Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum has created an in-depth and free Faith No More biography for Alternative Nation, and as part of it he discussed touring with Chris Cornell and Soundgarden in the 90’s.
“That’s not really my cup of tea, so much. That’s not my music that I would listen to. But it was fun. [Chris Cornell] had a really high voice, and he sang kind of like Robert Plant, kind of like crazy energy in a sort of, “grunge male dude with long shorts and Doc Martens boots.” It was almost competitive I think amongst us and Soundgarden, maybe on that tour. We were opening up. I think we were playing first, maybe, and then Soundgarden played, and then Voivod.
I remember a couple times…it was a long tour – we would leave and we would go to Europe or England and play some shows that we had booked, and then come back to the tour. So it was kind of like a crazy mind fuck, because we would go to England, and we had gained a lot of notoriety in England at that point. We were kind of like a big deal in England, and we were playing big theaters for the first time, and stuff was really taking off over there. So it was like this weird rollercoaster of we’d play these big shows by ourselves headlining in England, and then we’d come back, and we’d open this tour with Voivod and Soundgarden.
Voivod were really interesting. They were sort of a weird science fiction band or something. I never really understood what those people were. They were French Canadian. They were really odd balls. There’s something about them that’s fascinating. I’m gonna go back and listen to him after this interview. They were cool. I liked them. One of their names was Piggy, another was Away – they had really weird names.”
Bottum recently spoke with Alternative Nation ahead of the November 4, 2025 release of his autobiography, The Royal We (via Akashic Books).
