When Roddy Bottum started developing his remarkable autobiography The Royal We, the musician from Faith No More had a definite idea of the type of book he did not wish to create. “Those with photo inserts in the center,” he notes, in a video call from Oxnard, California, where he is completing a new album with his group Imperial Teen. “I don’t care much for rock memoirs – they tend to be cliché, full of name-dropping, and low on literary merit.”
The Royal We certainly isn’t name-droppy – Bottum omits the surnames of his bandmates. And while he describes the band’s beginnings and early development, this takes a back seat to his “teenage exploits” in San Francisco, “before the internet, before that city got ruined.” Much of the emphasis is on his personal journey with identity, and how the accompanying concealment and shame have shaped his life. “As a teenager, at 13 or 14, I began intimate encounters with men,” he says. “The stigma was immense, and it influenced my entire existence.” In the memoir, episodes involving his visiting public facilities and parks as a teenager are recounted without hesitation and unapologetically. “Intimate moments occurred with older men in outdoor hideaways,” he records. “Shamefully at first, proudly later. Get lost.”
“At book events, I begin by reading that part,” he says. “I understand how provocative statements like that are; it’s utterly unseemly. But I’m not ashamed. Amid political shifts, my reality requires bold expression, to oppose the bigotry, the anti-trans and homophobic mindsets.” He stops. “I aim to stir controversy. I have relatives who are Christian people, and I fully plan to disrupt their holiday meal with this publication. Since they will inevitably read it.”
The memoir opens on the teenage Bottum moving from his birthplace Los Angeles. “San Francisco offered a sharp contrast to LA’s glossy surface,” he says. “Chilly. Dark. People with dyed black hair and white faces, individuals using hard drugs like meth and heroin. San Francisco’s gay community was unlike anything in Los Angeles. It motivated me.”
Entering the Band Faith No More
During this period, in 1981, Bottum teamed up with Faith No Man, later renamed Faith No More with Billy Gould and Mike Bordin, accenting their “pummelling rhythm section” with “a touch of elegance amid the intensity. Rock bands didn’t have keyboards then.” They cycle through vocalists, including – for a short time – Courtney Love, the memoir’s most memorable personality, an unabashed chaos agent setting apartments ablaze and alienating people constantly.
“Courtney and I instantly recognized our deep connection,” Bottum says. Their platonic friendship momentarily crossed into a intimate involvement, leading to pregnancy and abortion; later, Bottum became a close advisor of Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain. Unlike the vilified image some hold, Bottum depicts Love as someone with cleverness, drive and agency.
“Life was difficult for Courtney,” he nods. “A divisive figure with immense strength, and highly intelligent. And that’s a very attractive, exciting person to write about. She’s a warm, compassionate person, and many fail to see that side. But we were very close and took care of each other.”
Faith No More’s Formative Years
The early Faith No More were, Bottum admits, “utterly absurd.” Their music focused on insistent, weighty rhythms improvised while under the influence of various drugs, including MDMA, while their frontman, alcoholic oddball Chuck Mosley, “was not a skilled singer.” But they had drive. “Our peers favored gothic and somber themes, but we were fans of pop culture icons. 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 handed over vocals to the visually appealing Mike Patton (who did have a good singing voice), and by 1990 Faith No More’s third album was a genuine, award-recognized success. Typically, The Royal We doesn’t linger over this triumph, shifting abruptly instead to their disastrous stint on Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s 1992 stadium tour.
“The heroin was me self-medicating, so I could feel OK about living all these secrets.”
The Big Tour Experience
It was, Bottum notes, “the largest concert series of its time.” But Faith No More were quickly alienated by the “harmful” rock’n’roll circus they’d clambered aboard; in the memoir, he tells an uncomfortable 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 states. “They had that song One In a Million, with the N word and the F word [faggot], and that set the tone behind the scenes. I refused to participate. We declined to contribute our identity to such toxicity.”
The tour – from which Faith No More were dismissed two weeks early, for badmouthing GN’R in the press – marked a critical juncture for Bottum. “I had to embrace my true self,” he declares, “to talk about being gay, 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. “Mercury kept his identity private. Stipe avoided the subject, nor Rob Halford, nor the alternative rock figure. It made me angry. It was essential to document my story, to get people to accept a queer person in music. I encountered numerous young LGBTQ+ individuals inspired by my visibility.”
Challenges and Recovery
Bottum hadn’t even discussed his sexuality with his group, even though he travelled with his boyfriend on the tourbus. “They were open minded, they would have been OK with it,” he notes. “The trauma of growing up gay during that time, the impact of internalized stigma.” He found swift approval from Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who was the clear opposite of the sexism and anti-gay sentiment that had marred the GN’R tour. “Kurt was a rare find,” Bottum whispers. “He embraced the idea of queerness for its rebelliousness. This connected us deeply. He loved that I was gay, that that was a thing he got to be around. He stood out as extraordinary.”
Bottum grew close to Cobain and Love, the trio bonded at the time by drug use. Bottum
