RATM’s Tom Morello Responds to Guitar Center CEO's comments on serious musicians needing expensive guitars

Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who is set to perform an intimate solo show in London later this year, has taken to social media in response to claims that serious musicians need expensive guitars.

Gabe Dalporto, the CEO of US music chain Guitar Center, was quoted in an interview with Music Inc Magazine saying “We have some premium product, but we don’t have enough, and it’s very hard to experience our premium product because we have our best guitars locked on the top row where you can’t easily get to them.”

“So, if I’m a serious musician and I walk into a Guitar Center, it doesn’t feel like the right place for me anymore.”

That comment, despite Dalporto’s reasonable discussion about wanting to make more lucrative guitar brands more accessible to customers, picked up some speed after Guitar World seemed to take some exception to the “serious musician” comment. Especially as the United States is projected to possibly enter a “mild recession” according to economists.

But those comments seemed to have caught the attention of Morello, long considered one of guitar’s greatest innovators. Taking to his Instagram account, Morello gave some sage advice to those musicians who might not have the money to buy an expensive guitar to become a “serious musician.”

Posting the very rig in question, Morello wrote: “This guitar/amp combo was used to record “Tire Me” on Rage Against The Machine’s “Evil Empire” album which came out 25 years ago last week.” 

“The guitar, which I’m not even sure is made out of wood (plywood?) cost 40 Canadian dollars at a Toronto pawn shop and the amp is a 20-watt solid state practice amp I had in my apartment. The song won our first Grammy.”

So the lesson budding musicians from Tom Morello? Don’t let the price of an instrument think you can’t do innovative things such as Morello did with his cheap pawn-shop guitar.