The Royal We

An alt-rock sideman recalls navigating queerness, heroin, and a now-vanished San Francisco bohemia.

Bottum could easily have delivered a memoir heavy on name-dropping and celebrity dish: He was a songwriter and keyboardist in Faith No More, a funk-punk outfit that enjoyed unusual success in the late ’80s, as MTV segued from hair metal to the punk revival. The band toured heavily, and Bottum was close friends with Hole frontwoman Courtney Love (who briefly fronted Faith No More) and her husband, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Instead, Bottum opts to tell a more intimate and much richer story, where details about fame are secondary to his desperate search for a found family. Growing up in Los Angeles, he chafed against middle-class convention, a feeling that intensified once he acknowledged he was gay. Moving to San Francisco, he found a community and a band, and much of the book’s best writing reflects an urge to capture the disappeared landmarks of his youth, from group houses to hole-in-the-wall clubs. (“Names like these no longer exist. These spaces don’t exist. The impetus to create them doesn’t exist.”) But it’s also where he discovered heroin, and his habit only intensified as Faith No More’s fortunes increased. So Bottum’s predominant feeling about success is revulsion: He witnessed rampant misogyny when his band opened for Guns N’ Roses and saw how the stress of fame fed Cobain’s drug habit and led to his eventual suicide. There are places where Bottum is overly strenuous about avoiding rock-memoir convention (he seems allergic to sharing last names), and the prose is sometimes clotted and pretentious. (“We heralded loudly in a cacophony of strength and powerful prowess.”) But Bottum’s candor is refreshing, and the book serves as a vibrant snapshot of a time when San Francisco was better known as a creative haven than a tech-bro bunkhouse. A melancholy tribute to punky, grassroots community-building.