Rage Against The Machine were locked in a room by the US Secret Service after bassist Tim Commerford tried to “attack” billionaire Steve Forbes backstage at Saturday Night Live.
Guitarist Tom Morello discusses the altercation in new documentary Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years Of SNL Music. It happened the night the California rap metal band played Bulls On Parade on the weekly TV programme in April 1996. Forbes, the editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine who ran for US president in 1996 and 2000, hosted the show that night.
Morello remembers the evening being fraught with difficulty and censorship. Rage Against The Machine tried to hang upside-down American flags from their amplifiers before they were removed by the SNL team.
“We were like, ‘You invited Rage Against the Machine, the “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” band,’” the guitarist states (via NME), referencing the famous lyric in breakthrough single Killing In The Name.
The band also had a planned second song, Bullet In The Head, cut from their performance at the last minute due to time constraints. At this point, the frustration got too much for Commerford, who balled one of Rage Against The Machine’s US flags up into a “weapon” and marched into Forbes’ dressing room.
“Timmy doesn’t like things like that,” Morello continues. “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.”
Although no one was injured in the “attack”, it spooked the Secret Service members accompanying Forbes. The billionaire’s 1996 bid for the Republican presidential nomination had ended only a month prior.
“The hallway floods with Secret Service,” says Morello. “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 [New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza]. You might notice Rage is not in the farewells on that particular show [but] I still went to the after-party. Ha ha!”
Rage Against The Machine were no strangers to controversy during their initial 1991-to-2000 run. As well as the “attack” on Forbes, the band filmed a music video on Wall Street and forced the doors of the New York Stock Exchange to shut. They also held a naked onstage protest against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) at Lollapalooza 1993.
Rage Against The Machine have reunited multiple times since their initial split, most recently in 2020. However, in January 2024, drummer Brad Wilk announced that the band were once again on ice.
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