Tom Morello

Tom Morello is living proof of the transformative power of rock’n’roll. As the co-founder of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave and Prophets Of Rage, and through collaborations with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Johnny Cash, he has continually pushed the limits of what one man can do with six strings.

But on his latest album, The Atlas Underground, he’s transformed his sound into something even he could not have anticipated, blending Marshall stack riff-rock with the digital wizardry of EDM and hip-hop to create the most ambitious artistic effort of his storied career.

The Atlas Underground includes collaborations with Marcus Mumford, Portugal. The Man, the Wu Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA, Vic Mensa, K.Flay, Big Boi, Gary Clark Jr., Pretty Lights, Killer Mike and Whethan among others. “The riffs and the beats led the way, but the extraordinary talents of the collaborators set my creativity into uncharted territory,” says Morello of the project, which was released October 12th, 2018 by Mom + Pop Music.

Assembled over the last two years in a variety of studios, The Atlas Underground is what Morello calls “a clandestine sonic conspiracy of artists working in disparate locations toward a shared goal of creating a new genre of music.” The lyrics often take the form of “social justice ghost stories,” and on tracks such as Bassnectar, Big Boi and Killer Mike’s “Rabbit Revenge” and the RZA/GZA-featuring “Lead Poisoning,” they convey the experiences of those less fortunate who were unable to speak up for themselves.

“This record also afforded me the opportunity to divest myself of my natural Type A controlling character,” admits Morello, whom Rolling Stone has recognized as one of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time. “After initial conversations with the collaborators about theme and lyrics, I made it clear that there was no ego stake in these songs and that the only goal was to make something we all loved; something that was fucking powerful with no preconceived notions other than the freedom of taking a blank sonic page and letting our freak flag fly.”

Morello knew some of his collaborators beforehand, particularly the Wu-Tang members, with whom Rage Against The Machine shared an infamous U.S. tour bill in summer 1997. In other cases, the connections were serendipitous, such as when Morello heard K.Flay on the radio and cold-called her, only to discover they were both from Illinois and “shared that suburban angst.”

Morello took great joy in sending batches of riffs and guitar noises to collaborators such as Bassnectar and Knife Party, who would send back “smashing tracks” that scrambled everything together. Just as rewarding were in-person jam sessions with artists such as Clark, where songs were built verse/chorus/lyrics from scratch. And in the case of “Find Another Way,” Mumford and Morello teamed up for early-morning Skype sessions in-between their parental duties.

“I’ve been devoted both musically and as an activist to fighting injustice at every turn,” says Morello. “Amid this heightened sense of impending doom, it’s now time to rally the troops in a last-ditch effort to save the planet, and our artistic souls. By challenging the boundaries of what music is and has sounded like before, you can open peoples’ eyes to changing the status quo in society.”

In tandem with acclaimed multimedia artist Sam Durant and director Sean Evans, who staged Roger Waters’ “The Wall,” Morello is planning an innovative live presentation of the music on The Atlas Underground, which won’t be reliant on fill-ins to replicate the guest artist’s contributions. “We’re assembling something that’s more of an art installation than a show, which is different than anything anyone has ever done,” he says. “It will be a challenging piece in non-traditional venues that will bring the ideas on the album to life—a last big event before we all go to jail.”

Nuno Bettencourt

Nuno is an insanely great guitar player. I was going to school in Boston and we’d go see Nuno’s band Extreme in the local clubs. As a 16-year-old he was the greatest guitar player I ever saw onstage. His incredible rhythm playing, hard & funky; his taste and jaw dropping technique was all there from the start. Throughout his work with everyone from Extreme to Janet Jackson to Rihanna, to backyard jams he continues to be a tremendous player.

Guitar virtuoso, singer-songwriter, and record producer, Nuno Bettencourt rose to international prominence as guitar player with the multi-platinum rock band EXTREME. To date, the Grammy-nominated band is one of the most successful rock acts of the early to mid 1990s selling over 10 million records worldwide. Nuno penned the acoustic ballad “More Than Words” that went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and “Hole Hearted” that reached #4 on the same chart.

