Rage Against the Machine wrapped up the 2022 leg of their Public Service Announcement reunion tour with a five-night stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden that concluded Sunday. At the second-to-last show on Friday night, they broke out “Fistful of Steel” for the first time since 1997. Check out the fan-shot video right here.
The song is a deep cut from their 1993 self-titled LP. They played nearly every song from the album at some point on the tour except for “Settle For Nothing,” which they haven’t touched since 1993. The vast majority of the songs in the set throughout the tour came from the band’s three proper studio albums, but they did play Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” from their covers collection Renegades, “No Shelter” from the Godzilla soundtrack, and Run the Jewels’ “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck).”
The band originally planned on heading to Europe later this month, but they canceled those shows to give frontman Zach de la Rocha more time to recover from his leg injury. “Zack must return home for rest and rehabilitation,” they wrote in a letter to fans. “The flights, travel time, and rigorous schedule in the UK and Europe are simply too much of a risk for his complete recovery. We are so sorry to all of our fans who have waited years to see us and hope to rage again soon.”
The singer injured his leg on the second tour stop at Chicago’s United Center on July 11. He played the rest of the tour seated on road cases in the front of the stage. The band never revealed exactly what happened to de la Rocha’s leg, but photographer Glen E. Friedman wrote last week that he tore his Achilles heel.
Rage Against the Machine are not scheduled to resume gigging until February 22, 2023, when the tour picks up again at the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They have dates at arenas throughout North America until April 2 in Detroit. It’s unclear if they plan on heading to Europe after that to make up for the canceled dates from this summer.