Imagine being a fly on the wall in the studio as Rage Against the Machine work on their new album, The Battle of Los Angeles (Epic). At the moment, the band is working on the track "Untitled (Mic Check)," and they're at the stage where Tom Morello is about to overdub the guitar solos. In the control room, the monitors pump an ominous, minor-key groove, with Morello's guitar sketching shimmering arpeggios as Tim C. lays a fuzz-edged, three-note bass line over drummer Brad Wilk's stutter-step pulse. Then, just past the second chorus, the groove shifts, moving into a more animated groove. As the bass dives to dub-reggae depths, the rhythm guitar skanks afterbeats against echo-enhanced drums. ���

This is where the guitar solo goes, and as the tape rolls, Morello leans into the beat, sending four cascading thumps shuddering through the reverb before delivering a short burst of scratch-style semaphore. From there, he does a quick tremolo dive bomb before uncorking a lick that sounds uncannily like someone trying to start an old car on a cold day. After twice trying to get the jalopy to turn over, Morello makes his guitar moo like a cow, and is done. At which point, he turns to the control booth, where everybody is all smiles. ���

But not the way you'd think. ���

"I'd finish playing, I'd look in the control boothm and they'd be laughing ," the guitarist recalls, months later. "And they were laughing at me, not with me." Morello, by now, is chuckling pretty hard himself. "They were waiting for me to play the real guitar solo, and I was like, 'No, that's it. That's really it.'" ���

He pauses, then adds, as if stating the obvious, "It sounded right to me." ���

More to the point, it sounded like Rage Against the Machine. Just as on the band's previous albums, Rage Against the Machine (1992) and Evil Empire (1996), the guitar sounds on The Battle of Los Angeles almost seem to come from another dimension. As always, Morello often takes the DJ role in Rage's hip hop/hard rock fusion, using his guitar to generate the wikky-wikky rhythms of turntable scratching. ���

But he does more than that, splintering his notes into sonic shrapnel, creating aural sculptures that are often awesomely abstract. In a sense, what he's doing isn't far from what techno and hip-hop DJs do with samplers, sampling recognizable musical snippets then using digital filters and editing software to turn the sound inside out. ���

Except, of course, that Morello does it all with only a guitar, an amp and a pedalboard. No synthesis or sampling required. ���

Because Morello's ideas seem so far from anything the average player could conceive, it's easy to assume a certain amount of virtousity is required to duplicate his solos and breaks. Not so, says the guitarist, who cites Evil Empire's "People of the Sun" as an example. ���

"I've seen that in tablature, and it's so wrong," he says, laughing. "It's so much easier than that. You know, you could probably learn the noises on a Rage record, with maybe one or two or three exceptions, in an afternoon. In less time than that. It's not really difficult, technique-wise." ���

But it's not about technique, really. It's about imagination, about being willing to boldly go where no guitar soloist has gone before--even if it means getting laughed at by the guys in the control booth. ���

"In part, it's having the confidence to play something that doesn't sound right, that doesn't fit into a well-marked drawer," says Morello. "And the next thing you know, it's 'People of the Sun' and the birth of a new concept." ���

Morello didn't start out playing that way, though, nor did he generate his arsenal of incredible noise overnight. "I see my development--from novice punk-rock guitarist to eight-hour-a-day shred aspirant to the guitar player that I am in Rage Against the Machine--as a process almost like drilling for oil," he says. "The eight-hours-a-day practice was getting throught the hard bedrock, then finally reaching a place where those noises--the sound of the verse in 'Calm Like a Bomb,' the sound that starts off 'Testify' or the weird solos--have pretty much become the vocabulary that I speak on the guitar now. There really isn't any premeditated thought that goes into those things." ���

By contrast, quite a lot of thought and premeditation goes into the political content of the band's songs. It isn't just that Rage Against the Machine addresses topics normally avoided on the pop charts, like the radical Zapitista movement in Mexico ("War within a Breath"); the group also advocates a consistently leftist approach to everyday issues. ���

Although singer Zack de la Rocha is wholly responsible for the words in Rage songs--and, indeed, spent months polishing the lyrics for The Battle of Los Angeles--Rage doesn't consist of three musicians and an activist; it is truly a united front. "We rehearse the songs, we write the songs and we rehearse the songs as a band," Morello says. "Zack is very much there and a part of the music and arrangements." Even if the specifics of what Zack will sing isn't set in stone when the basic tracks are being cut("Well some of them are," says the guitarist), the general thrust of the song has already been agreed upon by the band. ���

Of course, there are some who see Rage's political stance as dilettantish rock-star posturing. How many minds could the band possibly change, they ask, when it's playing to the stoned hordes of Woodstock '99, or trying to inject content into the glittering images of MTV? ���

"I see the answer to that question every day when I read Rage's fan mail," Morello answers. "In the real-life world of grassroots activism, there absolutely is a connection between the politics of Rage Against the Machine and political activity. ���

"Part of what happens is that some people actually do get involved. They're isolated in Idaho or somewhere, they're pissed off, and they see in the liner notes how they can help Leonard Peltier [a Native American currently serving prison time for allegedly killing two FBI agents--GW Ed.], or join [national resistance organization] Refuse and Resist or help the garment workers by not buying Guess jeans--and they physically do it. ���

