Rage with a new machine

IN Rage Against the Machine, guitar hero Tom Morello routinely looked out on delirious festival audiences that stomped and shouted back his band’s every lyric. In Audioslave, his solos shook arenas, and fans in front stretched out to touch him. So it was a bit of change the last few years as Morello, unannounced and undercover, launched his solo career at humble open-mike nights.

“It was two or three nights a week, sometimes it was bars, but sometimes it was coffee shops or bike shops, I’m not kidding, and the crowd could be eight people,” Morello said of his travels as an acoustic troubadour who signed up at each venue under the name the Nightwatchman. “Some nights there was the danger of getting drowned out by the latte machine. But it was a valuable trial by fire and a great balance to the day job as arena rock star.”

That day job takes Morello to Indio tonight, where he and the other three members of Rage -- singer Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk -- are scheduled to perform in concert for the first time since their breakup in 2000. The reunion at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival has been one of the most talked about moments in recent rock history, unless of course you’ve been talking to someone in the band. Morello and his mates have been resolutely mum, preferring to do their talking on stage, although Morello did, with a smile, say: “In rehearsals, playing those songs with those guys, it’s been what you want: ferocious.”

All eyes will be on the main stage tonight for Rage, but Morello was just as excited going into the weekend to bring his Nightwatchman music to the festival with his Saturday solo set in a tent. It’s a major moment for an acoustic career that Morello says is not a moonlighting exercise -- it’s the clear new direction of his artistic energies. Playing electric guitar in the big rock acts will now be his sidelight.

Last Tuesday, Morello released his first solo album, and the title, “One Man Revolution,” was intended to make it clear that he is no longer looking for safety in numbers.

“I like the purity of doing this,” Morello said. “In the big rock band, you bring people to concerts in order to sell millions of albums and to every kid you can. With this album, if we sell 1,000, well, we might be able to levitate the Pentagon. With this one I’m looking for poet soldiers, suburban guerrillas, zealots and street kids willing to fight in their own backyards.”

Socialist ideology and a bitter view of American conservative politics is nothing new for Morello, of course. All of that was clear in the lyrics of Rage (although De la Rocha is the recognized primary lyricist there) and the activism of Audioslave, which in 2005 became the first American rock band to play Havana. The new album finds Morello giving voice to the same views, but now the cadences are different and the guitar is acoustic, though no less savage.

The lyrics of the Nightwatchman are laced with workers union imagery and street revolution, and Morello says yes, if you hear echoes of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash in the populist storytelling, you’ve put your finger on the music that has captured his attention most in recent years. It was Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” that first captured Morello’s imagination, and as he went back into the musical heritage of protest folk and the rural sound of downtrodden America, he found that unplugging brought more power to words.

Oddly, though, the most powerful trigger to this new career direction was hearing a homeless teenager perform at a Thanksgiving show at a shelter. The street kid’s delivery was as rough as his life, but Morello was mesmerized.

“It felt like a moment when every soul in the room was at stake,” Morello said. He felt a new urgency to songwriting and, especially, to singing his own music. Visits with Rick Rubin, the music producer and a sage figure in rock, as well as conversations with Billy Bragg and Steve Earle, sharpened the resolve and the voice. On recent Tuesdays, Morello, as the Nightwatchman, has been playing at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood with a gallery of guests (Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Ben Harper and Shooter Jennings among them), and there’s a power in Morello’s vocals that can catch audiences off guard.

The lyrics too are bracing, such as “Midnight in the City of Destruction,” about personal loss and the destruction of Ward 9 in New Orleans.

I lost my guitar, my home, my hope, and my good fortune

I lost my grandfather, two neighbors, and my friend

I pray that God himself will come and drown the president

If the levees break again

Now we’re standing at the crossroads waiting for instruction

And it’s midnight in the city of destruction

The big question may be whether fans of Rage and Audioslave will embrace this new sound, which falls somewhere between a protest coffeehouse and a roughneck roadhouse but nowhere near a mosh pit. Morello said those bands had smart and open-minded audiences, but he couldn’t worry about their acceptance: Things in the country have been going too badly to spend time fretting over career rhythms.

“I’m looking for truth and answers,” he said with a bitter trace in his voice. “Why am I not picking up my guitar and pitchfork and torches and headed toward Washington, D.C.?” A few minutes later, though, Morello spoke of his growing Nightwatchman work, and he had resolve in his voice, not bitterness. “I know that right now, well, I got 55 new songs I believe in.”

geoff.boucher@latimes.com

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Tom Morello performs with Rage Against the

Machine tonight at 11 on the Coachella Stage.