Over the past few years, the state of the touring business has once again become a hot topic, with ticket prices and Ticketmaster fees ballooning out of control and no less an authority than Neil Young saying that the whole model is “over.” As you might expect, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello has some opinions of his own.

One of last year’s most exciting and talked-about large-scale tours was the long-awaited reunion of Rage Against The Machine, which was delayed by two years because of the pandemic and which was deeply affected when Zack De La Rocha tore his Achilles tendon on the second night, forcing him to play the rest of the tour while sitting down. That injury led to RATM cancelling their planned 2023 dates, which haven’t been rescheduled. A few months ago, we learned the awful news that Rage bassist Tim Commerford is battling prostate cancer; he had his prostate removed a few months before the band headed out on tour. Given all those obstacles and the changing touring climate, it’s an open question whether Rage Against The Machine will ever finish up their tour.

In a new Rolling Stone interview, Tom Morello talks about how powerful those Rage shows were, and he praises his bandmates for soldiering through tough situations. He also does a bit of campaigning for RATM to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame; they were recently nominated for the fifth time. And he explains why the tour couldn’t keep going as planned:

Doctor’s orders. I don’t know all the details, but there’s dangers of flying. There’s danger of blood clots and all that. I wasn’t in the room. But it’s not the optimum care to be on the road with a newly-ruptured Achilles.

Reasonable! Morello also takes the opportunity to address “some misunderstandings,” claiming that Rage never required proof of vaccination for anyone to get into their shows. He honestly seems offended by the idea, which is interesting. Morello also talks about ticket prices:

One, there’s a lot of ridiculous people who disapprove of Rage’s political outlook, who were not at the shows, who… just to be clear, no fans at any show in the history of Rage Against the Machine have ever had a vaccination requirement to be in the room. Ever. People say that, and it’s just foolish.

Second, in regards to ticket prices… I think by this point, I think everybody is familiar with the awful idea of dynamic ticket pricing. There was that big uproar with Springsteen and this one and that one. Just to reiterate, every ticket for the show was $125 with the exception of about five to ten percent of tickets, which we did the dynamic ticket prices with, and gave away every cent.

Every penny over $125 went to charities in those cities. In New York City, we raised over a million dollars for activist organization charities. There was a total of about six or seven million raised on that tour in what was basically a Robin Hood tactic. I wanted to say those things out loud since there was a lot of misinformation in the world about those two things.

On the question of whether Rage will ever tour again, Morello says that the band’s status is unclear: “We’ll see. If there is to be any more shows, we will announce it as a band. I don’t know. I know as much as you do, honestly. Right now, we’re in time of healing… When Rage Against the Machine is going to tour or break up or hold a seance on the Joe Rogan Show, you’ll hear it from Rage Against the Machine. Until such a time, there is not news.”

In the Rolling Stone interview, writer Andy Greene asks Morello again and again about the current status of Rage Against The Machine, rephrasing the question as many ways as possible, and Morello keeps saying that there is no news and that the band doesn’t operate like any other band. You can read that interview here.