Rage Against The Machine
In 1992 I was one of the guitarists in our high school jazz band and we went to San Diego, along with the marching band, for a large regional or national competition. While there, we went to Sea World and did other touristy stuff around town. After one of the competitions, there were a few bands playing a free show at, I believe, SDU.
We had some free time, so we all went down and watched the show. I remember there was a really mellow Grateful Dead-esque band named Jambay, who’s CD I may still own. One of the other bands was Rage Against the Machine. All the members of the rhythm section of the school’s jazz band were metal heads (as shocking as that might seem) and we were all blown away by RATM as Zack de la Rocha screamed “You’ve got a fucking bullet in your head!” and Tom Morello made sounds with his guitar that were other worldly, using only pedals. Their performance was so raw and vibrant…they had the whole crowd getting into the music and the message it carried.
I was sold. I plopped down the last few bucks I had and bought the cassette they had for sell. Even the black and white cassette cover was crazy; xeroxed stock quotes littered the cover as a background, with “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE” floating above the stock quotes in bold, all caps sans serif font and rotated at an angle . There was an unlit match, that had been hand taped to the cover, as a finishing touch.
According to the bio on the official Rage Against The Machine webpage, the band recorded, produced, and released the 12 track cassette in 1992. A very impressive 5,000 copies of the tape were sold at shows and through their fan club. Most of the tracks on the tape later became the rough sequence of songs for the band’s self-titled, major label release on Epic records. Three songs on the cassette have never been re-released.
I had an entire home’s worth of stuff sitting in storage for almost a decade. Last year I had all that stuff shipped to me from El Paso. A couple of night’s ago I was going through the boxes, looking for a bunch 4-track recordings I made back in my youth, and I stumbled across this:
The tape still played and sounded just like I remember it sounding on that long bus ride back to sunny El Paso. It’s funny to think that now anyone can slap together some drum and bass loops on their computer, sing a few lines, add some effects, and then burn a CD of their work, all with very little overall effort. Knowing that makes me appreciate this tape just a little bit more.
Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.