Fender and Tom Morello have teamed up to create a replica of his ‘Arm the Homeless’ electric guitar, the DIY S-style on which the Rage Against The Machine guitarist found his sound.
We nearly caught ourselves calling this signature guitar a signature Stratocaster – it has the solid alder double-cutaway Strat body – but it’s really quite a different guitar.
This has a hockey stick six-in-line headstock for starters. For seconds, that headstock doesn’t even have the Fender logo. There are a pair of EMG active humbuckers at the neck and bridge pickup. And how many Strats do you know that ship with the string ends all wafting around the headstock “like bumblebees”?
As Morello explains in the video, that’s a stylistic choice after some hotshot player upbraided him for his unruly electric guitar strings when he was cutting his teeth as a player in Libertyville, Illinois.
The rest of the instrument is all make-do improvised luthierie after he ordered a custom-made guitar from a Hollywood guitar store that sounded and played horribly and required surgery to make it work for him.
“I knew nothing about making a guitar,” he says. “I checked a bunch of boxes, spent a lot of money on the crappiest guitar that anyone has ever played. That was super disappointing. It was unplayable. It sounded absolutely terrible. So, through the years, I changed everything about the guitar. The only thing that remained from that original guitar was the body.
“I changed the neck a number of times. I changed the pickups, the electronics, the whammy bar, every configuration until I finally – and this is probably towards the end of 1988 – I spent one day in a Hollywood rehearsal studio, maybe about four hours, dialling it in as best I could, and I finally just gave up.
“This is the equipment I’ve got, this is the sound that I have. It’s not what I envisioned at all, but this sound is just gonna be my sound. I’m not gonna worry about it ever again.”
And this became the ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar. Now, he’s not really selling it here, but rest assured this will be a player out of the box.
You’ve got the Strat body, the painted bolt-on maple neck – again, a painted neck? Not very Strat-like. The 15” rosewood fingerboard is kinda flat, too.
There are a pair of active EMG humbuckers, each controlled by its own volume pot, plus a master tone control. A three-way toggle switch is on standby for abuse.
Just turn the volume down on one of those pickups and start rocking that toggle for those gonzo machine gun staccato effects that Morello loves.
Hit a harmonic and start working the double-locking GotohGE1996T series tremolo. Go nuts. This is what the guitar was designed for, and when Morello says he gave up modifying it and then used this to create his own sound, he is not exaggerating. This is the guitar behind Bombtrack, Bullet In The Head, Know Your Enemy, Fistful Of Steel… Et cetera.
“The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar has been my comrade for life in the sonic sphere. It allowed me to find myself as an artist,” says Morello. “I’ve played 22 albums in my life and ‘Arm the Homeless’ has been part of all of them. I know that there’s a lot of magic in the way that this weird island of misfit toys guitar has brought into my life, and hopefully some of that can be brought into yours.”
The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar also has the same graphic finish as Morello’s original, including the eponymous slogan, the hippopotamus, and the Hammer and Sickle that Fender feels obligated to mention might cause you legal strife in some jurisdictions, e.g. Indonesia.
The ‘Arm the Homeless’ guitar is priced £/$1,699, with a portion of the proceeds going to LA-based charities Midnight Mission and Covenant House, both hand-picked by Morello. For more details, head over to Fender.
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