The cigar goes to Audioslave

Cuba had been his destination for years. Tom Morello had hoped to get there when he was in Rage Against the Machine, to be the first major rock band from the United States to perform in the country, to lead a musical, cultural, political exchange from behind his electric guitar. It never happened.

Then, on May 8, everything fell into place, with the needed signatures from the U.S. government and Fidel Castro himself. But this time Morello arrived as a member of Audioslave, landing in front of nearly 70,000 fans in Havana’s La Tribuna Anti-Imperialista Plaza. The band performed the free, open-air concert for more than two hours.

“Playing Cuba was probably the single greatest highlight of my musical career,” Morello says. “It wasn’t just about playing a show. It was a cultural exchange, and it was about us learning about Cuban music.”

During his years in Rage Against the Machine, which split up in 2000 after a career of anxious, revolutionary rock, Morello’s performance in Cuba might have seemed a natural, given the political implications. Cuba has been the subject of an American embargo since 1960, and Rage was known for hard rock of a leftist agenda. With Audioslave, fans could be forgiven for expecting something different.

Built from the remnants of Rage, plus former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, Audioslave announced in its earliest interviews that it would not share the same overt political agenda as Rage. There would be no Audioslave manifesto beyond what Morello describes as “rocking furiously.” But playing the communist country could easily mean some political aftershocks, certainly among the Cuban exile community of south Florida, and especially for a band about to release a new album, “Out of Exile,” on Tuesday.

Cornell saw no reason not to go. “We’re not going to be Jane Fonda sitting on a cannon in Vietnam,” Cornell says. “It’s just not going to come down like that. Also, it’s an art form, and it’s us sharing that with people who are citizens of a country. We didn’t go to play a private concert for Castro and his dudes.

“We figured that some of the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida might be angry, and apparently they were. But I can’t think of one reason why some music fans in Cuba don’t deserve to see an American rock band.”

For Cornell, the show was vaguely reminiscent of a concert he performed in Prague with Soundgarden in the ‘90s in support of Guns N’ Roses. Czechoslovakia was freshly liberated from the Soviet bloc, and young fans there craved some loud American rock. Playing Cuba in 2005 was no different. And they didn’t even meet Castro, says Cornell. “No, he was on the TV complaining about the U.S. most of the time we were there.”

That Audioslave chose to make the four-day trip at all -- which included visits to a Havana music university, a museum and time jamming with local salsa players along El Malecon waterfront -- is no shock to Cornell. Despite his early comments distancing Audioslave from the political imperative of Rage, the singer says he simply did not want to be locked into any specific role or message as a lyricist. If he is moved politically to write something, he will. If not, he won’t.

A sign of his own sociopolitical awareness came in summer 2003, several months after the beginning of the war in Iraq. During Audioslave’s set at the Lollapalooza festival date in Irvine, Cornell performed Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny (‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding)?” It was a quieter form of protest than the erupting noise Rage was known for, but it was equally pointed, and at least as emotional.

Audioslave’s members insist that they are a true, organic band of players, and not just a lucrative merging of rock ‘n’ roll name brands. There were, of course, skeptics at the beginning, calling it an unnatural blending of Rage (Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk) with Cornell, a brooding blues shouter in the tradition of such pre-rap vocalists as Robert Plant and Paul Rodgers.

Morello says they gelled immediately. “It pushed us musically,” he says. “It’s not just working with a melodic vocalist, but with one of the greatest singers in the history of rock. The way that he is able to pull great melodies out of the ether is astounding.”

That progression can be heard in the band’s newest album, from the melodic current radio hit “Be Yourself” to the churning, hammering guitars of Morello on “Your Time Has Come,” as Cornell considers the friends and associates who died young, and contrasts that loss with the thousands of names etched in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

The new band has stepped away from the high-octane agit-pop of Rage, but Audioslave’s players now feel free to add songs to the live show from their former bands, from Rage’s “Killing in the Name Of” to the obscure “Call Me a Dog,” a song Cornell wrote for the short-lived band called Temple of a Dog. Expect some of that at the group’s show this Friday at the Wiltern LG.

“Any band, in order to be as good as it can be, has to first and foremost be authentic,” says Morello, who has been politically active since he was 16. “Rage Against the Machine was authentic in its overt politics. Audioslave is authentic in how we make music. One of the authentic expressions of this band was the will to play a show in Cuba. That’s something Rage Against the Machine could never do. In this case, I think actions speak much louder than words.”

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Audioslave

Where: The Wiltern LG, 3760 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Price: $36.50

Info: (213) 380-5005