Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum offers a vivid, poetic depiction of the strange, exhilarating, drug-fueled world of San Francisco in the early Eighties in a new excerpt from his upcoming memoir, The Royal We, out Nov. 4.
The book is centered around Bottum’s fateful journey from Los Angeles — where he’d grown up gay with few role models — to San Francisco, where he found a vibrant arts community and his future Faith No More bandmates. The book also delves into the band’s early days touring the world, Bottum’s struggles with heroin addiction, and living through the height of the AIDS crisis.
“The Royal We is a personal and jarring memoir of fable and prose, a nostalgic tribute to a city and a time that no longer exist,” Bottum tells Rolling Stone. “It celebrates my coming out and coming up with Faith No More in the unhinged backdrop of San Francisco in the 1980s, before the Internet, a time of bicycle messengers, peace punks, hippies, heroin, wheatgrass, music, witchcraft and children reaching and aspiring to unfathomable heights.”
In the excerpt below, Bottum writes about finding his way in a city and arts scene that had been greatly shaped by the generation of hippies who’d come before. Bottum admits he and his friends often took an adversarial stance towards their tuned-in and dropped-out forebears, but it stemmed from a perennial desire characteristic of young, creative people everywhere.
“At our age,” he writes, “we were looking for something of our own. It felt more real to criticize and complain, to point out holes and flaws, to champion ourselves. What they’d done before us we saw as a reason to get up and scream.”
The rest of the excerpt depicts the wild happenings at More Plastic Bags, a warehouse space where the city’s many “weirdoes” met: “Filmmakers, fashion people, queers, strippers, painted faces, bearded men in habits, couples wrapped in chains, masks, exotic gowns, wigs, the mix of San Francisco was a circus, vibrant, deafening and spiritual unto itself.” Bottum and his friends eat goldfish, pop pills, and go on the hunt for a legend of the hippie era, Timothy Leary.
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There was the same number of us in San Francisco, five or six. We worked as a crew like grubby fingers interlocked. We were fueled by a rush of desire to keep up, to make a mark, to claim a place for ourselves in the changing landscape. The places we went in our heads and the things that we did were encouraged by the friends we met and the past that the village had been. Butting our heads against the hippies and what they’d done and made for themselves, that was our own antiestablishment stance. It didn’t make a lot of sense and it wasn’t really fair. It was disrespectful, honestly, but that’s what we did. The hippies had invented that stance. Nobly. They’d created a community and a movement specific to where they’d been, where we were now. The Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love and all that, that’s what came before us. The hippies had resonated and made an impact, they’d changed the world. At our age, though, we were looking for something of our own. It felt more real to criticize and complain, to point out holes and flaws, to champion ourselves. What they’d done before us we saw as a reason to get up and scream.
More Plastic Bags was a warehouse space, tucked enough away to not attract attention. There were kids like us and hippies much older. It was a massive building of brick, floor after floor of flashing lights and sound removed from the street through a huge crumbled archway. We’d wait in a line for our turn to get in and see people we knew and meet pockets and clutches of weirdos we hadn’t. Filmmakers, fashion people, queers, strippers, painted faces, bearded men in habits, couples wrapped in chains, masks, exotic gowns, wigs, the mix of San Francisco was a circus, vibrant, deafening and spiritual unto itself. Drugs were everywhere, pot smoke, meth on mirrors, tabs of acid on tongues of fucked-up dancers swaying into each other, obliterated, twirling and moving in throngs on the different dance floors, overstuffed couches on the edges of it all with crashed-out young people in crumples of costumes.
We’d run up and down from floor to floor, dancing and drinking and screaming over the noise of the party. There was a huge bowl filled with goldfish on a window ledge in the staircase, more like a party decoration, not an aquarium. It was situated in an alcove, positioned in the shine of a colored light. We crowded around the bowl and one of us said, “Everyone eat a fish,” and we did. We ate the goldfish. We put our hands in the bowl one by one and scooped out goldfish and ate them. Live little fish on our tongues and swallowing them. No one judged, hippies looked on surprised and complacently amused at what the kids would do. Us eating the goldfish was just one of so many scenarios going on in the space.
We rummaged through the coat room and put on other people’s clothes and tromped up and down the different floors of the party, wearing big floppy trench coats not our own, chasing each other through the crowds. Someone would approach us, not territorial or angry, honestly just wanting to understand.
“Excuse me, that’s . . . You’re wearing my . . . Is that . . .”
“Maybe . . .” and we’d run off screaming and hitting each other, laughing.
We found a plastic disk of pills in a pocket of one of the coats we’d put on. It opened up like a Polly Pocket. Someone knew they were birth control pills. We swallowed them all, ate the pills, and laughed about what would happen. There was a ring of different color pills in the center of the disk that we figured were the strong ones and I took one of those, expecting more of whatever it was we were expecting. Those were maybe the placebos that were eaten on an off day, we knew nothing.
Someone said Timothy Leary was there.
We didn’t really know who that was but he represented something that had come before us.
“Let’s get him.”
We looked for him and wouldn’t stop, asking the different hippies, “Have you seen Timothy? We’re looking for Timothy.”
Stoned hippies watched on, appreciative and impressed by our look and our energy. There was honestly no judgment.
“They’re looking for Timothy,” entirely unfazed and bored, mildly entertained. “One of them’s wearing my coat.”
We couldn’t find him and we wouldn’t stop and were enthused, even angry at the situation.