Tim Commerford Rages Against The Machine

Rage Against the Machine’s Tim Commerford is raging against the machine.

The bassist was out on a quick hardware store run in LA when he stopped to chat about the band’s scuppered comeback gig at Coachella, and what could have been.

“It was already going to be something really special without getting into it, like we were doing things that we never done before, and we’re all better musicians than we’ve ever been before,” he lamented. “The music was all time and it was just exciting. It was going to be a really great new version, a new exciting version of Rage, you know?”

But the Covid pandemic canceled Coachella 2020, not to mention Coachella 2021, and pretty much every other gig in the world besides. This especially hurt musicians, Commerford said, and especially RATM who absolutely rely on the crowd at live shows.

“Musicians got kicked to the curb, man,” he said. “Musicians, barbershops, and gyms. We’re the last ones to go, so like it’s stressful for me just because I look at Rage and go like, ‘F— we rely on an audience’. You go to Rage shows to see the audience as much as to see the band, and we need that.”

“We’ll never be one of these sellouts that’s gonna go play a drive-in show or play a venue that holds 100,000 people and there’s only 10,000 there,” he vowed. “That’s bulls—. Rage will never do that.”

The one advantage of the pandemic, he joked, we hope, was it allowed people to wear masks, sunglasses, hoodies and baseball caps into stores so they could shoplift in peace.

Commerford is a self-confessed conspiracy theorist; he once famously insisted in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview that he believed the moon-landing was faked, as was Isis, as were their beheading videos.

Another thing he doesn’t believe in? Presidents.

“I don’t believe in Presidents. I don’t believe that they do anything,” he said. “We live in a military coup in this country.”

The guitarist theorizes that the country, and in turn the world, is actually run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and its Chair, General Mark A. Milley.

“The guy that Nancy Pelosi called right after the Capitol event and said, ‘Please don’t give Donald Trump the keys to the nuclear codes’,” he insisted. “He’s meeting with Netanyahu in Israel. He’s meeting with the United Arab Emirates guy. He’s meeting in Afghanistan. He meets with more world leaders than anyone in America. He is the world leader. He’s the one.”

“He has the final decision in it. Six dudes that are on the joint chiefs. They’ve been there since Eisenhower. That’s when it started. Eisenhower was the head of the Joint Chiefs and then he went on to become President after he put Truman in — a guy who called Black people n-word. A freaking racist, who just did whatever the military wanted.”

The Joint Chiefs, he claims, are only psyched when warmongering Republicans win the presidency, as they can build all the weapons they want. When the Democrats win, they simply take it upon themselves to start a war, with the same result. When the Joint Chiefs retire, they go on to run the companies that get the no-bid contracts for the war effort.

“It’s the craziest thing,” he said. “That’s where we are, and we pay 75 cents on the dollar to military.”