Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum Calls ’90s Guns N’ Roses Tour An ‘Offensive’ Turning Point

Looking back at heavy music’s messier chapters, few tours loom as large or as ugly as the 1991 Use Your Illusion run.

The co-headlining monster tour with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica was chaotic, volatile, and infamous for riots, arrests, and unchecked excess, for Faith No More (who opened the tour), it also became a breaking point.

Faith No More keyboardist and co-founder Roddy Bottum has revisited that era in his new memoir The Royal We, and in a recent appearance on the 60 Minutes or Less podcast, he described the experience as deeply confronting on a personal level.

“I think it was a challenge, but honestly, only for me. It was very much the rock and roll norm at that point. Misogyny, male aggression [and] toxic masculinity was all just part of the equation at that time. Everyone was on board for it. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t, honestly.”

Bottum explained that while most of the touring ecosystem embraced the chaos, Faith No More felt out of step with the environment.

“[Most of Faith No More] were leftist-leaning, progressive, weird and . . . liberal-minded… We were all like, ‘Oh, my god.’ Kinda blown away by the audacity of that environment. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

Magnified isolation

The isolation was magnified by Bottum’s sexuality, which he had not yet publicly discussed at the time.

“Me, being the gay man… That was just, like, offensive and wild and ‘What the fuck?’ to me more than anyone else, for sure.”

That pressure eventually pushed Bottum toward a decision that would shape the rest of his life and career.

“Seeing the potential association of us as a band – and me in that band – being sort of regarded as that was, like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”

He later added:

“There was definitely solitude in sort of my perspective and who I was… in that rock and roll circus, there were no gay people. No way… It’s kind of like the turning point for me.”

In hindsight, the tour didn’t just expose the excesses of the era, It forced Bottum to draw a line between who he was and what the industry expected him to tolerate.

Not everyone walked away from the Use Your Illusion circus changed, but for Roddy Bottum, it marked the moment he stopped playing along.