Outside of EXTREME, Nuno is also a member of the guitar supergroup GENERATION AXE which features Nuno, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Zakk Wylde and Tosin Abasi.

Nuno has written, produced and performed with many artists. He was personally recruited by Rihanna to be her guitar player and touring music director on 4 mega-world tours. Nuno performed with Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler at the 21st Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, honoring children’s rights activists Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai. Nuno has also preformed with Paul McCartney, Kanye West, Janet Jackson, Perry Farrell and many others.

In December 1990, Washburn Guitars unveiled the Washburn N4 Nuno Bettencourt Signature Series Guitar- a series of Bettencourt-designed guitars which endures today. The N4 is the flagship guitar for Washburn. Nuno also has his own signature series amp he designed through Randall Amplification called the NBKing.

John 5

John 5 can play anything. Like, ANYTHING. I admire his unapologetic love of KISS and all things metal, but he’s a guy that can go from some incredibly articulated bluegrass picking to the craziest Yngwie Malmsteen arpeggios in the blink of an eye. He’s played with Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, even David Lee Roth – and is an effortless master of every genre and a really nice dude; any time I get to see him play makes me very happy.

John 5, was born John William Lowery, on July 31 1971, in Grosse Pointe Michigan, in a safe, affluent neighbourhood “it was safe, and I had my own maid“. His love of guitar came at the age of seven, from the Hee Haw series he would watch with his father, as well as The Monkees; “I watched the guitar playing and knew that was what I wanted to do. My friends wanted to be astronauts and such but all I wanted to do was play and play and play”. Other influences included KISS and Jimi Hendrix “one of the hardest but most graceful guitar players of all time“.

For John it was having the support of his parents who permitted him to play in bars and clubs on the condition that he kept his grades up, which gave the biggest push to his burgeoning career. That support of family still drives John today “I‘m very lucky, I practise all the time and yet my wife, my family get it. You come to my house and you will rarely find me without a guitar in hand and I am so blessed to have the support of my family in what I do.”

John’s first high-school band – ‘Dirty Tricks’ won a major battle of the bands contest in the sixth or seventh grade. Hours of practise paying off. Another band – ‘Vampirella’ – was where he began to experiment with the unique facial make-up that he still wears to this day; “we looked crazy on stage. I’d already started wearing eyeliner anyway but the stuff we wore on stage was crazy“.

In October 2014, John 5 did a series of web shows to celebrate the release of the album ‘Careful With That Axe’. On the back of the success of the album and the web shows, in February and March 2015, John 5 took his solo act on the road as John 5 and The Creatures. Joined by long-time friend Rodger Carter on drums and newcomer Ian Ross on bass, the band travelled from West to East coast and quite a lot of the mid-west of the USA, presenting and intimate instrumental show and a series of fan meet and greets.. Many of the dates were sold out and received rave reviews. Says John 5; “Its been hard to find the time to do this but its the question that just kept being asked. When the chance came I took it and to see all the fans, the way we have been greeted and the atmosphere at all the shows has been fantastic.”

Working on new solo albums, Zombie albums would make one busy enough, but John 5 has continued to work as a “hired gun”. Whether it be contributing to guitar leads, such as on Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell 3: The Monsters Loose, or going into the studio for not one, but two Lynryd Skynrd albums and surprising fans by working with Ricky Martin and Rod Stewart – to name but two, life is busy for John 5. “I do kick myself sometimes. I’m busy, constantly busy with work but I look at who I am in the studio with or sending music to and I think sometimes, how can I top this and then something else comes along and it just gets better. I don’t want it to stop – the kid from Grosse Pointe did good“.

Wayne Kramer

Brother Wayne Kramer is a musical icon. He and his band the MC5 with passion, fury and political fire Iaid the groundwork for punk rock music. Wayne is an incredible musician who combines jazz styles with pure Detroit power. He is also likely the wisest musician I’ve ever met.

