Tom Morello, on Tour and on Message

Tom Morello has spent the last 15 years playing in sold-out arenas as the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, yet here he was on Saturday night, playing to a sold-out coffeehouse crowd of 200 with just a guitar, harmonica and his voice.

His bands have sold more than 30 million records, so it's not that he needs a cut of the iced-coffee sales at Jammin' Java in Vienna, where he was performing as his acoustic folk-rock alter ego, the Nightwatchman, promoting his album "One Man Revolution."

His message is no mystery: It's evident in the black baseball cap that says "Industrial Workers of the World"; the phrase "Whatever it takes" that's scrawled on the soundboard of his guitar; and the crowd sporting T-shirts that say "Against All Authority" or "Support the Resistance" or "Iraq Veterans Against the War."

Morello rejects labels, largely because he's so far left on the political spectrum that labels cease to apply. A term like "revolutionary socialism" or "radical anti-establishment" gives a general idea for those unfamiliar with Rage Against the Machine.

"The whole idea of this was to be the black Woody Guthrie," Morello says of his new musical incarnation. "I started doing the Nightwatchman songs and music because it was important to me to have something really pure. To make music for wholly the right reasons."

The Nightwatchman, by design, is not for mass appeal. The songs are written to rally people on picket lines and at protests. "One criticism that could credibly be leveled against the record is that it's preaching to the converted," Morello said backstage before the show. "Well, the converted need a kick. . . . Those of us that know better are not doing enough."

Morello, 43, is touring the country in front of small, fired-up crowds because he's not satisfied that President Bush's approval ratings are low enough or that enough people want out of the Iraq war.

"Aside from [Rep. Dennis] Kucinich, and he's still several shades to the right of me, I don't think anybody has courageously stepped up and said what needs to be said. We have a war criminal sitting in the White House. That's not hyperbole."

Onstage, when the Nightwatchman sang, "I pray that God himself will come and drown the president if the levees break again," the Jammin' Java crowd's attitude was chilling. People were praying.

There were no screaming guitar solos that characterized Rage Against the Machine (although Morello does play an acoustic version of the Rage song "Guerrilla Radio" in his set), and this absence has been perhaps the biggest obstacle for his old fan base.

Among the Jammin' Java crowd on Saturday was Ryan Harvey, himself a musician. A member of a Baltimore folk-rock collective who could safely be described as part of the underground, he was never a big Rage fan. "I know a lot of people who were radicalized by Rage," Harvey says, "but in the '90s, I was already there."

To much of the underground, Rage Against the Machine was too commercial (the band's label was part of Sony, after all), but the Nightwatchman is in part a response to that. "He means it, and people can sense it," Harvey says. "If you don't mean it, you don't last too long with the grass roots."