Photo: Archive Photos
Rage Against The Machine (in)famously played Saturday Night Live on April 13th, 1996, which happened to be the same night billionaire and Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes was hosting. As the story goes, the band tried to hang upside-down American flags from their amplifiers but SNL crew members took them down; they didn't get to play their second song, "Bullet in the Head;" and they were never invited back to the show. In a new NBC documentary Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music, RATM's Tom Morello divulged the full story, which also involved getting put in lockdown by Secret Service.
“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,” the guitarist explained in the documentary (transcribed by Consequence). “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. 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," he continued before explaining that they had rehearsed with upside-down American flags on their amps and were asked to removed them because it wouldn't sit well with advertisers. “We were like, ‘You invited Rage Against the Machine, the ‘f**k you, I won’t do what you tell me’ band.”
“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," Morello recalled. "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.”
“It’s a rockin’ performance, we go back to the dressing room, and it’s tense,” Morello noted. “Our dressing room is right across the hall from Steve Forbes. 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.”
“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," he revealed. "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].”