Roddy Bottum is a co-founder and keyboardist of Faith No More, one of the most singular and important bands of my lifetime. I'll never forget how mesmerized and spooked out I was by Angel Dust — how it made everything else on the radio sound so bland by comparison. I'm genuinely grateful that a creative force like that was running wild during my teenage years. But his memoir, The Royal We, isn't really about Faith No More, or Imperial Teen, or any of the other projects Roddy has been part of. It's about the city that made him, San Francisco in the 1980s. Back then it was a genuinely singular place, in its post-hippie trajectory of punks and queers and bike messengers, before the tech boom flattened it. We get into this during the conversation, but there's no great book that properly mythologizes that counterculture, that specific San Francisco and the people who lived and died inside it. In some ways The Royal We is that book. Roddy came up inside that world as a young man, and we get into all of it, the cruising, the addiction, what it meant to be openly gay in a genre dominated by hair metal. It didn't occur to me while we were talking, but sitting with it in the edit I came to see the book as a eulogy for a city that was so formative to some of my favorite art and music. Outro music: The Vault by Trigg & Gusset. “This memoir of a rarefied world made me realize I was so lucky to live through it on the fringes—San Francisco in the eighties during the glory days of punk rock, written as if Salinger was there, queer, and started a band. A band I was actually in, but they rarely admitted! Roddy has been an incredible influence on my life, love, friendship, and language. A brilliant and gorgeous book—just like Roddy Bottum.”—Courtney Love “Thump, thump, thump went my heart as the words popped and the pages turned and I fell more and more in love with Roddy Bottum. Written with the right amount of flourish and punk abandon—what a treat.”—Chloë Sevigny “The Gen X Cancerian daddy king of California rock has delivered to us an oral history of a time when queer boys who rocked still played hard and RULED the underground. Emotionally charged, but never reckless (okay, maybe a BIT reckless), this book flows with an emotional IQ that only Roddy Bottum could give us. All the grit and grime aside, this is a story based in wisdom, recounting, and, above all, beauty.”—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
