Rock & Roll Hall Of Famers Rage Against The Machine and progressive alternative metal favs Tool have inextricable ties. Their respective guitarists Tom Morello and Adam Jones have maintained a lifelong friendship, even starting a band together in their teenage years dubbed The Electric Sheep.
While Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan guested on Rage Against The Machine‘s self-titled debut album, appearing on the track “Know Your Enemy“, his involvement with that album and the band runs deeper than that. Appearing recently on the Lipps Service podcast, Morello opened up on how a fateful guitar lesson from Keenan went on to help create two of their band’s pivotal early tracks.
Speaking of that period in history, Morello shared [transcribed by theprp.com]:
“…We began jamming around, jamming with different bass players, different singers, including — we played with Maynard [James Keenan] at one point… It was in some 18-year-old bass players like bedroom. Me, Brad [Wilk], Maynard, and some dude named Noah jammed for… There was a recording somewhere… It was some of the riffs that later would be [used] elsewhere. Maynard‘s the dude who taught me how to do drop D tuning. He did. Quick sidebar: this is like for fans of Tool and Rage Against The Machine.
So Maynard, you know the Seattle sound was the thing, they were doing drop t-tuning, I didn’t know how to do it. So I was over at his place, and he showed me, and he was playing a riff that would become [Tool‘s] “Sober“. And the first riff that came out of my fingers when he showed me Drop D tuning was the riff from ‘Freedom‘, Rage‘s song ‘Freedom‘, and those two were sort of a song one afternoon.
And then later when Rage became a band I said, you know, ‘I don’t know if you remember, but we were jamming on that thing one time and like I’d like my half back please’ [laughter] .’ …I think Tool were off and running at that point.”
