After years of speculation, Fender has granted Tom Morello fans’ wishes and announced a replica of his Arm the Homeless electric guitar – the misfit six-string that fueled Rage Against the Machine and changed the face of rock guitar as we know it.
Fender has replicated every part of the one-of-a-kind instrument, which was Frankensteined together by Morello after he commissioned a custom guitar and hated every single part of it. Over several years, he would swap everything, settling with the iconic configuration that hasn’t changed over the past three decades.
There’s the EMG pickup combo – an 85 in the bridge, H humbucker-sized single-coil in the neck. The indestructible toggle switch. Gotoh’s Floyd Rose-alike locking tremolo with the rattly whammy bar.
The striking aesthetics are replicated, too: Morello’s hand-drawn hippos, the “Arm the Homeless” slogan in black and red permanent marker, all atop a blue ice metallic finish. And yes, in what’s possibly a first for a production-line guitar, the strings are uncut at the hockey-stick headstock.
In fact, the neck shape was the hardest thing to get right – after all, this was a knockoff Kramer neck that Morello found in a bargain bin. It took 20 to 25 iterations for Fender to nail the formula, but now the replica and the original are so interchangeable that Morello has been stealth-testing it on tour – and no-one, not Arm the Homeless die-hards (guilty) or even his bandmates, noticed.
“Zero. Zero percent. You'd never know. I mean, I don't know!” Morello told Guitar World. “The final prototype that I approved I've been using in concert on the last tour this year. So I feel great about it.
“It's interchangeable down to the aesthetics of the guitar. We were shooting some promos, and I was at Cello Studios where we made a number of Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine records. I put three of the Fender Arm the Homeless guitars and the real one down on the mixing board. And I brought people, and I was like, ‘Pick the real one.’”
But, as he reveals, there is one distinguishing characteristic between the original and the new guitar – and it’s a highly unusual bit of wear.
“On the real Arm the Homeless guitar, a couple decades ago, a dog chewed the headstock. So there are teeth marks on the headstock. I think it was a dog. It's hard to say whether it was a fan or whether it was a badger. But other than that, they're absolutely identical.”
There are a couple of teeny tiny differences on the rear of the guitar, too. There's no Fathead Sustainer on the rear of the headstock (“It literally did nothing”) or giant hippo on the back of the body – but the latter is normally covered up with a political statement that Morello flips to the audience while playing with his teeth.
And, unlike many of Fender’s recent Mexico-built signature models, the guitar is box-fresh and isn’t relic’d in any way. As Morello puts it, “Now it’s up to you to let your dog bite it.”
As per the guitarist’s other signature gear releases, proceeds from sales of Arm the Homeless will go to charity organizations Midnight Mission and Covenant House, which help those experiencing homelessness.
The Fender Tom Morello “Arm The Homeless” Guitar is available now for $1,699. Head to Fender.com for more info.
Guitar World’s full interview with Tom Morello will be published in the coming days.
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