Are you ready for some “Vanning In The Name Of”? Well, then, head on over to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and check out their exhibition on the band Rage Against the Machine, featuring a very special van. A faded burgundy 1985 Chevrolet Astro is perhaps the last thing you expect to find on the sixth floor of a human rights museum, but this one is an important artifact of music history.
Which didn’t stop RATM guitarist Tom Morello stepping over the stanchions and climbing into the driver’s seat as soon as he saw it.
“We treat artifacts with the utmost care,” says Travis Tomchuk, curator of the exhibition. “He opened the door and just hopped on in there. I was asking myself, ‘Is this really happening?’ He was just really happy to see his van again.”
The Astro van, on loan from the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame and museum in Cleveland, Ohio, is basically an old friend to Morello. It was this van that carried Rage Against the Machine and their gear during those first formative years in the early 1990s, on supporting tours and eventually their own tour, there right as the band hit it big. And even when Rage was a headlining act, with fans all over the world, the Astro was still with them.
“I was surprised to see that it was still registered as late as 2011,” Tomchuk adds.
Everyone loves a good touring van story, from the Terry Fox Ford Econoline’s second life with the band Removal; to Aerosmith’s International Harvester Metro turning up in a field in Massachusetts. In the case of the RATM van, the story is all the more satisfying for how an ordinary Chevy minivan wasn’t jettisoned the moment the royalty cheques starting coming in. How could it be? It was practically part of the band, too.
Our story starts with a young Tom Morello, growing up in a small town in Illinois in the 1970s. His high school may have been small, but its effect on hard rock was outsized — one of Morello’s classmates was Tool’s lead guitarist Adam Jones.
Upon graduation from high school, Morello was accepted into Harvard University, where he ended up forming a band that included a future Nobel Laureate chemist. Upon graduation from Harvard, he was given the Astro van as a graduation present. Perhaps a sporty Ford Mustang or thrifty Honda Civic might have been a suitable ride for a just-graduated college kid, but Morello needed to haul his guitar gear around, so Astro van it was.
The Chevrolet Astro and the GMC Safari were both designed as rivals to the Chrysler minivans that were so successful in the mid-1980s. The GM vans were a little larger, rear-wheel-drive-based, and somewhere between a full-size cargo van and a consumer-oriented minivan. It was a good pick for a wood-be musician.
It was this van that Morello drove across country to Los Angeles, a faithful companion during the starving-artist times. Having joined a band called Lock Up, Morello woke up to find all his gear had been stolen out the Astro by thieves — who’d very weirdly left a freshly laundered stack of socks and underwear behind.
By 1991, Morello had joined rapper Zach de la Rocha, drummer Brad Wilk, and bassist Tim Commerford to form Rage Against the Machine. The Astro carried their gear to those early shows around Los Angeles, and was the place where the band got together to package up their demo tape, individually taping matches to newspaper stock-exchange listings as artwork.
Rick pulls up in this Rolls-Royce, and Flea’s in this souped-up Mercedes, and in between them, there’s the Astro
Tom Morello, on his meeting with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and producer Rick Rubin
The next year, Rage was signed to Epic Records, found a foothold in the mainstream, and their debut self-titled album eventually achieved triple-platinum status. Success had arrived, some of it due to an honest and hardworking little Chevy van.
The best part is that even with fame and fortune having arrived, Morello still just drove his Astro van around Los Angeles. In an 2013 interview with The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, he describes a lunchtime meeting with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick Rubin, producer for everyone from the Beastie Boys to Slayer to Lady Gaga.
After trying, unsuccessfully, to donate the van to the MTV show Pimp My Ride, the band let the Astro languish in a lockup facility until it was donated to the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. Curators there carefully cleaned and documented all the contents, which rather hilariously included some ancient fortune cookies, old veterinary bills for Morello’s dogs, and soccer shirts.
It’s a cool piece of music history whose story nicely pairs with RATM’s politics, which was never about flashy cars and the other excessive trappings of the rock ‘n’ roll life style. The band may have raged against machines, but not this one. Besides, what else would a political-science major with socialist leanings drive other than a van built in Baltimore by union labour?
As it happens, there’s an answer to that question, too. Morello may have donated his faithful old Chevy Astro to spend the rest of its life resting in a museum, but he still has his high-school dream car. It’s a 1971 Dodge Demon 340, with the four-barrel carburetor, in Hemi Orange, of course. It’s not part of a collection, but his only muscle car, and he reportedly paid all of $7,500 for it. Morello tells a great story about meeting Joe Strummer of The Clash, and his musical hero crawling all over the Dodge, fascinated by American muscle.
A Demon is a fun car for a rock star to own, but the humble Astro might be even cooler, just for its back story. If you’re a fan, head on over to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to get your chance to meet the fifth member of Rage Against the Machine you never knew existed. Just don’t try to climb into the driver’s seat. Only Tom is allowed to do that.
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