"For other people, it's a cultural battleground, and Rage injects a very different set of ideas and mores into the general consciousness than you usually hear from pop music. And that's a tradition, from Bob Marley to the Clash to Public Enemy, which is very necessary. And while I'm not comparing us to those three great artists, there are similarities, at least as far as intent." ���

That's not to say that Rage converts every listener--or even the majority of them. "But you know what?" says Morello. "If it's only five percent of our audience, and we sell eight million records, it's a considerable number." ���

Despite his reputation as an Ivy League intellectual whose politics are as radical as his guitar technique, Tom Morello grew up middle class in middle America, deep in suburban Illinois. As such, he had the same introduction to rock and roll as anyone else who grew up in the Seventies. "You can't discount what makes you want to pick up a guitar to begin with," he says, "and for me, that was Kiss and Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper. Those were the bands that made me excited about rock music." ��

� Things changed dramatically when punk rock hit. "I played guitar because of the Sex Pistols," he says. "I got Never Mind the Bollocks, and I was in a band that week." ��

� It wasn't that the barely teenaged guitarist had any political interest in anarchy in the U.K.; for him, the attraction was strictly musical. Punk rock, he realized, was "attainable," something even a fledgling guitarist like him could play. "I mean, I couldn't be like Jimmy Page, conjuring Mephisto on an oddly tuned sitar, because I was trapped in a suburban basement," he says. "But I could approximate the Clash and the Sex Pistols." ��

� At first, Morello took the garageland aesthetic of punk very seriously, acting as if it wasn't really "DIY" if you knew what you were doing. "When I played in my little punk rock band in high school, we were militant about never learning anything from anyone," he says. "If someone tried to teach me a barre chord, I would avert my eyes." He chuckles. "Thank goodness there are precious few recordings from those early days." �

�� Times changed, though, and as the Seventies rolled into the Eighties, Morello abandoned the Clash's cry of "No more guitar heroes!" and began worshiping at the altar of technique. "I discovered Randy Rhoads," he says. "I loved Al DiMeola and Randy Rhoads."

��� So he began to practice. And practice. And practice. "I was working hard to be a guitar player, and I was relatively sastisfied with my playing," he says. "But when I listen to those tapes now, it sounds very pedestrian to me. I can hear that I was a little more than a product of my influences, and that there was nothing particularly original or unique in that playing. Yet, at the time, I remember thinking, Oh,� I'm mastering the modes and the scales and whatnot, as if it were and end in itself."

��� Still, there were moments when he had the sense that there was more to rock and roll than a prefectly executed 64th-note mixolydian run. "Early on, a friend played me Allan Holdsworth's Metal Fatigue," he recalls. While I didn't particularly like the album--and couldn't stand the singing on the track 'Metal Fatigue'--it shocked me. It was an epiphany. There was a guitar tone on that song that is almost heavy metal, and yet it incorporates his otherworldly choice of notes. Plus it has this harmonizer tone on it... �

�� "I thought it was as good as any hard rock guitar playing I had ever heard. Yet it was completely different. But there's nothing else on the record that resembles it. I was like, 'Man! If somebody could bottle that!' And that song has long stayed with me as something to shoot for, something to try to approximate. Certainly not in terms of his playing skill, or even the vibe of the record. But to have that kind of jolting impact on a first listen--that's pretty rare."

��� Morello first got a glimmer of his own jolt-potential when he discovered a previously overlooked feature on his guitar. "I was saddled with a Gibson Explorer, with a bunch of knobs, when everyone else had those really cool Eddie Van Halen guitars with only one knob," he says. "So I thought, I might as well make use of these knobs, since I can't afford a different guitar right now.

��� "That was when I stumbled on the toggle switch. I combined it with a wah-wah pedal, and all of a sudden there was a noise which I had never heard a guitar player make. It sounded more like a sort of synthesizer."

��� Having come up with a sound totally unlike anything he'd ever heard from a guitar before, did Morello give up on the hyper-technical approach and throw himself into the noisy, nonlinear sound he has today? Not exactly. "I went ahead with my rigorous, more traditional practice routine," he says. But he did begin to cultivate the special effect he'd discovered. "When I started playing in bands out here in L.A., I started concentrating more on the less obvious parts of my playing," he says. "The toggle switch stuff grew, and eventually--he laughs--"that part of my playing ate the rest of it.

��� "I went from having a sneaking suspicion to feeling certain that the odd guitar playing was my voice on the instrument, that it was the thing that I had in common with the guitar players I liked-- a uniqueness. I just ran with that, and have been running with that ever since.

��� "And unlike the technique-driven stuff, it doesn't require--and actually I don't know that it would even benefit from--eight hours a day of practice. Now, when I put on the guitar, that's just what comes out."

