Rage Against The Machine were locked in a room by Secret Service after ‘SNL’ performance

Rage Against The Machine were locked in a room by the Secret Service after their performance on Saturday Night Live in 1996.

The band appeared as the musical guests on an episode of the US sketch show hosted by billionaire Steve Forbes, who was a recent Republican presidential candidate at the time.

• READ MORE: Tom Morello: “In the past, I’ve wanted to use music as a battering ram for social justice”

During a new documentary titled Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years Of SNL Music, RATM guitarist Tom Morello recalled an incident that occurred after the group performed ‘Bulls On Parade’.

Morello and co. had their crew hang upside-down American flags on their amps, but these were removed by the SNL crew just before the band began the song. They never got to play their second track, ‘Bullet In The Head’, and have never been invited back to play on the programme.

“One thing I think is very important is to weave your convictions into your vocation, whatever it is, whether you’re directing a film or running a camera or playing guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Morello explained in the doc.

“And for a band like Rage, SNL was a perfect opportunity to do that. Being on SNL was something that was valued. It was a part of the DNA of American culture and entertainment.”

He continued: “So, when the offer came to be on it, we were like, ‘We’d be happy to’. But Rage never did things in a normal way. So, we were thinking, like, ‘How do we make this into some sort of crazy performance art thing?’

“We heard that Steve Forbes was going to be the host. He had just been a Republican candidate for president. He’s Forbes of Forbes magazine, one of the richest people in America, and one of the driest and most boring humans to ever walk the face of the earth… Let’s see how that works out.”

In the rehearsal, RATM displayed upside-down American flags on their amps, and were asked to remove them because it wouldn’t go down well with advertisers. Morello also noted the “weird vibe” around Forbes hosting that episode of SNL.

“We were like, ‘You invited Rage Against the Machine, the ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me‘ band,” he added.

“So, the night of the show comes, and our roadies are primed … We’re about to rock ‘Bulls On Parade’ and our roadies put the upside-down flags back up onto the amplifiers. The stage manager is barking into his headset like, ‘Take those down right now!’ Our roadies have been told to like, defend the perimeter.

“There’s 35 seconds ’till we’re live. The stage manager sends the SNL crew. There’s a quick scrum onstage. Unfortunately, the burly New York City union men are able to wrestle the flags off of the amplifiers with seven seconds to go before we go live.”

Morello remembered the “rockin’ performance” RATM delivered on the show before they went back to their dressing room, where the atmosphere was “tense”.

“Our dressing room is right across the hall from Steve Forbes,” he said. “Time goes by. A representative of SNL comes to the door and says, ‘Looks like the show’s running a little long, and we’re gonna cut your second number’. And then they leave us alone. That was their mistake.

“[Bassist] Timmy [Commerford] doesn’t like things like that. And he expresses himself. So, what he did was he took one of the American flags and he tore it up and he knotted it into a ball. You might call it a weapon. And he entered Steve Forbes’ dressing room across the way to attack him.

“Steve Forbes was not in his dressing room, but his family was. So Timmy launches his American flag ball rocket at aunts, cousins, wives, children. Fortunately, the kind of solid integrity of it is not so great. So … it flaps apart, hurting no one.”

Morello added: “However, did I mention before that Steve Forbes had just been a presidential candidate? The hallway floods with Secret Service. We’re now locked in our room. They’re protecting Steve Forbes and his family.

“We get escorted out and put on the sidewalk at 30 Rock. You might notice Rage is not in the farewells on that particular show. I still went to the after party [Laughs].”

In other news, Timothée Chalamet hosted last weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live (January 25), and played a trio of Bob Dylan songs on the show to promote his new film A Complete Unknown.

Meanwhile, Rage Against The Machine have reacted to Joe Biden’s decision to pardon activist Leonard Peltier, saying that “justice will finally be served”.

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