Tom Morello recently discussed blaming himself for Rage Against The Machine breaking apart, sharing his thoughts in a post by The Rolling Stone.
The guitarist explained how he initially envisioned his career and how he viewed the band’s split as a major personal failure.
“The final crucial failure was being unable to keep that band together,” Morello said. “And I sort of saw myself as like, I’ll be in one band, for like Jimmy Page or in Led Zeppelin, and that’s the thing. And it just did not happen. What felt like a tremendous failure. Like the dream is real. Like you’re able to have the politics that you believe in and the music that you love, you know, on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and it just goes away.”
He then reflected on how this apparent failure ultimately led to new opportunities and collaborations throughout his musical journey.
“And it opened the door to, you know, Audioslave, to playing with Bruce Springsteen, to collaborating with everybody from, you know, Joan Baez to Wu-Tang Clan to playing with my son now,” Morello continued. “And the greatest musical experience of my life, where, you know, one door closed and a million beautiful windows opened. I blamed myself for all those failures, and they were the best thing that could possibly happen to me.”
Morello’s reflection points back to a long history of breakups, reunions and reinventions for the band, a story that began when Rage Against the Machine first came apart more than two decades ago.
The band’s initial split came on October 18, 2000, when frontman Zack de la Rocha announced he was leaving Rage Against the Machine after nine years. The rest of the group — Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk — were reportedly caught by surprise by the decision.
“I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage, because our decision making process has completely failed,” de la Rocha said in a statement to the press at the time. “It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively.”
The remaining members went on to form Audioslave with former Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell. The supergroup produced three successful albums before breaking up, and later reunited for a one-off performance in 2017.
Morello’s career then expanded well beyond his original band. He described the end of Rage as a door that opened onto work with Bruce Springsteen, collaborations spanning Joan Baez to Wu-Tang Clan, and eventually playing alongside his son, Roman Morello.
The band’s story did not end with that 2000 split. Rage Against the Machine announced a reunion show at Coachella in January 2007, and the group later planned a 2019–2022 reunion tour that was ultimately cancelled. Through it all, Morello has framed those perceived failures not as an ending, but as the turning point that shaped the rest of his musical life.
