When Roddy Bottum embarked on writing his remarkable autobiography The Royal We, the keyboard player for Faith No More had a specific goal of the kind of book he wanted to steer clear of. “The sort featuring mid-book images,” he remarks, during a video call from Oxnard, California, where he is completing a new album with his musical project Imperial Teen. “I have little interest in rock memoirs – they’re the most predictable, name-droppy, sub-literature experiences.”
The Royal We is definitely not name-droppy – Bottum omits the surnames of his group members. And while he outlines the team’s early days and initial growth, this is secondary to his “teenage exploits” in San Francisco, “prior to the digital age, before the city’s decline.” Much of the attention is on his discovery of his sexuality, and how the accompanying concealment and shame have shaped his life. “From a young age, around 13 or 14, I engaged in sexual relations with men,” he states. “It was such a taboo, and that set the tone of my life.” In the memoir, events involving his cruising public toilets and parks as a teenager are described without hesitation and unapologetically. “Intimate moments occurred with older men in outdoor hideaways,” he notes. “First filled with guilt, then with confidence. Fuck off.”
“During presentations, I open with that segment,” he comments. “I am aware of the shock value in those words; it’s so inappropriate. But I have no regret. Amid political shifts, my reality requires bold expression, to combat the racism, the anti-transgender and anti-gay attitudes.” He stops. “I aim to stir controversy. My relatives include religious conservatives, and it’s absolutely my intention to ruin their Thanksgiving dinner with this book. As they are sure to peruse it.”
The memoir starts on the teenage Bottum moving from his native Los Angeles. “The city was a sudden shift from LA’s bright facade,” he notes. “Bitter. Dark. People with dyed black hair and white faces, persons engaged in substance abuse. The LGBTQ+ scene in San Francisco stood in stark contrast to LA’s. It felt empowering.”
Entering the Band Faith No More
In 1981, Bottum became a member of Faith No Man, which evolved into Faith No More with Billy Gould and Mike Bordin, accenting their “driving beat section” with “a sense of beauty atop that darkness. Rock bands didn’t have keyboards then.” They cycle through vocalists, including – for a short time – Courtney Love, the memoir’s most vivid character, an unabashed chaos agent lighting homes on fire and alienating people constantly.
“We immediately felt a bond, Courtney and I,” Bottum states. Their non-romantic relationship momentarily crossed into a intimate involvement, causing pregnancy and abortion; later, Bottum became a close advisor of Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain. Unlike the vilified image some hold, Bottum portrays Love as someone with cleverness, energy and agency.
“Courtney had a hard go of it,” he nods. “A controversial woman who’s very powerful, and highly intelligent. That makes for a compelling subject in writing. Her nature is caring and understanding, and few get to witness it. But we were very close and took care of each other.”
The Band’s Beginnings
The embryonic Faith No More were, Bottum acknowledges, “absolutely preposterous.” Their music focused on insistent, weighty rhythms improvised while under the influence of assorted narcotics, including MDMA, while their frontman, alcoholic oddball Chuck Mosley, “was not a skilled singer.” But they had aspiration. “The local music community preferred dark aesthetics, but we adored mainstream media and artists. Irrationality, we saw ourselves in that league. Yet we were far from glamorous or appealing.”
But their sardonic rock-rap anthem We Care a Lot became a modest television favorite in 1988, Mosley stepped down to the camera-friendly Mike Patton (who did have a good singing voice), and by 1990 Faith No More’s third album was a bona fide, Grammy-nominated hit. As usual, The Royal We doesn’t linger over this triumph, jump-cutting instead to their disastrous stint on Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s 1992 stadium tour.
“Heroin served as my coping mechanism for hidden truths.”
On the Road with Legends
It was, Bottum says, “the biggest tour that had ever happened.” But Faith No More were quickly alienated by the “harmful” rock’n’roll circus they’d entered; in the memoir, he tells an unsettling encounter with followers recruited for GN’R’s entertainment. “The misogyny and the bravado of the macho dynamic coming from the Guns N’ Roses camp was suffocating,” he says. “They had that song One In a Million, with the N word and the F word [faggot], and that reflected the atmosphere offstage. I refused to participate. We resisted sacrificing our values for this negativity.”
The tour – from which Faith No More were dismissed two weeks early, for criticizing GN’R in the press – marked a turning point for Bottum. “I had to embrace my true self,” he says, “to open up about being queer, to distance myself from this negative setting.” Against his managers’ advice, he came out in the pages of the Advocate the following year. “No other rock musician was openly queer at the time,” he states. “Freddie Mercury never publicly acknowledged his sexuality. Michael Stipe remained silent on the topic, nor Judas Priest’s frontman, nor Hüsker Dü’s member. This fueled my frustration. I had to claim my place in history, to encourage acceptance of LGBTQ+ artists. I encountered numerous young LGBTQ+ individuals inspired by my visibility.”
Personal Struggles and Sobriety
Bottum never talked about his sexuality with his bandmates, even though he travelled with his boyfriend on the tourbus. “They were open minded, they would have been OK with it,” he comments. “It was the damage of being a gay kid in that era, the impact of internalized stigma.” He found immediate support from Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who was the clear opposite of the misogyny and discrimination that had marred the GN’R tour. “Kurt was like a unicorn,” Bottum says softly. “He wanted to be gay – Kurt loved the provocation of that. I think that’s why we were really good friends. He appreciated my openness and presence. His character was remarkable.”
Bottum developed a strong bond to Cobain and Love, the trio united at the time by substance dependence. Bottum
