2024-07-24 22:40:07
That hammer and sickle on Tom Morello’s guitar was impossible to miss. The left-leaning American guitarist and singer closed the program of Wednesday’s first day of the Colors of Ostrava festival. As the main star, he probably poisoned a lot of people with the communist symbol. But the member of the band Rage Against the Machine refrained from political speeches and gave a top musical performance.
The festival, which started this Wednesday in the Lower Vítkovice area and will last until Saturday evening, has been having a hard time lately. Last year’s 20th edition became the most dramatic in the history of Colors, when two main stars dropped out. At one point, the director Zlata Holušová was standing backstage and watched in disbelief the announcement on the big screens that after the singer Ellie Goulding, the Nigerian singer Burna Boy also canceled the performance. She was as pale as ever at that moment.
And it wasn’t just about that. Over the last decade, Colors has grown into the largest Czech music event, which symbolically culminated when in 2022 the majority stake in the organizing company was acquired by the investment group Rockaway, which also operates the Karlovy Vary festival or the Luxor bookstore chain. In recent years, however, the show between the Vítkovice blast furnaces has faced more intense competition from Rock for People in Králové Hradec Králové, and in terms of attendance, it was surpassed for the first time this year by the dance party Beats for Love, which takes place at the same place 14 days earlier.
In addition, the pandemic crisis was ending last year, as a result of which the costs of Colors rose to a record 200 million crowns. At the same time, due to inflation, accommodation prices in Ostrava hotels jumped up to 4,000 crowns per night for one person during the festival. This could also have contributed to the fact that significantly fewer people moved around the area recently, the ČTK agency estimated the drop in attendance to around 30,000 people. When Jiří Moravčík, the festival’s longtime dramaturg, left, people were worried about the future of Colors.
Fortunately, it seems unnecessary. The organizers, led by Zlata Holušová, prepared one of the strongest programs in years for this year. Maybe the offer of the smaller Drive stage or the stage in the former gas-filled Gong is a bit more modest, on the other hand, on the two main stages, the star replaces the star. And after the first day, the organizers praise the attendance. “At the time of the main concerts, there were more than 35,000 visitors in the area on Wednesday, the total daily attendance was even higher,” says festival spokesman Jindřich Vaněk, adding that more will arrive at Lenny Kravitz’s Friday show. The campus designed for 50,000 people could “significantly approach” this limit, Vaněk hopes.
All the riffs in one pile
Directly on the spot, compared to last year, there were minimal changes. A marquee for several hundred people was added for the session called the New York stage, a tribune grew in front of the main stage, the cafe on the ground floor of the Gong grew into a pizzeria. A tea shop has recently moved right next to the gas station.
The organizers appreciate the attendance. | Photo: CTK
The second main stage is no longer named after the Ostrava smelter Liberty, which ended up in insolvency, but the telephone operator T-Mobile. The new sponsor built a very loud tent for it, but this does not deviate from the trend. Compared to the situation ten years ago, Colors are bigger, noisier and more expensive. It’s a toll for being able to have a stellar program.
Among the most enjoyable performances on Wednesday were the musician Anna Vaverková, who alternately accompanied herself on keyboards and bass guitar, the very well-played DYK project of singer and actor Vojtěch Dyk, or in the early evening the excellent American guitarist Gary Clark Jr.
But the main star Tom Morello attracted the most attention. “Good evening, we are Queens of the Stone Age,” he greeted. He alluded to the fact that the originally announced American band refused to participate due to health reasons. The universally recognized guitarist Morello is a more than worthy replacement, moreover, he did not play independently in the Czech Republic – he only performed in Prague in 1996 with the band Rage Against the Machine.
It was this group, which, along with Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, was one of the biggest rock stars of the 90s, brought Morello to fame. Rage Against the Machine mixed political appeals with elements of rock, rap, metal, punk or hip-hop. They won two Grammy Awards and their song Wake Up closed the first part of the sci-fi movie The Matrix. In the new millennium, however, the formation broke up several times, most recently this year. This definitely dashed the hope that Rage Against The Machine would replace the announced return to Prague in 2020.
Tom Morello has now partly compensated for it, at least for the Colors visitors. He ran onto the stage with a scarf around his neck, wearing black glasses and an army beret, which he later changed to a cap. He started energetically, loudly and at a fast pace. He had already kept it all evening.
After a few minutes, he started riffing on songs from Rage Against the Machine such as Testify, Freedom, Know Your Enemy or Bullet in the Head. Surprisingly, however, without lyrics, poured one after the other into instrumentals lasting several minutes. As if he wanted to fulfill his duty and devote as much time as possible to his own creation.
