Talkin' Cubs with Tom Morello

Back in February, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello about his new political folk-rock project, The Nightwatchman, whose debut CD comes out April 24 on Epic Records. (The bulk of the interview appears in the June 2007 issue of Guitar World Acoustic, which is at your local newsstand as we speak.)

I've spoken with Tom a few times over the last decade, and always found him to be quite charming, funny and down-to-earth. Maybe it's the fact that he grew up in Libertyville, IL at the same time I was growing up in Chicago, but talking to him always feels like having a conversation with an old high school acquaintance — albeit an extremely politically active one (check out The Axis of Justice, the non-profit political information and action organization Tom formed a few years back with Serj Tankian of System of a Down) who also just happens to have sold millions of records.

Tom is also a diehard Chicago Cubs fan —  he and I sport virtually identical Cubs license plate holders on our respective vehicles — so as we were wrapping things up, I couldn't resist the chance to shoot some Cubs shit with him.

(Warning to sensitive Cubs fans -- if painful memories of the 2003 NLCS still make you want to retch violently or curl up in the back of the nearest waste disposal truck, you'll probably want to skip the rest of this post.) 

Me: Okay, one last question — how are the Cubs gonna do this year?

Tom Morello: Well… I believe in the curses; I’m not gonna tell you I don’t. [Laughs] I was there at Wrigley during "the Bartman game", and felt the supernatural horror of that moment. But I believe that each one of us may play a role in what eventually happens, so I’ve decided to take a different tack this time: I’m going to guarantee a World Series victory! [Laughs]

Me: You also guaranteed that Bush wouldn’t be re-elected in 2004.

Tom Morello: Well, I was wrong there, too. [Laughs] But so far, for every year I’ve been a Cubs fan, I’ve been among the doom-sayers; I actually made a sign to bring to one playoff game that said, “Please don’t blow it!” [Laughs] And that’s a certain mindset that I’m going to try and set aside this year. I guarantee it! I guarantee a World Series victory!

Me: A friend of mine who was at the Bartman Game is convinced it wasn’t actually Bartman’s fault. He blames the loss on some anonymous guy in the section behind him who stood up halfway through the 7th and yelled, “THE CUBS ARE GOING TO THE FUCKING WORLD SERIES!!!” Everyone in my friend's section section turned around, like, “Who the FUCK said that?” They were all ready to beat the guy's ass, because they were sure he had just jinxed the team. And sure enough...

Tom Morello: I’ll tell you what felt great at the time — but in retrospect is pretty ironic and horrible — is we were chanting “Five more outs!!! Five more outs!!!” Five more outs ‘til what? ‘Til Game Seven? [Laughs] There’s a horrible shot, which I actually have saved on my TiVo — why, I don’t know. It’s not the Bartman pitch, but the pitch before the Bartman pitch, and they show me standing there, and the expression on my face is like, “Dare to dream! This could be the greatest moment of all our lives!”

Me: I was visiting Chicago the night the Cubs went up three games to one over the Marlins. I was drinking with some friends at a bar until five in the morning, and everybody was like, “We got Zambrano, we got Prior, we got Wood — no fucking way are we gonna lose this!”

Tom Morello: But I do believe that the most exciting moment in the history of the Chicago Cubs franchise came in Game Seven. Game Six, it honestly felt like it wasn’t a baseball game — it felt like something of Old Testament proportions was occurring. [Laughs] The warm-ups for Game Seven felt weird; Wrigley was so quiet, you could hear the players talking. We’d had a full day to digest what had happened, and everybody was just like [makes extremely constipated noise]. And then the Cubs went down three-nothing, and we were all just like, “You know? Fuck us, man!” And then Kerry Wood hit that three-run home run to tie it, and it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced; I was there when the Rams won the Super Bowl, but I’ve never felt a moment like that. It was like this insane, almost feral reaction, like, “THERE IS SOME GOOD IN THE UNIVERSE!!!” As Wood rounded the bases, Wrigley was like a monkey house!

Me: I was picking my wife up from work at that very moment; I heard it on the radio, and I practically punched a hole in the roof of my car.

Tom Morello: Yeah, and then it all went to hell. [Laughs] I talked to Kerry Wood about it later on, and he said he looked up as he was rounding first, and he’d never seen anything like what the bleachers looked like at that moment. And then he was like, “And then I lost the lead for good and inning and a half later.” [Laughs] But not this year!

Me: I guess Wood's okay after falling out of that hot tub. [In retrospect, perhaps not so much! -DE]

Tom Morello: I know! What an auspicious way to begin the season! [Laughs]

Me: Of course, the NL Central looks pretty level this year, and the Cardinals look like they're gonna suck, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the Cubs could take it.

Tom: It certainly could happen. They’ve done what they always do, which is reel us back in…

Me: Though I prefer to be reeled back in by big-bucks signings; at least it's better than the old, “We got rid of all your favorite players in the off-season, but you’ll still come to Wrigley, right?”

Tom: Yeah, we’ve had that for about sixty years, so it’s nice to go in the other direction for once! I guarantee a World Series victory!

You heard the man, Cubs fans. Perhaps it's time to put the power of positive thinking to work for the Cubbies? Hell, we've tried everything else...

Comments

[Stu Shea]

I dunno. At this point I'm almost ready to try the power of NEGATIVE thinking.

[discount coach]

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[Ashley]

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[Nike Shox Turbo]

Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation. (John Kennedy, American president)