RATM Guitarist TOM MORELLO On His Riffing: ‘Most Of My Riffs Are Really Just Sabbath Riffs With One Or Two Riffs Changed Around’

Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello and Black Sabbath‘s bassist Geezer Butler were together at The Eddie Trunk Show where they talked about their presence at ‘I Am The Highway’ Chris Cornell tribute show. It turns out that Tim Commerford turned down Morello’s offer to perform, so there was a vacancy on bass and Butler took it. Read part of their conversation here:

Tom Morello:  “We had the good fortune of playing together a couple of times before, so I got to play Geezer’s riffs, and he got to play mine, which is so trippy. As I told him last night, I’m glad he’s not litigious, because most of my riffs are really just Sabbath riffs with one or two riffs changed around.”

Geezer Butler: “Don’t tell Tony [Iommi].” “[He’s] great, he’s one of my favorite guitarists of all time.”

TM: “I’ll put that on my business card. I told Geezer the other day, the first time Sabbath entered my world, I was really young, we were doing some Presidential physical fitness thing in junior high, and the one bad boy in our class, the kid who had nunchucks and smoked and had gotten laid as a preteen, brought in a Sabbath record to like the gym, and I just remember looking at the album cover, and I was just terrified that something like that existed in the world. Then he put it on, and all the sudden this Sabbath record came on, and I was like, I need to know more about this and devote my life to it.”