Tom Morello Admits to Working as a Stripper

In a startling revelation, outspoken musician Tom Morello has revealed that he once worked as an exotic dancer. In a new guest column for NME.com, the Rage Against the Machine guitarist said that when he first moved to California, he was forced to shake his moneymaker to afford food.

"When I graduated from Harvard and moved to Hollywood, I was unemployable," Morello admitted. "I was literally starving, so I had to work menial labor and, at one point, I even worked as an exotic dancer. 'Brick House' [by the Commodores] was my jam! I did bachelorette parties and I'd go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank god it was in the time before YouTube! You could make decent money doing that job -- people do what they have to do."

Morello also said that despite his politically-charged music and actions, his tenure in the 1980s working for California Senator Alan Cranston squashed any political ambitions he might have ever had. "I was his scheduling secretary for about two years," he explained. "I never had any real desire to work in politics but if there was any ember burning in me, it was extinguished working in that job because of two things: one of them was the fact that 80 percent of the time I spent with the Senator, he was on the phone asking rich people for money."

"It just made me understand that the whole business was dirty," the guitarist continued. "He had to compromise his entire being every day. The other was the time a woman phoned up the office and wanted to complain that there were Mexicans moving into her neighborhood. I said to her, 'Ma'am, you're a damn racist' and she was indignant. I thought I was representing our cause well, but I got yelled at for a week by everyone for saying that! I thought to myself that if I'm in a job where I can't call a damn racist a damn racist, then it's not for me."

Morello also revealed that Rage's naked protest against the censorship-happy Parents Music Resource Center at Lollapalooza in 1993 "was one of the more harrowing things we did. The crowd were throwing quarters at us! We figured out that we had about 15 minutes until the police came. So I went to the one place where a running, naked black man wouldn't seem out of place -- and that was the tour bus of [ska-punkers] Fishbone. I settled in and watched 'Star Wars' while the police were outside."