In the ongoing Battle of Los Angeles, even the foot soldiers of protest need an occasional break from the fierce urgency of now. And after a few hours of photographing demonstrators on the street during the city’s sprawling “No Kings” protest on June 14, I stepped into the ancient Redwood Bar a couple of blocks from city hall and heard a familiar voice calling to me. It was Tom Morello, dedicated rocker and activist, Rage Against the Machine guitarist and happy warrior.
He was in the Redwood like any other citizen or noncitizen on duty, with no entourage or any companion at all, sitting over a drink with some protesting moms he’d just met.
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As ever, Morello was compelled to join the protests for the second week in a row during the latest crisis roiling the nation, this time over aggressive immigration arrests and the arrival of armed troops. He was marching here until he was spotted by his friends in the activist rock band Ozomatli, who rolled up on a flatbed truck with their instruments, and they invited the guitarist up to jam.
The day before, Morello had just announced on social media a concert of live music and protest called Defend L.A., to unfold the following Monday at the 780-capacity Echoplex club. Others on the bill included B-Real, Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova, artist Shepard Fairey as DJ, comic George Lopez, and more. “It sold out in four minutes. We could have done it at the Forum,” Morello said with a laugh. “We’ll be bringing the Forum show to the Echoplex instead.”
For Morello, being at the protest was a natural impulse, just another day as the son of a politically radical mom, Mary Morello, still agitating at age 101. Starting as a young adult, he’s lived through varying degrees of outrage at White House policies on war, hunger, and civil rights, back to the Reagan administration and through his years erupting with Rage, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage, and his solo acoustic persona the Nightwatchman.
“This moment feels like it is uniquely desperate,” he says of the current crisis. “I’m not sure whether Trump is a clown dressed as a fascist or fascist dressed as a clown, but either way, I know it’s dangerous and the danger is real and the danger’s not clowning. We’re in trouble, and there’s nobody coming to save us except us.”
He’d never been in this bar before, so I told him its history as the old watering hole for the hardboiled journalists from the Los Angeles Times a block away, going back to the Dragnet era. It had long since been transformed into a nightclub for new indie bands and the occasional icon (Mike Watt, etc.), and the Times left its historic building years ago. But there is still a red phone on the wall that was once connected to the old newsroom. Morello had just met a cartoonist from he New Yorker, Ivan Ehlers, who was buying the next round of drinks, as a band set up to play.
Trump had inflamed local feeling (and national outrage) even more by calling up the California National Guard—over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom—to add another layer of muscle and fear to his U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweep in Southern California.
On one side of a federal building, U.S. Marines were gathered in front of the door, as the crowd chanted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The young men in battle fatigues were not standing tall with bayonets drawn, but gathered on some steps to block the entrance, looking more bored than imminently dangerous in the afternoon heat. The most popular graffiti and slogan on signs was simply “Fuck ICE.”
For generations, renowned artists in rock, pop, and hip-hop have been drawn to political action, rallying followers to a cause. Sometimes their influence can be tragically overstated. Not even Bruce Springsteen could get Kamala Harris elected last year. But for Morello and others, stepping up—either out on the street or in their creative work—is an essential part of being a concerned American.
Bad times often lead to powerful art and music. A gifted songwriter or musician can articulate a message and a feeling that goes directly to the core of an issue in ways normal political speech can’t. In past decades, that expression has reverberated from Billie Holiday’s haunting anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” to Public Enemy’s still searing “Fight the Power.” It has sent listeners into spasms of fury in the Rage classic “Killing in the Name” (and it’s incendiary sing-along hook, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”).
A rallying voice is always needed at times of frustration and worry at the direction of society. In folk agitator Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land,” Morello has found a permanent highlight of his solo concerts. The guitarist always includes the verses censored in the 1940s from the original, which are critical of concentrated wealth and this one about the plight of hungry Americans:
“In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?”
At any time, but especially in the era of Trump, any artist who dares speak out against the president and his policies should be prepared for attacks equal to their fame. After the world’s biggest pop star endorsed Harris last year, Trump’s weirdly adolescent response via Truth Social was “I hate Taylor Swift!” and, later, asking if “she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” This year, he responded to criticism from Springsteen with a rant: “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy,” followed by schoolyard level insults about his appearance (“dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker”). Ariana Grande should brace herself following her reposting to Instagram Stories a call for Trump’s impeachment after bombing Iran.
Rage Against the Machine was their generation’s most inflamed and inspired band to make political outrage as its calling, welding hard rock and hip-hop into an ecstatic whole. Their most active period was during the Clinton administration, but the band broke apart just in time to be out of action during the George W. Bush years of orange alerts and “Shock and Awe” over Iraq. There have been several reunions of Rage, and they have been spectacular every time, but during this second age of Trump, they have gone silent again, with no sign of a return anytime soon.
The lesson there is to not depend on any one voice, but to find your own. Morello was back out on the street as a personal calling, not tied to any band he was involved with. The point is to carry on, even as he’s lost comrades—recently including Wayne Kramer of the MC5 and singer-songwriter Jill Sobule—who could be counted on to join him. Others will have to step into the breach.
“Dangerous times demand dangerous songs, and this is a very, very dangerous time that’s being met,” Morello says. “Courage is contagious hopefully between artists, between artists and audience. We will not go quietly into that dark night.”
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