The New York Times: Melissa Auf der Maur, 90s rock linchpin of Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, spills her stories

Bassist Melissa Auf der Maur played the first six shows of her career with a nascent trio, mostly in tiny clubs around her Montreal hometown. Her seventh performance, though, was in front of 65,000 people at the Reading Festival in England after she joined Hole, the seminal grunge act led by Courtney Love. It was August 1994, scarcely five months after Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, died by suicide.

“Oh, yeah, I’m so goddamn brave,” were Love’s first words to the audience as she smoked into the mic. Then, as Auf der Maur recalls in her new memoir, “I took my spot eight feet to the right of the fearless widow.” She calls that gig “my portal into the abyss”.

Reading was the first stop on Hole’s Live Through This Tour, just 10 weeks after the band’s original bass player, Kristen Pfaff, died of an overdose. Auf der Maur, then 22, had barely seven days of rehearsal. Naively — or sagely — her complete stage prep consisted of swiping on “a browny mauve matte MAC lipstick”.

The scale of her leap, and how Auf der Maur found her equilibrium through a particularly topsy-turvy entry into fame and beyond, is detailed in an empathetic and unsparing style in her memoir Even The Good Girls Will Cry, due out March 17 (her 54th birthday). Romances and finances are fair game; addiction is rife but gently handled. She was an insider-outsider, privy to the peaks and traumas of those days but not of them.

“Someone recently called me ‘a monster whisperer,’” she said in an interview in February. “I had never really thought of it that way.”

But she did have a singular intimacy, as she reveals in the book, with some of the most towering figures in alt-rock, including Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, who helped pluck Auf der Maur out of her Montreal scene; Dave Grohl, whom she dated post-Nirvana; and especially Love, then a wild and grieving dervish who was tarred with a generation’s animus toward female artists.

It was a lot to unpack, as Auf der Maur discovered when she wound up in tears while recording the audiobook. “I don’t think I realised how hard it was for me then, even though I was the luckiest girl in the world,” she says.

After spending the first half of her adulthood as a globe-trotting musician, taking upward of 10,000 photos on the road, Auf der Maur has, for the past 18 years, led a highly local life in Hudson, New York, the upstate industrial-turned-bohemian town where she and her husband run a successful arts centre, Basilica Hudson. She is active in the community and its politics but has hardly picked up her bass, or a real camera, since 2011.

Revisiting her artistic heyday in the 90s, what she lovingly calls “the last analog decade,” was her way of jump-starting her next chapter. It was also a reckoning — for herself and for her 14-year-old daughter as she navigates toward adulthood and learns more about her mother’s past. (The book, with Auf der Maur’s photos, is dedicated to her “and all the girls.”)

“My coming-of-age as a woman was so dramatic,” Auf der Maur says. She wanted to “shed these weighty stories and things I’ve carried in me for too long, so I can actually move into a more peaceful middle life”.

We were settled in her airy, sunlit office, in a circa-1903 Hudson elementary school that she and her husband, indie filmmaker Tony Stone, have turned into a creative hub. She wrote a lot of the book there, in a vintage swivel armchair with a fading peacock print. Wearing a denim chore coat, shorts over tights, and a beret atop her trademark mane of red curls, Auf der Maur still exudes an effortless cool-girl chic.

Auf der Maur is still fiery — as she was back then — about how Love, who battled addiction, was treated as a cultural scourge. Yes, as a bandmate, Love occasionally tried to mess with her, “compete with me, weird stuff,” she says. But she understood where it was coming from. “These are wounds, in this person.”

After more than a decade out of touch, they reconnected about eight years ago, in a relationship that only seems to be deepening.

“I’m messy, and she’s not,” Love says in a voice memo. “Melissa is very user-friendly, very beautiful, very talented, and just charismatic in a very chill, silver, cool-drink-of-water way.”

Last spring, Auf der Maur spent five days in London, where Love lives, recording vocals for her forthcoming album. “I wanted her voice,” Love says, “because it’s robustly an octave over mine. It’s surprisingly, to me, more robust and embodied now than it was in 98,” when they recorded Celebrity Skin, Hole’s Grammy-nominated third album. “Silver, tinkling, all the things I can’t do. We’re perfect together.”

Auf der Maur seems to agree. She describes the London session as “so profound”. “It changed me,” she adds. “Like, sonic, cellular recalibrating. I did not realise how powerful my union with her is.”

Their collaboration began with Corgan, who met Auf der Maur after a Pumpkins show in Montreal when she was 19. They became friends (and briefly, more than that, as she divulges in the memoir), and he recommended her to Love. But Auf der Maur initially turned down the job — which, of course, only made Love want her more: “That really intrigued me,” Love says.