Tom Morello started the concert at Colors with current single Soldier In The Army Of Love. He wrote it with his son. Photo: Jiří Zerzoň | Video: Tom Morello
Heritage from Kenya
All of these riffs Morello played on a modified Fender Telecaster electric guitar, on which he has the lowest string tuned one tone lower to achieve a darker position suitable for hard music.
Whoever took a good look at the guitar recognized the inscription Sendero Luminoso. It refers to the Peruvian Maoist guerrillas, which the European Union has included on the list of terrorist organizations. When the musician changed the instrument, the call to “Arm the Homeless” and the communist hammer and sickle played on another guitar.
It has its context. Tom Morello learned the guitar under the influence of bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, which also shaped his worldview. He knows the tradition of American protest songs from Woody Guthrie through the post-war Once I’ll Go On to the political performance of Jimi Hendrix, who parodied the American anthem at the Woodstock festival and whose distorted guitar imitated the sound of falling bombs during the Vietnam War.
The socialist Morello follows up on this context when he has been calling for unrest at concerts for years. Much was heard about him around the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. At the same time, his political positions have a personal level. Morello is the son of an American teacher who went to Kenya, Africa, where she met his father, a rebel fighting against the then British colonial administration. Anyone who took a good look at Colors saw a black and white photo taped to one of Morello’s guitars with the words “Go home, we really hate you”. It comes from Kenya.
But his parents separated shortly after his birth, and the boy grew up without a father in the suburbs of Chicago. “He was the only black kid in a white neighborhood and the only left-wing kid in a neighborhood full of Republicans,” a classmate in the Washington Post interpreted his political orientation in 1999. Before Tom Morello later turned to hard music, he managed to study social sciences at the prestigious Harvard University.
Compared to how often he talks about politics in the US, he kept it short on Colors. Perhaps warned by the organizers that the hammer and sickle in the former Czechoslovakia meant thousands of victims of judicial murders, hundreds of thousands of political prisoners or theft of property. The American did not make a single political statement during the entire ninety-minute concert. He dedicated only the song Hold the Line to trade unionists.
Rage Against the Machine’s Killing In the Name as performed by Tom Morello on Colors this Wednesday. Photo: Jiří Zerzoň | Video: Jiří Pelikán
The 60-year-old Morello instead remembered his deceased friends in Ostrava. He played a cover version of the song Kick Out the Jams from the repertoire of Detroit rockers MC5, whose member Wayne Kramer died this year. He also performed Like a Stone from the Audioslave repertoire, accompanying Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. “I regret that Cornell and I never came to that Prague,” said Morello in Ostrava. He alluded to an incident from 2005, when they announced a concert in the Czech capital and canceled it again.
The audience reacted most euphorically to the song The Road I Must Travel, during which Morello made people squat and jump in the chorus. Later, he instructed them to create a so-called circle pit and dance in a circle – there were two under the stage, which is not common at Colors.
The repertoire was refreshed by newer compositions: Gossip recorded with the Italian Måneskin, Let’s Get The Party Started written with the British Bring Me The Horizon or not even a month old Soldier in the Army of Love. The guitarist invented his riff with his thirteen-year-old son Roman Morello, who learned to play the guitar during the pandemic.
Cover versions included The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen, with whom Morello has been playing since 2008, or the campaigning Power to the People by John Lennon. Everything was interspersed with songs from solo records and projects like The Nightwatchman.
Practically every guitarist used modulation effects such as distortion, overdrive, whammy or phaser in addition to delay. He repeatedly played with the signal on and off the guitar, creating a staccato-like effect. He used techniques reminiscent of Eddie van Halen a few times. And more than once he rang out the strings with just the power of his left hand, with his right hand raised triumphantly above his head. The bandmates were also impeccable: drummer Eric Gardner, bassist Dave Gibbs and guitarist Carl Restivo, who sang many of the songs himself.
In the end, he performed only one song from Rage Against the Machine’s repertoire, Killing in the Name, which Morello mysteriously introduced as “an old Czech folk song”. The song from 1993 reacts to the period riots in the USA caused by the acquittal of the white police officers who brutally beat the black man Rodney King. And its power lies on the one hand in turning the figure “you dance as I whistle” into “I won’t dance as you whistle”. And on the one hand, in the understatement of the chorus, where only “I kill in the name” is always sung – but no one says who.
Tom Morello was the main star of the first day of Colors of Ostrava. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň
Tom Morello, with the microphone raised in Ostrava, probably hoped that a larger part of the audience would sing along with him. Younger visitors to Colors may know the song more in an apolitical context. In 2009, Killing in the Name soared back to the top of the UK charts as part of a social media campaign at the time, which British people expressed their displeasure with the radio playing only pleasant pop music in the run-up to Christmas.
The one on the main stage of Colors of Ostrava will get space on Thursday, when Sam Smith will perform. That’s how it should be: everything takes turns here like in the best years, and hopefully everyone will find something for themselves.