Hey, kids. Just for the record, a Harvard degree might not get you employed right away when you’re finished with school.
Tom Morello knows that much since the Rage Against The Machine guitarist and former Audioslave member says he worked as a male stripper after he graduated from Harvard University with a bachelors of political science degree and moved to Los Angeles in 1986.
“When I graduated from Harvard and moved to Hollywood, I was unemployable,” Morello wrote in a new guest column for NME.com. “I was literally starving, so I had to work menial labor and, at one point, I even worked as an exotic dancer. ‘Brick House’ [by The Commodores] was my jam!
“I did bachelorette parties and I’d go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank god it was in the time before YouTube! You could make decent money doing that job – people do what they have to do.”
Morello also explained how working as late California Democratic Senator Alan Cranston for two years in the 1980s politicized him… but made him never want to go into politics.
“I never had any real desire to work in politics but if there was an ember burning in me, it was extinguished working in that job because of two things: one of them was the fact that 80 percent of the time I spent with the Senator, he was on the phone asking rich people for money. It just made me understand that the whole business was dirty. He had to compromise his entire being every day.
“The other was the time a woman phoned up to the office and wanted to complain that there were Mexicans moving into her neighborhood. I said to her, ‘Ma’am, you’re a damn racist,’ and she was indignant. I thought I was representing our cause well, but I got yelled at for a week by everyone for saying that! I thought to myself that if I’m in a job where I can’t call a damn racist a damn racist, then it’s not for me.”
You can see Morello perform as The Nightwatchman at a benefit for The Pablove Foundation, an organization that works to improve the lives of children with cancer, at Los Angeles’ Avalon Ballroom on Nov. 21.
