{"id":798713,"date":"2026-10-11T02:38:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T02:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798713\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T02:38:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T02:38:14","slug":"tom-morello-on-the-future-hair-metal-star-who-blew-him-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798713\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Morello on the future hair metal star who blew him away"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Morello<\/a> has revealed the unlikely inspiration a future hard rock guitar hero had on him years before he founded Rage Against The Machine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Morello was a student at Harvard University in the mid-80s when he stumbled across a rising Boston band named Extreme<\/a> and their guitarist Nuno Bettencourt.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen I was at Harvard University, on Wednesday nights there was a metal night at a club in downtown Boston,\u201d Morello tells Classic Rock in a new interview. \u201cOur favourite band was called Extreme, which featured, at the time, a 16 or 17-year-old-guitar wunderkind, Nuno Bettencourt. I remember thinking: \u2018This is one of the best guitar players in the world, and he\u2019s a high-school kid.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t believe it. He was one of my guitar heroes. This would\u2019ve been 1985, 1986.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Latest Videos From Louder<\/p>\n

Morello\u2019s sense of impending greatness wasn\u2019t off. Within a few years, Extreme had bagged a major label deal and would go on to release 1990\u2019s multi-platinum Pornograffitti album and the single More Than Words, which reached No.1 in the US. Bettencourt himself would be hailed as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation \u2013 something Morello was fully aware of.<\/p>\n

\u201cCut to 1999, and it\u2019s the Rage Against The Machine Battle Of Los Angeles tour,\u201d he tells Classic Rock. \u201cWe\u2019re playing in Boston, and there\u2019s a meet-and-greet thing. I\u2019m looking at the names of who\u2019s on the list, and the name Nuno Bettencourt is there. I\u2019m like: \u2018Make sure I see that guy.\u2019 So Nuno comes up to me and says: \u2018Great show.\u2019 I was like: \u2018Dude, you have no idea. I\u2019ve been a fan of yours for fifteen years.\u2019 And since that day we\u2019ve been great friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Morello also reveals that he\u2019s one of only a handful of people to have held the guitar played by his hero Randy Rhoads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was instrumental in getting Randy Rhoads into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame,\u201d the RATM man says of the guitarist, who famously played with Ozzy Osbourne and died in 1982. His sister, who\u2019s lovely, is very protective of all the stuff. It\u2019s sealed away somewhere in a secret vault and no one knows where it is. I\u2019d asked her if I could see it, and she said: \u201cNobody sees it.\u2019 You gotta respect that.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCut to about a year later, and she texts me saying the guitar is at her house that afternoon, on its way back from the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and now would I like to go see it? His mom didn\u2019t want anyone else to ever play it again, but I got to hold it. That was pretty emotional for me. The crazy thing was that the leather guitar strap still smelled of cigarette smoke. He was performing up until the day he died, so that strap had smoke from 1982 left in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full interview with Tom Morello in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, on sale now. Order it online here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Morello has revealed the unlikely inspiration a future hard rock guitar hero had on him years before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":798714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-798713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}