‘I was the only weird guy in rock’: Rudy Bottom of Faith No More | Faith no more

WWhen Roddy Bottom began work on his brilliant autobiography The Royal We, the Faith No More, the keyboardist knew exactly what book he was writing. He didn’t do that want to write. “The kind with the images in the middle,” he says via video call from Oxnard, California, where he is completing a new album for his group Imperial Teen. “I’m not a big fan of rock memoirs—they’re the more predictable, name-slippery sub-literary experiments.”

The Royal We’re certainly not skittish about names – Bottom doesn’t even use his bandmates’ nicknames. As he outlines the group’s origins and early development, he takes a back seat to his “youthful adventures” in San Francisco, “before the Internet, before it destroyed that city.” Much of the focus is on his sexual awakening, and how the secrecy and shame associated with it affected his life. “I was having sex with men when I was very young, 13 or 14 years old,” he says. “It was taboo, and that set the tone for my life.” In the memoir, episodes involving his wanderings into public toilets and parks as a teenager are recounted without hesitation and without apology. “I had sex with older men in the bush,” he writes. “Shamefully at first, proudly later. Leave.”

“When I do readings, I start with this section,” he says. “I understand how provocative such statements are; they are completely inappropriate. But I am not ashamed. With Trump in power, the truth must be shouted loudly, to combat racism, transphobic and homophobic mentalities.” It stops. “I He wants To be provocative. I have Christian relatives, and I definitely intend to spoil their Thanksgiving dinner with this book. “Because they will all read it.”

The memoir begins around a teenage Bottom’s move from his native Los Angeles. “San Francisco was a sudden shift from the sunny superficiality of Los Angeles,” he says. “Cold. Dark. People with dyed black hair and white faces, people doing crystal meth and heroin. The gay culture that existed in San Francisco was very different from Los Angeles. It was inspiring.”

Here, in 1981, Bottom joined Faith No Man (later Faith No More) with Billy Gould and Mike Borden, emphasizing their “pounding rhythm section” with “a sense of beauty over that darkness. Rock bands didn’t have keyboards at that time.” They cycle through singers, including — briefly — Courtney Love, the memoir’s most colorful character, an unabashed chaos worker who sets apartments on fire and makes enemies at every turn.

“Courtney and I knew right away that we were soulmates and that we would always be friends,” Bottom says. Their platonic friendship briefly turned sexual, resulting in pregnancy and miscarriage; Later, Bottom became a trusted confidant of Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain. Far from the grungy Lady Macbeth of the misogynistic myth, Bottom portrays Love as someone of intelligence, energy, and strength.

“Courtney had a hard time,” he nodded. “A controversial, very strong woman and very intelligent. And that’s a very attractive and interesting person to write about. She’s a warm and compassionate person, and a lot of people don’t experience that. But we were very close and looked after each other.”

Bottom admits that the embryonic “No Faith Anymore” was “completely preposterous.” Their music revolved around heavy, repetitive grooves that broke down while under the influence of various drugs, including MDMA, while their frontman, the eccentric alcoholic Chuck Mosley, “didn’t have a good singing voice.” But they had ambition. “Everyone in our scene was into gothic and dark stuff, but we loved MTV and Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. In a crazy way, we imagined ourselves being part of that mix. Even though there was nothing shiny or sexy or glamorous about us.”

But the satirical rock-rap anthem “We Care a Lot” became a minor hit on MTV in 1988, with Mosley ceding the microphone to the charismatic Mike Patton (who an act has a good singing voice), and by 1990, Faith No More’s third album was a bona fide success and nominated for a Grammy Award. Tellingly, The Royal We doesn’t focus on that triumph, jumping instead to their disastrous stint on Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s 1992 stadium tour.