At the time, Auf der Maur was a college student studying photography, a tastemaker as a tape DJ in a popular bar, and starting out with her own band, Tinker. She had an artistic life mapped out, influenced heavily by her bohemian parents.

Her mother, Linda Gaboriau, is a Boston-born translator and dramaturge. Her father, Nick Auf der Maur, who died in 1998, was a prominent Montreal journalist and city council member. Her parents were married only briefly, years after her birth; she was, she writes, the product of a one-night stand — an intentional one, after her mother decided she wanted a child.

Her upbringing was free-spirited but supportive, says musician Rufus Wainwright, a childhood friend who grew up in the same circles: “Even though it was very creative and very untethered, there was still this protective layer around us, which certainly helped us navigate the treacherous world of show business afterward.”

For Auf der Maur’s 21st birthday, her father, whose columns about her rock-star life are excerpted in the book, bought her a bass. It accompanied her to Seattle to audition for Hole; the chorus of voices urging her to go had overwhelmed her own instincts not to. She had seen all the grunge bands upending music in the 90s (including Nirvana and Hole) and on the plane kept a cassette bootleg of Live Through This on repeat. Blisteringly feminist tracks like Miss World made her suddenly understand the power in joining this female-led act.

The turmoil was clear, too: Love’s home still had yellow security tape around the garage where Cobain died. “I am grateful that Courtney has music to bash these dark feelings around, grateful that we all do,” Auf der Maur, who has kept a journal since childhood, writes in the memoir. “Rock music saves lives. I have always believed that.”

In the months and years that followed, as Hole fought for its place in the industry and was further battered by drugs — drummer Patty Schemel, Auf der Maur’s housemate when they moved to Los Angeles, also disappeared into a heroin relapse — Auf der Maur remained a steady, non-judgmental presence. “She was definitely the one who was ready to lick my wounds,” says Wainwright, another roommate who left for rehab.

But when her five-year contract with Hole was up, Auf der Maur found herself broke. The Live Through This Tour didn’t make any money. Celebrity Skin, the critically lauded and commercially successful follow-up, on which she had potentially lucrative songwriting credits, cost $US3 million ($4.3m) to make (the equivalent of about $US6 million, or $8.5m today), she says, thanks to exorbitant travel and recording bills and flashy videos like Malibu. (“It took 25 years,” she says, for the album to recoup enough for her to earn royalties.)

She viewed Corgan’s offer, in 1999, for her to be the Pumpkins’ touring bassist as destiny. But it was also her financial lifeline. “I almost had to join the Pumpkins for stability,” she says.

Love wrote her a startling letter when she quit Hole, simultaneously extolling her talents and warning her about appearing as an accessory — “Billy Corgan’s purse” — in the male-dominated rock world. (It’s included in the book.) Only now, Auf der Maur says, can she see “the power of her words”.

Corgan and Love have their own complicated history, but for Auf der Maur, they are simply “my grunge parents”.

As that period of music waned — as did her dalliance with Grohl, whose gushing love faxes (oh, the 90s!) are quoted in the book — Auf der Maur regrouped in New York City. Her life there was not exactly tame; she lived in a notorious downtown brownstone, with Natasha Lyonne on the top floor, photographer (and Corgan ex) Yelena Yemchuk as a roommate, and Wainwright in the basement apartment. The place “was firmly embedded in the New York scene,” he says. “I made out with one or two members of The Strokes there.”

Auf der Maur, who abandoned photography when it went digital, was then still documenting with her camera — “she has such a good eye,” Yemchuk says — and would begin a solo career, releasing two albums. She considers herself a musician, but, she says: “I’m not a songwriter like Courtney is. I’m not a riff-master like Billy.”

And when she decided to become a mother, “I really ejected myself entirely” from music, she says. That choice, and her escape from New York City, surprised some friends. But transformation has been her mainstay. “She’s always been so good at framing the next step as this wondrous journey,” Wainwright says.

These days, she helps curate experimental festivals at Basilica Hudson — which recently partnered with Bowery Presents, the powerhouse New York promoter. But her main musical output is as a goth/darkwave DJ. Her sets started as midwinter birthday parties, “a Piscean mother’s ritual,” she says. But they turned into something more visceral.

Throughout the 90s, “I was, like, cool wallflower girl,” she says. “And then something happened in my middle age, of not making music, not being onstage. Now, all of a sudden, I needed to dance.”

Even The Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf der Maur, published by Allen & Unwin, is out on March 17

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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