Melissa Auf der Maur on Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and surviving ’90s alt-rock

Auf der Maur, the former bassist for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, just published an enthralling memoir, “Even the Good Girls Will Cry,” that she hopes honours “both the living and the dead,” and which she dedicated to her teen daughter River and her generation.

She wrote it “to have a clean record, even though it’s subjective,” and “for people trying to figure out how to locate that inner wave-finder that guarantees you will not be dismantled no matter how dangerous the world feels.

“We need to find an eternal version of existence,” she added, “so we don’t become a casualty of our time.”

Montreal-born Auf der Maur was raised by progressive parents who, she said, valued “finding purpose in their lives, freedom of expression, and deep exploration of the self.” Her mother Linda Gaboriau wrote for French-language counterculture journals and produced English radio documentaries for CBC. She was also the first female rock deejay on CHOM-FM Montreal’s English airwaves.

Her father Nick was a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, hosted a man-on-the-street TV program, CBC’s “Quelque Show,” and stood by his three arrests: for speaking out against the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis, reciting Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry nude on a street corner, and bar brawling with Jack Kerouac, who had been spewing antisemitic rhetoric.

In 1970s Montreal, there was a downtown public grade school called FACE (Fine Arts Core Education), an experimental place that, Auf der Maur said, bet that “making art the primary focus of children’s education would ensure happier and more open-minded people.” It’s where she met her “soul brother” Rufus Wainwright when they were “perfectly androgynous 12-year-olds.”

“Music and art tricked me into loving school,” she added. “Expression in the arts is a gift.”

There, her choir teacher showed her the unifying power of music when, at 13, Auf der Mar was singing Mozart’s “Requiem” with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at Place des Arts. That piece of music in D minor seduced her and became, she said, “my most beloved key of all time.”

Billy Corgan calls

In 1991, when Auf der Maur was 19 and studying photography (“hiding behind a lens was a great comfort”), two weeks in July would change her life. Both Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins performed in Montreal, and after a show the latter’s frontman, Billy Corgan, agreed to be pen pals.

Even then it felt as though her future had been mapped out. “The fairy tale version of this story wasn’t lost on me,” she said. “I think we are all shown these things, if you are lucky enough to have an eye for it or some kind of internal compass.”

At the same time, she said, she had been “visited by these strange apparitions in visions and hauntings and a demon who quite literally delivered my book’s title to me.

“(I am) aware in writing my book that some of my esoteric leanings and listening to my dreams might alienate people,” she continued, “and I really don’t want to have them think that I’m some kind of flaky quack. But I do want to be able to explain what I’ve experienced. I definitely believe, and always have, that there are forces much bigger than we know that are at play.”

For her 21st birthday, her father bought her a Sunburst Squier Precision Bass, a “romantic object” that matched her own red hair. Quickly she taught herself to play her favourite Smashing Pumpkins song, “I Am One.” (“The bass line was simple enough,” she said with a laugh.) That guitar became her sword, which led her to start the band Tinker with a couple of friends.

Fast-forward to 1994 and Corgan calls, asking her to join his ex-girlfriend Courtney Love’s band to replace bassist Kristen Pfaff, who had recently died from a heroin overdose. Auf der Maur’s instinct then was not to join “a group of grieving drug addicts.” Initially, she declined because she had plans to pursue a master’s in photography.

Nevertheless, she joined Hole two weeks before performing in front of an audience of 65,000 at England’s Reading Festival at the end of August, learning the set list during a week’s rehearsal in Seattle. It was a commitment to herself “to put women on a male-dominated landscape,” she said, and she was also aware of being “part of a collective unconscious effort that was trying to wake up and break a spell.

“We could feel the corporate creepy-crawly forces of the ‘80s that we were trying to shake,” she said. “Now look at where we are: billionaires own elections, and tech moguls control our every move and spy on everything we do.”

The Hole truth

Love’s power-dynamic instincts, Auf der Maur said, established the bassist as her “wonder twin: the good girl to her bad girl, the virgin to her whore, the calm to her chaos.”

While on that exhilarating and exhausting yearlong international tour, Auf der Maur vowed to be honest and pure of heart by documenting those through-the-looking-glass days in diaries and letters home.

“It was my self-protection and processing of what I could tell was history, but also a very overwhelming experience that I was trying to put away for later,” she said.

The letters were like an SOS. “Hello, I’m out here, you might be worried about me; you should be worried about me,” she said of their tone. She was witnessing, Auf der Maur said, “both the addictive personalities around me and the creepiness of the public eye. It felt like being Alice in Wonderland in another universe.”

When her five-year contract with Hole was up, Auf der Maur wrote a resignation letter and could feel “the flame inside me coming back to life.” She travelled to Chicago to record with the Smashing Pumpkins and then to Hollywood to meet with their manager Sharon Osbourne, sipping cups of tea poured by Ozzy in their Beverly Hills backyard.

Auf der Maur said that recording the audiobook late last year — reading it out loud — she “sat with the truths of it for the first time. It was a lot of pain to hold. Not only of the strangers who became my family for those five years (in Hole), but also of the horror of my father’s cancer that marred, mangled and destroyed him.”

She didn’t really get to grieve his loss when he died in 1998, but, she said, “20 years later I gave myself the space and opportunity and I worked with an incredible literary editor who happened to be also a grief counsellor.” Before he died, her father told her, “Don’t worry, Melissa. I’ll be around. I will knock. Listen for me.”

While writing the book, Auf der Maur visited an evidential medium and within minutes the woman identified a man wearing a fedora, sitting at the end of a bar, laughing and drinking, and hammering away at a typewriter. “He is cheering you on in your writing project,” she told her.

“I just burst into tears,” Auf der Maur said. “You know, people cannot believe, but people can believe this too. To each their own.”

As someone fiercely concerned about how technology is hollowing out our daily routines, making life unenjoyable and lonelier, Auf der Maur said, “We are thousands of years of analog power and we don’t have to be morphed and mutated into machine brains. We can nurture sacred time with ourselves and each other.”

Auf der Maur, who lives in upstate New York and runs Basilica Hudson, a multidisciplinary arts centre, said she hopes her book “will bring people into a young woman’s world, where the analog was intoxicatingly powerful.

“We can reclaim that kind of power now with music and community and ourselves,” she added. “I’m trusting that kids who romanticize the ‘90s will read the book. We just need to get them living the way we used to do.”

Melissa Auf der Maur will launch her memoir at Toronto’s Wavelength Music Festival today and return to the city in September when her exhibit, “My ‘90s Rock Photographs,” debuts at the Art Gallery of Ontario before touring the world.