It was “the biggest tour that’s ever happened,” Bottom says. But Faith No More soon became alienated from the “toxic” rock and roll circus they had climbed aboard; In his memoirs, he recounts a disturbing encounter with groups recruited for GN’R’s entertainment. “The misogyny and gritty macho dynamic coming out of the Guns N’ Roses camp was stifling,” he says. “They had that one-in-a-million song, with the N-word and the F-word [faggot]And that was the atmosphere behind the scenes. I didn’t want any part of it. “We did not want to lend our credibility, our culture and our individuality to this poison.”

The tour – from which Faith No More had been sacked two weeks earlier for defaming GN’R in the press – marked a turning point for Bottom. “I needed to be who I was, to talk about being gay, and to distance myself from this toxic environment,” he says. Against the advice of his managers, he appeared in the pages of The Advocate the following year. “I was the only weird guy in rock,” he says. “Freddie Mercury didn’t come out before he died. Michael Stipe didn’t talk about it, nor did Rob Halford, nor did Bob Mold. It made me angry. I needed to put myself on that page of history, to make people accept a queer person in music. And I met a lot of kids who were gay, who felt that being queer in music made a difference to them.”

Bottom didn’t even discuss his sexuality with his bandmates, even though he was traveling with his boyfriend on the tour bus. “They were open, and they were OK with it,” he says. “It was the damage of being a gay kid in that era, the damage of shame and homophobia.” He found immediate acceptance from Cobain, the Nirvana singer who was the proud antithesis of the misogyny and homophobia that blighted the GN’R tour. “Kurt was like a unicorn,” Bottom says quietly. “He wanted to be gay – Kurt loved the provocation of that. I think that’s why we were really good friends. He loved that I was gay, and that was the thing to be around. He was a very special person.”

Bottom became close to Cobain and Love, and the trio were at the time linked to heroin addiction. Bottom had been struggling to keep his habit secret from his bandmates for some time. “It was a drug of secrets, something I did behind closed doors,” he says. “The darkness of heroin was a draw for me – putting a needle in your arm is so overrated. I didn’t realize the impact it had on my life, and the devastation it caused to my friends and family.”

In 1993, Bottom overdosed in New York. “I died for a moment, then came back to life,” he recalls. In early 1994, while his father was dying of cancer, he, Love, and Cobain made plans to go to a rehabilitation center in Long Beach together; In the end, only Bottom made the trip. After several stressful months, he returned to their home, hoping that his newly sober existence would have a positive effect on Cobain. Bottom stayed in Seattle for a few days, then returned home. A week later, Cobain committed suicide.

“The first time a death happens in a young person’s life is very devastating,” he recalls. “But this was very violent. There was a gun. I couldn’t stop thinking about how that meant the bullet went through his head, and his skull was shattered.”

Bottom fell into a deep depression, but his sobriety was not shaken. “I felt like I had survived this. This – Kurt’s death – is what’s happening. My sobriety is the reason I’m still here, and he wasn’t.” He founded a new band, Imperial Teen. “We were gay people, singing about man-to-man relationships,” he says. “And it was only when I wrote the book that I realized: This was my happy ending. The darkness I had to go through was the shame I felt. Heroin was what I was self-medicating for, so I felt good about living all these secrets. And when I was able to uncover those secrets, everything changed. The imperial adolescence was me being honest and open, celebrating my life – an acknowledgment of acceptance of myself. That’s what made me successful.”

The Royal We closes here, before Faith No More’s split and subsequent reunion (he won’t wonder if they’ll ever play again), before his turn to film scoring, before the opera he wrote about Sasquatch, which he hopes to turn into a musical. “I’ve always identified with characters like the Elephant Man, Frankenstein’s monster, or even King Kong,” he says. Does he see any similarity between these tragic creatures of hidden darkness and himself? He smiles. “I think I was really attracted to a big, ugly monster who had a heart of gold.”

The Royal We by Roddy Bottum is published by OutLine Press Ltd priced £16.95

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the Lifeline crisis support service is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

In the UK, the Take Action on Addiction website provides links to various support services. In the United States, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline on 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drugs Hotline on 1800 250 015; Families and friends can seek help from Family Drug Support Australia on 1300 368 186