The band Tom Morello called his musical “cornerstone”

Posted On November 17, 2025November 17, 2025

If your average metalhead were to reel off the key guitarists of the 1990s, it’s a safe bet that Tom Morello will pop up within the first three counts.

He was a creature of the particular moment when alternative music exploded onto the US mainstream charts early in the decade. Founding Rage Against the Machine along with rapper Zach de la Rocha, the politically charged fusion of metal and rap would launch them as one of the leading poster boys of the Lollapalooza generation, along with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins, and pave the way for nu-metal’s turntable rock crunch, for better or worse.

It was Morello’s distinct guitar technique that most will remember. Along with de la Rocha’s lyrical spits at the US imperial machine, novel flexes of toggle-switched whammy mayhem would bring a new sonic flourish to the alternative world, and the downtuned strings would plumb an extra depth of heavyweight that swung with groovier clout amid his funk and hip-hop swagger. For a new generation, Morello was their guitar god.

Yet, like every other guitar shredder and much of the metal world, a fascination with rock’s darker offshoot stemmed from the Birmingham burnishing of Black Sabbath, conjuring several totemic records across the early 1970s that, along with the harder ends of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, paved the way for the nascent new wave of British heavy metal by the decade’s close. Many a curious young music fan’s intrepid rummage through their elder sibling’s record collection would often be struck by the arresting artwork before actually dropping a needle on the vinyl.

“I remember very clearly being scared shitless when I saw the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover as a child… and then I fell in love with the music,” Morello recalled to Guitar World.

Adding, “Paranoid was the first record I got. ‘Iron Man’ was the first hook that drew me in, and it began riff imprinting on me. It’s a cornerstone of every song I’ve ever been a part of”.

Few artists can count such a foundational string of albums as Black Sabbath’s first five record run, still counting gems up until even 1978’s patchy but frenzied Never Say Die! But it’s those early few that channel the spook factor, eerie yet captivating hacks of engulfing proto-metal that dwell in the corners of some cobwebbed dungeon or forgotten corner of an English castle.

It’s no wonder it caught a hook in Morello as a kid, beckoning with fearsome allure like the captivating pull of a horror movie you know you’ll pay for later with sleepless nights, but you just can’t tear your eyes away.

Jump fifty or so years later, and Morello stepped up to music director duties of the Back to the Beginning, Black Sabbath’s farewell concert in Birmingham’s Villa Park stadium, corralling everybody from Metallica, Slayer, Guns N’ Roses, and Alice in Chains to pay their respects and play out a final metal send-off to the band that started it all.

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