But as serious as Morello was about his music, he and Anderson had a running joke about the juxtaposition of their musical affiliations on campus. Anderson, who sang in the Din & Tonics a cappella group, remembers coming home late from gigs in his evening coattails and seeing Morello back from his gig as well, wearing spandex and leopard print.
“‘How was your gig?’ ended up being a kind of running joke between us. We really had a good time just making fun of each other,” Anderson says.
RAGING ON
After Harvard, Morello moved to Los Angeles, where he worked, among other jobs, a brief stint as a male stripper.
“I did bachlorette parties and I’d go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank God it was in the time before YouTube!” said Morello in an interview with CHARTattack in 2009. “You could make decent money doing that job—people do what they have to do.”
After forming Rage Against the Machine in 1991, Morello and the rest of the group enjoyed mainstream success, selling over 16 million records to date. Rage Against the Machine eventually broke up in 2000, though the band has periodically reunited since 2007 to play in concerts around the world.
Three of the four members—including Morello—joined forces with the frontman of the now-defunct band Soundgarden to form Audioslave in 2001. Morello also debuted a solo act called “The Nightwatchmen” in 2003 as an outlet for his political views, and most recently, makes up one half of the two-man rap-metal band the Street Sweeper Social Club, which started in 2006.
According to Joseph “Joey Thunder” M. Forbess ’86, one of Morello’s college bandmates, it was clear even in college that Morello had his heart set on making music.
“[After graduation,] I was walking out of Currier with my parents and we saw Tom getting into a van his mother had bought him,” Forbess says. “My mother asked, ‘Hey Tom, where’re you going with that van?’ He replied, ‘I’m going out to California to become a rock star!’ And he did.”
—Staff writer Kevin Sun can be reached at ksun@college.harvard.edu.