Wayne Kramer is a songwriter whose reputation writing music for film and television risks supplanting his legend as one of the world’s stellar guitarists. He is recognized nearly as often as a vigorous social activist.

Along with British troubadour Billy Bragg, Wayne founded Jail Guitar Doors, a Los Angeles based charity that provides musical instruments and group programs for prisoner rehabilitation. Known as “the loudest charity on planet earth,” JGD-USA launched at Sing Sing Prison in 2009 and has intervened in over 137 facilities to date.

Wayne’s last solo album Lexington marked not only the flagship launch of his new indie label Industrial Amusement, but just as the album was heralded by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke as “fiercely progressive jazz,” it landed in the Top 10 on Billboard’s jazz charts at #6 nationally.

Wayne was a teenage greaser and leader of the MC5, widely recognized as the prototype for punk rock. In 1969, the MC5 released the incendiary album Kick Out the Jams. After Elektra Records dropped them due to “radical antics”, they released two albums on Atlantic: Back in the USA, produced by Bruce Springsteen’s Jon Landau, and their final masterful High Time. He was 20 years old and had toured the world.

Wayne spent 1976-1978 in Lexington Federal Penitentiary where he was tutored by fellow inmate Red Rodney, trumpeter for the Charlie Parker Quintet. It was Red who taught Wayne how to hone his sight-reading skills and the two formed a prison band. After release, Wayne co-wrote the acclaimed R&B musical The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, then joined Don Was’ revolutionary acid funk band Was (Not Was) as its original guitarist. Wayne helped define the band’s sound through, of all things, the dance hit “Wheel Me Out”. In early 1980s’ New York City, Wayne teamed up with infamous Johnny Thunders for a short-lived, headline grabbing, punk rock supergroup Gang War. The band didn’t last, but Wayne’s love affair with the Lower East Side carried on for over a decade.

In 1994, Wayne moved to Los Angeles and signed with Epitaph Records. He recorded four records in as many years and toured the world 10 times over. He produced the album Full Circle with provocateur John Sinclair and produced an MC5 retrospective for Rhino Records entitled The Big Bang. Then, in 2006, he launched a career as a film and television composer.  Wayne scored Talladega Nights for Sony Pictures, where his song “Edge of the Switchblade” also runs at the film’s end title credits. He scores HBO’s controversial documentary Hacking Democracy, which also used his song “Something Broken in the Promised Land” as its title track. He has written additional underscore for the feature film Daydreamer (Aron Paul), C.O.G (the first-ever feature adaptation of a David Sedaris work).

In January 2015, Wayne completed the score for NBC’s Bad Judge starring Kate Walsh. In Summer 2014, he scored the Kristen Wiig dark comedy feature film Welcome to Me and contributed score for the feature length doc Being Evel about Evel Knievel, directed by Oscar-winner Daniel Junge. Between 2009-2012, Wayne scored three seasons of HBO’s East Bound & Down and the feature thriller Concrete Blondes as well as the acclaimed “zeitgeist” doc Let Fury Have the Hour. In 2015, he wrote and produced all the original songs for ShadowMachine’s stop-motion animation feature comedy Hell & Back, as well as the score for Algren, a feature-length doc about the outsider Chicago writer Nelson Algren.

While completing score and narration for the PBS doc The Narcotic Farm about America’s decades-long failed drug war, Wayne not only produced for, but was also featured on the release of Guitar Hero: World Tour. He also scored the #1 series Why Not? With Shania Twain for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Earlier, on television, Wayne’s title theme for the Fox Sports program 5-4-3-2-1 was a bona fide hit. He went on to write nearly a half dozen more for the network. Wayne composed the theme for E!’s hit series Split Ends as well as the “Unlabeled” commercial for Jim Beam. His songs have been featured in a wide array of TV shows and feature films Jackass, Judging Amy, Millennium, Almost Famous, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Pump Up the Volume. His cues are heard in NFL, NBA, and MLB Playoff events and Food Network productions, and Bravo’s series Kell on Earth, among others.

