.” I think that, for him, his mission very much was accomplished in that moment. A couple of very rich corporations grew much richer over that illicit and immoral war, and at the end of the day, I do believe that this was indeed his mission. So you and I can laugh all we want at what a buffoon we think he is, but he and Cheney and the war-criminal cabal are all high-fiving one another, slipping into retirement well-heeled.

The other “Mission Accomplished” that I think is totally lost is the utter hypocrisy of this administration decrying the “sectarian warfare” we’re seeing in Iraq while setting up a completely sectarian situation here at home. Most people fail to grasp the parallels between the highly militant Islam they profess to hate and the highly militant form of Christianity espoused by this administration.
I think it’s in subservience to the most narrow and wealthiest sectors of society, too. That’s the core of their constituent base. And then they use the rhetoric of the Christian right to inflame the anti-gay movement, for example, and to throw sand in the eye of the real issue, which is that they’re gouging the world of all its money and resources and throwing soldiers like so much hamburger into these ridiculous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with untold civilian losses we’ll probably never fully understand or account for. If the laws of the Geneva Convention or Nuremburg were applied to this situation, impeachment would definitely be deemed too good for Bush and his crowd.

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