��� Morello hastens to add that he didn't arrive at this conclusion entirely on his own. "I mean, it was definately pushed and influenced a great deal by other members of Rage Against the Machine," he says. "Because when we started rehearsing, all of a sudden there were these hip-hop grooves going on that my normal Sabbath-esque riffing just didn't fit on top of. I had to find a way to complement it, and what I tried to do was approximate a DJ's sounds. Which, of course, you can't do exactly on a guitar. But it does create sound that's somewhere between a guitar and [Public Enemy DJ] Terminator X."

��� Maybe that's why none of Morello's influences these days are guitarists. "Since '91, when the band was first formed, my influences have been guys like Terminator X and Jam Master Jay [of Run-D.M.C.], and DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill. Much more than any guitar player."

��� Techno and electronica have also made their mark on his playing. "Whether it's Liam Howlett and the Prodigy or some different sort of electronica, I like trying to approximate those sounds and textures on guitar," he says. "But it's not like I'll sit down with a record and try to make it an exact copy. I just hear it and try to capture the vibe of it."

Impressively, Morello does all this without the benefit of techno technology, instead relying on a small assortment of tried-and-true effects. "With the exception of the first DigiTech Whammy pedal that I got in '91, it is the identical setup that I've been using since Lock Up," he says, referring to the band he was in before Rage. In addition, Morello uses a flanger, a digital delay pedal and a wah-wah pedal. "And that's it."

There is one additional effects device at play on the new album. "For one phasing effect on 'Guerilla Radio,' I used a Small Stone," he says, referring to the vintage Electro-Harmonix stomp box. "A friend gave it to me for my birthday, and I wanted to get it on the record."

To understand why Morello doesn't feel the need to update his effects, consider the tale of his lowest-tech sound-modification device--the Allen wrench. It all started in rehearsal, just after Morello had changed a busted string and used his Allen wrench to re-lock his A string. "I'm not sure whether it was Zack or Timmy, but someone said, 'Hold on a second. Do that again.' "He did, and the rest of the band kicked in behind him.

"Really, the music for that song was written in about the amount of time it took to play it," Morello says. "Somebody pointed out that there was a sound worth looking into, and all of a sudden, there was this roaring rhythm underneath it. Three-and-a-half minutes later, we went, 'Okay, next!'"

Still, the simplicity of Morello's approach hasn't stopped other from developing synthesized Rage-sound stomp boxes. "I was at the NAMM music convention a couple of years ago, and a company that will remain nameless was doing their best to make Tom Morello pedals," he says. "You know, 'This setting is the "Bullet in the Head" verse, and this setting is the "Know Your Enemy" solo.' It was kind of shameful."

Morello adds that his lack of interest in the latest effects processors doesnt's stem from some fear of technology or politicized sense of musical purity. "I stay with the stuff that I've been using because I don't feel tha I'm anywhere near tapping it out for possibilities," he says. "It's still a rich banquet of sound sitting there in front of me so there's no reason to order from DigiTech, or whatever.

"If I run out of combinations that I find appealing between those effects pedals, the toggle switch, the slide, the Allen wrench, whatever, I may look further afield. But right now, there's very wide variety of soundscape on this record, and it all comre from the combination of those pedals and a couple of techniques."

That, and having the right pick in his hand. "I use these Tortex jazz picks that I'm absolutely paralyzed without," he says. "It's the purple-ish one, and when I say that I'm paralyzed, I mean I can hardly strum a campfire song without one. And I have a really light touch with both hands. Like, I don't have callouses on my fingers on my left hand.

"A lot of the effects-driven stuff on many of our records is right-hand technique that has nothing to do with the strings," he adds."It has nothing to do with the toggle switch. That's where I build my muscle. Whatever the toggle switch-flicking muscle is, it's very strong in my arm," he laughs.

"That is really a cornerstone of my playing. On one of my guitars I have the switch set so that in the rhythm guitar pick-up position, it's on; in the lead guitar pick-up position, it's on; and in the middle position, it's off. So if you flick the toggle switch back and forth you get the effec that's used on 'Calm Like a Bomb,'" he says, referring to the spiraling, siren-like sound that runs beneath the verse. "There's this 'hummingbird wing' thing--it sounds almost like picking, but it's not. It's a really rapid toggling effect."

Perhaps the most ironic thing about Morello's non-linear, anti-virtuosic, low-tech approach to his axe� is that it has made him a guitar hero in an age when guitar heroics have pretty much gone by the board. Think about it: Back in the Eighties, when Morello had his eight-hour-a-day practive routine, there were plenty of young titans in the guitar world, including Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen.

But of this current generation, who--other than Morello--could be considered a modern guitar giant? None of the big bands of the moment, be it Korn or Limp Bizkit and the Offspring, or Godsmack and Sevendust, seem even interested in guitar solos, much less in cultivating guitar soloists. In that sense, Morello is something of an anachronism--albeit an extremely futurist-sounding anachronism.

"I think it is a matter of taste," says Morello. "A matter of influences. I know some of those guys you're talking about. I haven't really spoken with them about what their influences are, but I think part of that could be because when Rage Against the Machine rocks, it's with riffage that is more reminiscent of your Led Zeppelins, your Black Sabbaths or your Deep Purples.

��� "Whereas it could be that the hard rock that those guys grew up on was your Panteras and your Metallicas, which is sort of a different tone, and a different sort of guitar attitude."