Wayne’s story is deep and was, at one time, a sordid one. Naturally, he completed his memoir THE HARD STUFF: DOPE, CRIME, THE MC5 & MY LIFE OF IMPOSSIBILITIES for Hachette/DaCapo in August 2018 and it won the Michigan Notable Book Award among other international accolades. And the story continues….

Vernon Reid

Vernon Reid went from NY avant-garde jazz fireball to Living Colour shredding metal icon, hit songwriter, and barrier breaker. I’ve always admired his huge riffs, great songwriting and unexpected turns as a soloist. He was also the first African American since Hendrix to be on the cover of guitar magazines and was tremendously inspirational to me. He is a deep cat and a true artist.

London-born lead guitarist, founder of Living Colour and a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, Vernon Reid has done a great deal to undermine stereotypical expectations of what kinds of music black artists ought to play; his rampant eclecticism encompasses everything from hard rock and punk to funk, R&B and avant-garde jazz, and his anarchic, lightning-fast solos have become a hallmark. In 1980, he joined Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, and over the course of the decade, Reid went on to work with a wide variety of experimental musicians including Defunkt, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, and Public Enemy. He has continued with extended collaborations as a producer and performer with James “Blood” Ulmer’s Memphis Blood, with DJ Logic in Yohimbe Brothers, the collaborative Burnt Sugar Arkestra, and the Tony Williams Tribute band “Spectrum Road” with Jack Bruce, John Medeski and Cindy Blackman-Santana. His latest project “The Zig Zag Power Trio” features Will Calhoun and Melvin Gibbs.

Bibi McGill

Bibi McGill is lead guitarist and musical director for Beyoncé. As a female lead guitarist, rocking huge stadiums she is a true groundbreaker with a total command of the instrument. Her aggressive, funky, soulful rock style is totally unique and awesomely, she, like me, cites Randy Rhoads as her favorite guitarist.

Musical force of nature, Bibi McGill, electrifies audiences with melodic, driving, emotionally moving, and spiritually elevating live performance and DJ’d sets. Dubbed by Rolling Stones Magazine as a “Zen Master, hippie, rock goddess who can seriously shred,” Bibi is phenomenon. She is considered one of the greatest rock guitarists alive. Bibi served as Beyonce’s lead guitarist and musical director for almost a decade, leading the ten-piece all female band that literally rocked the world. She has graced stages in over 100 countries, including two performances at the White House, with legendary solos at the 2013 Superbowl and the Glastonbury Music Festival. As producer and DJ, Bibi’s vast musical knowledge amplifies her heartfelt devotion to the healing power of music in luscious, buoyant, can’t-sit-down sets that sculpt epic sound journeys. Her blend of Hypnotic, Glitch, Bass, World and Mantra music inspire dance-floor revelations at music festivals around the world. She has DJ’d alongside The Polish Ambassador, Lapa, ILL-ESHa, CloZee, and The Human Experience. Other collaborations include Kirtan artists Shantala, Karnamrita Dasi, Tina Malia, Simrit Kaur, Jai-Jagdeesh, The Hanumen and Gurunam Singh. As guitarist, live performer, DJ & producer, Bibi brings a musical apothecary of gifts, blended with a deft touch to deliver musically thrilling, vibrationally healing, dance floor medicine from the heart.

Billy Howerdel

Billy Howerdel is the guitarist, producer and co-songwriter of A Perfect Circle. One of his greatest strengths is as a producer and engineer, creating the heavy, lush and beautiful tones on the Perfect Circle albums. Billy began as a guitar technician for David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, Guns & Roses and Tool before stepping into the spotlight with his own band.

One of rock music’s remaining Renaissance men, Billy Howerdel has penned multiple platinum albums, has become notorious for his ability to masterfully reassemble shattered guitars and adroitly plays and programs any and all types of instruments and recording gear.

