One afternoon in a Los Angeles apartment in 1991, Maynard James Keenan showed Tom Morello how to tune a guitar to drop D. Two of the decade’s better-known riffs were in the room by the time it was over, and for a short while they belonged to the same song.
Morello told the story on the “Lipps Service” podcast, describing the period before Rage Against The Machine existed, when he and drummer Brad Wilk were auditioning players in bedrooms around the city.
He said (as transcribed by theprp): “…We began jamming around, jamming with different bass players, different singers, including — we played with Maynard [James Keenan] at one point… It was in some 18-year-old bass players like bedroom. Me, Brad [Wilk], Maynard, and some dude named Noah jammed for… There was a recording somewhere… It was some of the riffs that later would be [used] elsewhere. Maynard‘s the dude who taught me how to do drop D tuning. He did. Quick sidebar: this is like for fans of Tool and Rage Against The Machine.”
“So Maynard, you know the Seattle sound was the thing, they were doing drop t-tuning, I didn’t know how to do it,” he continued. “So I was over at his place, and he showed me, and he was playing a riff that would become [Tool‘s] “Sober“. And the first riff that came out of my fingers when he showed me Drop D tuning was the riff from ‘Freedom‘, Rage‘s song ‘Freedom‘, and those two were sort of a song one afternoon.”
Morello added: “And then later when Rage became a band I said, you know, ‘I don’t know if you remember, but we were jamming on that thing one time and like I’d like my half back please’ [laughter] .’ …I think Tool were off and running at that point.””
The account is not new, though the detail is. Morello posted a compressed version on Twitter (now X) back in 2012, which supplies the year and makes plain what he means by the two riffs being “sort of a song”.
“’91 memory: Maynard taught me ‘drop D tuning’ and for one brief afternoon the riffs from ‘Freedom‘ and ‘Sober‘ were in the same song,” he wrote at the time.
On Keenan‘s side, the “Sober” riff had a history before that afternoon. Speaking on the same podcast, he traced it back to CAD, a band he had before Tool, saying a CAD song eventually became “Sober“.
He was busy elsewhere at the time too. Between 1990 and 1993 Keenan played guitar and sang backing vocals in Green Jellÿ, alongside future Tool drummer Danny Carey.
“Freedom” closed Rage Against The Machine‘s self-titled debut in November 1992, and became the song the band used to shut down sets for the next three decades. “Sober” appeared on Tool‘s Undertow in April 1993 and gave them their first real breakthrough.
The two camps stayed close. Keenan guested on “Know Your Enemy” on the Rage debut, and Morello had known Tool guitarist Adam Jones since their teens in Libertyville, Illinois, where the pair played together in a band called The Electric Sheep.
Morello releases his first solo rock album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, on September 25.
