At a time when the memoir market is oversaturated, Faith No More member Roddy Bottum’s brazenness strips the word “transparency” of its trendy veneer and restores its original meaning. He’s done as much work on himself, and it shines through. Read my full review on Treble.
“I feel, like, not so complacent, but enthused, honestly, in a great way. I feel good. It’s my job. I’m an artist, and that’s kind of what I need to do. I need to provoke and I need to demand answers and I need to challenge things.”
-Roddy Bottum
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With his new memoir The Royal We out now, I recently spoke with Roddy Bottum of Faith No More, Imperial Teen and Man on Man fame about a very wide range of topics. Read some of them in my FLOOD feature and my Bad Penny story (in which he recalled a bizarre incident involving his paranoid ex-girlfriend Courtney Love).
In this part of the interview, part of The Bad Penny‘s On Tyranny series, Bottum shares his first-hand accounts about the shameful and horrific acts occurring in the United States: the exodus of trans people leaving out of well-justified fear; and ICE attacks on immigrants, demonstrators and U.S. citizens.
But Bottum also discusses what he sees as a silver lining: The recent election of Democratic-Socialist Zohran Mamdani as the youngest-ever and first Muslim mayor of New York City. Here’s that portion of our wide-ranging conversation:
Continue readingWith his new memoir The Royal We out now, I spoke with Roddy Bottum of Faith No More, Imperial Teen and Man on Man fame about coming out in the early ’90s, provoking MAGA and more. Read my FLOOD feature and my Bad Penny story in which he recalled a bizarre incident involving his paranoid ex-girlfriend Courtney Love.
Most music fans can’t read music. But they can read about music – the larger-than-life personalities, the history of various genres, the often-times truth-is-stranger-than-fiction dynamics that keep one of the entertainment industry’s least profitable yet universally beloved pillars standing.
For the first time ever, The Bad Penny shares what we consider to be the most essential nonfiction books about music that came out in a year during which citizens across the country tolerated book bans and censorship in Authoritarian America. Mark these words: What happened this year and is still happening in libraries and schools in the U.S. will go down as one of the most shameful “chapters” in this country’s history.
Read whatever books you want to read, and enjoy doing so, because in this unpredictable hellscape, who knows what rights we might lose next.
1. Patti Smith – Bread of Angels: A Memoir (McNally Jackson)
Buy here.
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Much like news headlines about the goon in the White House, stories that appear in the press about Courtney Love often reveal she has managed to sink even lower, causing more collateral damage to other people and continuing to shock a benumbed nation into deeper states of catatonia, exasperation and hopelessness.
The latest Love update comes courtesy of Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who briefly dated her in the ’80s and just released his first memoir earlier this month. Titled The Royal We and revolving heavily around Bottum’s decision to come out of the closet way back in 1993, the 275-page read contains many anecdotes and vignettes of the front woman of her on-again, off-again band Hole.
Back in the good ol’ days, Love and husband Kurt Cobain used to rail against prejudice, misogyny, corporate greed, overconsumption and America’s addiction to consumerism. But after the couple’s halcyon days were cut far too short due to the couple’s heroin use (which Love has denied), it didn’t take long for them both to plummet back down to earth in shambles.
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You know a label is cool when it doesn’t even bother keeping track of how many records it sells. And while such slackerish business practices would seem to spell doom for any label, Ipecac Recordings is puking in the face of its naysayers as the company founded by Mike Patton and Greg Werckman blows out 10 candles this year.
“We don’t really count record sales that well,” Werckman sheepishly admitted to IndiePit in a recent chat. “For Mike and I … we’ve only been around 10 years, but man, we’ve done these records. And the records we’re proudest of are definitely not always the ones that sell the most. It’s just cool to work with so many talented people.”
Lest ye doubt the merit of Werckman’s word, try on for size the Melvins, Isis, Peeping Tom and Queens of the Stone Age – just a small nibble of the big cookie that is the Ipecac Recordings oeuvre.
“We have a foundation of artists who have been around for a while and have a built-in fanbase,” Werckman says of the aforementioned acts. “It would’ve been pretty hard for us to fail completely. … We have a base of Mike Patton’s projects since Faith No More – that’s a pretty strong fanbase. And then, right off the bat, we had the Melvins, who have a good, strong fanbase. The one band we’ve been able to grow and establish a fanbase with is Isis. And then Josh Homme, a good friend of ours from Queens of the Stone Age” who is a constant co-conspirator.
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Writing about music is often an intimidating proposition. And we all make mistakes (probably no one more than yours truly). But are we at the point where even a quick Wikipedia search is asking too much?
Faith No More is — or was, depending on whether they reunite again — not an ” ’80s band,” despite the egregiously sloppy headline to this post. To wit …
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In light of the 1999 Duane Denison interview and Jesus Lizard trivia labyrinth that have recently been posted in these parts, here’s another vintage conversation with the guitarist, along with Tomahawk bandmate Mike Patton. Continue reading
The Bad Penny (beta) 