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“By day I’m an organizer and an activist, a guy who believes in rallying the troops and in standing up in an uncompromising way for social justice. The Nightwatchman believes in bitterness and revenge.”
The Nightwatchman is an alter ego of sorts for Tom Morello, who made his name as the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and then with Audioslave. As the Nightwatchman, he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic one and recorded One Man Revolution, an album of protest music. It’s political, progressive, pro-union and confrontational—an extension of the aesthetic he brought to Rage Against the Machine—and it’s self-consciously so. Morello is aware of the tradition he’s joining by making such music, and invokes the message on Woody Guthrie’s guitar when he sings that “this machine here / well it kills fascists, too.”
Morello appeared in New Orleans as the Nightwatchman when he came to town with the Future of Music Coalition to see how musicians could play a part in the city’s recovery, and he performed with Steve Earle, Allison Moorer, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and more at a benefit at Tipitina’s last November. He’ll return Tuesday, June 19, this time playing the House of Blues.
Was your appearance as the Nightwatchman at Tipitina’s as part of the Future of Music Coalition benefit one of the first solo appearances?
No, I’ve been playing hundreds of shows over the last five years. It started literally playing open mic nights around Hollywood and the valley, and that’s how I started amassing a catalogue of songs. Over the course of the last five years, I’ve played union rallies and peace marches. I was tear-gassed at the FTA riots in Miami in 2003 or early 2004, I was arrested doing civil disobedience at the Los Angeles airport for striking hotel workers. I’ve opened for Michael Moore on a speaking tour, and have played with Billy Bragg and Steve Earle, so there has been many a show.
It’s really great to hear someone making protest music again. I presume you see this as a continuation of what you were doing in Rage Against the Machine.
Absolutely. The album is called One Man Revolution for a reason. Since I was 17, I’ve been in rock bands and I’ve been in political organizations, and this has been a way to take my political convictions into my own hands. There’s a great freedom in being able to play whenever, wherever and for whatever cause—it’s very liberating.
For a while, I was doing the balancing act between the arena rock of Audioslave and the non-profit political organization I was running with Serj Tankian (of System of a Down) called Axis of Justice. It felt like something was missing. As an artist, I felt a need to express my feelings and convictions, and the Nightwatchman grew from there.
This seems like very function-based music. Do you agree? Do you think about how this music is going to be used?
Occasionally. There are really two songs on the record that were written from a very conscious standpoint. One was “Union Song,” and that came after playing countless union rallies, and all the songs that were played came from the 1960s or earlier. I thought, “We need songs for now.” We need songs for globalization, and songs that incorporate Spanish in them, and songs for cold nights on the picket lines, and songs of solidarity and encouragement for now. The rest of the songs came from somewhere I don’t know. They weren’t written for a specific purpose. I put the antenna up and whatever came down, came down.
“No One Left” seems like one of the most important songs on the record because it puts a human face on the rhetoric.
That’s right. In the aftermath of 9/11, there were a lot of songs written about various aspects, and I kept waiting for someone to write that song and nobody did. Losing a daughter or a father, that pain is equal if it happens in Manhattan or if it happens in Baghdad. If you look at loss in that very human way, in a family oriented way, it reorients your perspective on who it’s okay to kill.
Some of this music is clearly designed to rally the troops, and it’s music made with a purpose in mind.
The goal very early on was to be the black Woody Guthrie. Two things I’ve always been drawn to are heavy music and rebel music, and music doesn’t need a wall of Marshall stacks to be heavy. I think One Man Revolution is the heaviest record I’ve been involved in, and there isn’t a single guitar solo on it. From Springsteen’s Nebraska record to Dylan to Woody Guthrie to the darker Johnny Cash songs, even Leonard Cohen and Roger Waters, the right lyrical couplet can be heavier than an entire Metallica album.
What you’re saying reminds me that one of our writers wrote reflecting on this year’s Jazz Fest wondered when someone would write new protest songs so that people wouldn’t have to pull out Edwin Starr’s “War” every time.
I’ve had that experience so many times. I played the protests around the Republican National Convention in New York City, and there are 50,000 union workers in the streets of New York City. I played “Union Song” and afterwards, they said, “Thank you.” Someone was writing songs about now.
From my very first days of college protests, people would sing these songs from the 1960s and I’d say, “Yeah, that’s fine, but what does it have to do with me?” That’s why bands like Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down resonate, because it’s protest music for the ’90s. What I’m trying to do with this music is continue that thread from Joe Hill to Pete Seeger to Public Enemy to Rage Against the Machine to the Nightwatchman.
When making music like this, do you worry about how the music will age?
That’s the least of my concerns. (laughing). As an artist, you have one responsibility only and that’s telling the truth as you see it through your art.
Is it safe to say that One Man Revolution is an angry record? Do you find anger and similar intense emotions make listeners uncomfortable?
I take your word for it from the outside. For me, it’s a true record; it’s an honest record.
I think a lot of music makes people too comfortable, and music often serves as a bread-and-circuses act to divert attention from the crimes and misdemeanors being done in our names. We have a war criminal in the White House…
I’ve been waiting to find someone else who thought that.
It’s not hyperbole. There are three categories of war crimes: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and crimes against the norms of war. This administration is guilty of all three. Look it up. First strike aggression against a sovereign nation is a war crime. Torture is a war crime. Secret prisons are a war crime. It’s incredible to me the tepid response to the horrific administration in office.
What you’re saying reminds me of something else I was thinking during Jazz Fest: How bad do things have to get to people to speak out? I was disappointed so few musicians had anything to say about the war and the non-existent federal response to Katrina.
You hit the nail on the head. Forget this horrific crime going on halfway around the world, but then there’s your beautiful city, which was completely abandoned. I’m a person who pays attention to the national affairs, and I was aghast at how the Bush administration has abandoned one of America’s greatest cities.
When we were there (last November), the thing that was so disheartening was that it didn’t look like help was coming. We spent a lot of time with different volunteer groups from around the country and around the world that were doing great work one home at a time, but then there are scenes that look like they’re post-Hiroshima with one or two FEMA trailers.
So what did you take from your visit to New Orleans?
One of the things I took was that I wanted to make New Orleans one of the principal focuses of my non-profit organization, Axis of Justice, over the next few years, whether it’s in recruiting and sending our own volunteer teams down, or refurbishing homes of musicians who lost everything. There’s so much work to be done that’s not being done by the government and we’re determined to figure out what way we could lend a hand, support-wise or monetarily.
