It’s fair to expect a memoir by Faith No More’s co-founder and keyboardist to include a wealth of revelations about the influential San Francisco band. But if that’s what you were hoping to get from Roddy Bottum’s new memoir, The Royal We, you might leave sorely disappointed.
In his debut book, one of hard rock’s few gay icons does take a no-holds-barred approach to telling the story of his upbringing in Southern California and, in particular, life on the artsy fringes of 1980s San Francisco.
Yet, although Faith No More’s success was a huge part of Bottum’s life, I left The Royal We with almost no idea how the band actually worked together — on tour, in the studio, writing songs or on a day-to-day organizational basis once they graduated from van life. One is left with the impression that, while Bottum is willing to tick boxes here and there about tours, hotels and vehicles, he actively withholds insights about his bandmates.
What the 62-year-old does detail well in this memoir are his harrowing struggles with heroin and the loneliness he long battled because of his sexuality. Bottum shares some genuinely perturbing stories of sexual encounters he experienced with adult men while underage, growing up in Southern California. His journey to coming out in the pages of The Advocate is a fraught and sometimes frightening one. That interview he gave to Lance Loud, he reveals, was sold to the British rock press without his consent.
The Royal We shines when Bottum vividly takes the reader back to pre-tech San Francisco: the grime, the venues, the underground bands, the bike messengers, the “anything goes” of it all. Local legends like Frightwig and the Dicks feature fleetingly, alongside lesser-known characters from the old-school punk scene. Bottum is refreshingly frank about his own misguided cultural appropriation during that era. (There were dashikis and white-people dreadlocks involved, he admits.)
