“Like on the early Dylan records, I was going for a certain quietness”

ACOUSTIC WEEK: During his career with Rage Against The Machine, Tom Morello blew people’s minds by making his guitar sound like a turntable, an air raid siren, a theremin, a sci-fi ray gun – in short, anything but a guitar. And so it came as a double head trip when the unorthodox axe hero rechristened himself The Nightwatchman, a folk-based protest singer for the 21st Century, and wielded a nylon-string acoustic that sounded like, well, a nylon-string acoustic.

In Rage, Morello created his otherworldly audio sensations with an abundance of imagination and a series of non-high-end, Frankenstein-type electrics given memorable names like Arm The Homeless and Soul Power. “Misfit toys,” he lovingly calls them. In similar fashion, to complement his rich, stentorian baritone as The Nightwatchman, he utilized, for the most part, a budget-priced Ibanez Galvador nylon-string acoustic dubbed “Whatever It Takes.” (He later added a steel-string Gibson to the proceedings, one he calls “Black Spartacus.”)

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