Best known as one half of A Perfect Circle and the face of the eclectic alt-pop outfit Ashes Divide, Howerdel grew up on a steady diet of WLIR. It was those days of listening to Adam & The Ants, Depeche Mode, The Cure, and other staples of ’80s alternative radio that led him to pick up his first guitar. Two weeks after graduating high school he began working for local bands around the New York/New Jersey circuit. His first international tour came in the Spring of 1991, joining NYC outfit The Throbs. It was that tour, which brought Howerdel to Los Angeles for the first time, that foreshadowed his future on the west coast. The Throbs imploded fairly quickly into the tour, leaving Billy looking for a new employer. Luck struck when he met up with Fishbone at their June 1991 CBGB’s show, joining their crew and making the move west shortly thereafter.

Howerdel went on to work for a number of bands, including Guns and Roses, Nine Inch Nails (where he learned to reassemble splintered guitars), Smashing Pumpkins and Tool. It was the last band that would so greatly impact his future. Howerdel and Tool singer Maynard James Keenan were roommates in the ’90s and it was those shared walls that gave Keenan his first listen to what would become the songs on A Perfect Circle’s first album, Mers de Noms. Billy initially rebuffed the idea of Keenan singing for his as-of-yet untitled outfit, envisioning a female singer, but after a few conversations he realized the pairing could prove to be a special one. The band went on to release two platinum records (Mers de Noms, Thirteenth Step), one gold album (eMOTIVe) and just last year the pair released their first album in 14 years, the critically-acclaimed Eat The Elephant. Howerdel’s Ashes Divide released Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright in 2008 with Howerdel currently writing and recording a follow-up.

Ryan “Fluff” Bruce

Riffs, Beards & Gear is my popular YouTube Channel, and has a simple concept: educate and have fun while doing it. The channel began in May of 2011 as a sort of hobby/experiment to see how far I could push my learning experience in the home recording world. As time passed, it slowly grew into something much larger than I could have ever expected. The channel now consists of several different segments, such as the ever-popular FAQ Monday series, Beard Files, Riff Wars, Vlogs, Cool Gear Alerts and more.

Doug Doppler

With a disc out on Steve Vai’s esteemed Favored Nations label, tours supporting the likes of Michael Schenker, and a session background that includes Guitar Hero, Doug Doppler clearly took the lessons he learned as a student of Joe Satriani to heart.

In 2014 Doug launched GearTunes.com to connect the dots between gear, demos, and dealers. The GearTunes marketing platform helps brands get their message to market by engaging gear enthusiasts in new and innovative ways.

Doug remains a passionate music educator, offering Skype lessons, and teaching one day a week at the same Berkeley teaching studio he inherited from Joe Satriani.

Chris Cisneros

Rock-Fusion guitarist, composer, and producer, Cisneros has dedicated over four decades to his musical calling with a special love for melding music from various genres with cultures from around the world. This passion fuels his desire to help players uncover the gift of musical self-discovery, connection through performance, and the art of listening.

Cisneros studied Classical guitar, Jazz, Flamenco, and traditional Indian music, and continues to learn each time he picks up the instrument. He enjoys performing with various groups ranging from small ensembles to Latin Jazz Big Bands, Rock bands as well Rock band backed by an orchestra and has been honored to share the stage with many well-known, accomplished names in the business.



Chris delights in being part of the Dreamcatcher Events team and particularly loves helping campers immerse, learn, and cherish the experiences for years to come. Cisneros is blessed with making many friends that will last a lifetime, and looks forward to making more new friends at this camp!

Carl Restivo

Carl Restivo is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter, and producer. Carl has worked with ‪Tom Morello for over a decade as his musical director, playing guitar/bass/vocals. Most recently, Carl toured with Tom and the Freedom Fighter Orchestra for the Atlas Underground Live tour of the US and the UK.
Carl has performed, written or recorded with ‪Perry Farrell, ‪Nuno Bettencourt, Jerry Cantrell, Slash, Wayne Kramer, Flea, Dug Pinnick, and many others.