In January 1965, Bob Dylan started recording “Maggie’s Farm” for the album Bringing It All Back Home. In 2000, Rage Against the Machine recorded a powerful cover of “Maggie’s Farm” that still holds all the fire and frustration that it did 25 years ago. Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, previously praised Bob Dylan’s work, specifically calling The Times They Are A Changin’ the “heaviest record I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Speaking with Forbes in 2018, Morello shared that he had always been a fan of heavy music—metal, punk, hip-hop, “the harder the better,” he said. However, he came late to the Bob Dylan party, and found that he liked Dylan’s blend of folk with what are, essentially, hardcore ideals.
“It sort of tapped into my angst and latent aggression and when I heard Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin,’ it stopped me dead in my tracks,” said Morello, “I said, ‘This might be the heaviest record I’ve ever heard in my life’. And it opened me to the world of folk music. Three chords and a rusty razor of truth.”
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine Talks Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’
Tom Morello went on to explain that, from Bob Dylan, he discovered Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Phil Ochs’ work. Morello began writing his own songs from there, but added, “the weight of those couplets and the songs on [The Times They Are A Changin’] are so devastating and much heavier than a wall of Marshall stacks.”
Morello then extolled the virtues of Bob Dylan’s 1964 masterpiece, explaining his thoughts about the song “God On Our Side.” He posited that Bob Dylan went hardcore with “‘God On Our Side,’ that last couplet of historical untruths, which he’s been fed, but told to swallow them whole because God is on our side.”
He described the final lines of “God On Our Side,” explaining that they mean “none of the Christian narrative of redemption and salvation turns, unless Judas has God on his side, [unless] Judas was part of the plan. And if so what is right?” Morello then added, “It’s such a heavy and surprising twist on what is a brilliant but surface-level treatise, which becomes this dark rumination on spirituality and what is at the core of good and evil.”
Featured Image by Val Wilmer/Redferns
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.