Melissa Auf der Maur saw herself spending her whole life in Montreal. “I was very happy,” she recalled recently during a generous telephone interview. “I was studying at Concordia [en photo]I was playing with my band [Tinker], I didn’t really have the ambition to conquer the world. »
When Billy Corgan, with whom she had begun a letter-writing relationship after the Smashing Pumpkins’ visit to Les Foufounes Electriques in 1991, suggested that she go to Seattle and audition for the Hole band, the 22-year-old replied thank you, but no thanks.
“And it was my dad who said to me, ‘You should think about it. Call the Big Pumpkin back and tell him you’ve changed your mind,” said the musician, a few days before the 25th anniversary of the death of her father, Nick, on April 7, 1998. Big Pumpkin? The author of these lines laughs. “Yes, that’s what he called her!” That’s my spitting father. »
City councillor, journalist, pillar of the bars on Crescent Street, close friend of the big shots as well as the penniless, Nick Auf der Maur is above all the greatest Montreal columnist not to bear the name Pierre Foglia. An event in his memory will be held late Friday afternoon at Winnie’s, downtown, around several vodka-cranberries, his favorite poison.
PHOTO JEAN-YVES LÉTOURNEAU, PRESS ARCHIVES
Nick Auf der Maur, then city councilor for the Montreal Citizens’ Rally, January 22, 1975
My dad’s reaction is a testament to how cool my parents were. In their eyes, Courtney Love was not that dangerous junkie that many people saw, but an influential and fearless woman with whom I suddenly had the opportunity to travel everywhere and accomplish something extraordinary.
Melissa Auf der Maur
Although he was not a rock lover, unlike Melissa’s mother, translator Linda Gaboriau, it was Nick Auf der Maur who gave her daughter her first bass, an Esquire purchased from York Music , a gift for his 21st birthday. “I went to see him on Crescent,” recalls the then DJ at Bifteck, “he took the money out of his wallet and I went straight back to the store. »
Reconnect with the young woman in her
In 2010, Melissa Auf der Maur founded with her husband, director Tony Stone, the Basilica Hudson, an arts and dissemination center located in the Hudson Valley. To this time-consuming project was added at the same time another, even more demanding, that of parenthood: their daughter River is now 11 years old.
But Melissa, the musician? “It’s one of the great mysteries of my life,” breathes the 51-year-old woman whose most recent album, Out of Our Minds, dates from 2010. “I didn’t want to combine motherhood and touring and I felt that I had gone after my dream with music, that I had to take a step back. I wanted to recreate here everything I loved about Montreal in the 1990s, a truly alternative, different place, far from the crap of Ticketmaster and the majors. »
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Melissa Auf der Maur, on stage with the Smashing Pumpkins, at the Spectrum in March 2000
But all these years later? “My body is really sad,” she says. My mind and soul are very confused about my decision to stop playing music. »
It was during the pandemic that Melissa Auf der Maur measured for the first time the depth of the void that this absence digs in her. “I was beginning to miss my bass and the magic of creation”, underlines the one who is currently working on the writing of her autobiography as well as on a joint musical project.
My book is a way of committing myself to reconnecting with the musician that I am. I want to find the girl who locked herself in her room for hours learning bass lines. The 21-year-old girl in me is my new teacher. I need to spend more time with her.
Melissa Auf der Maur
Rehabilitate Courtney
In addition to wanting to “honor the music that has changed [sa] life”, Melissa Auf der Maur hopes with her book to help rehabilitate her comrade Courtney Love, one of the most divisive figures in the history of rock, whom dad Nick himself has already defended. In 1996, the Montrealer took to the stage of the Rialto Theater to interrupt a conference held by journalists Max Wallace and Ian Halperin, two of the main propagators of the thesis of the murder of Kurt Cobain by his widow.
“Even in her most difficult times, even at the worst of her addiction problems, I always supported Courtney, because the double standard she suffered from was so obvious and brutal”, regrets the one who still speaks to her regularly, although that a Hole reunion is not on the table, Mrs. Love having an aversion to any form of nostalgia. “I saw her destroying herself while they were throwing bullets at her on stage and calling her a murderer. »
In 2019, while the magazine Kerrang! underlined the 25 years of the death of Cobain, Melissa signed in its pages a letter rising against the deification of the leader of Nirvana. “Kurt Cobain was brilliant, he changed my life and my generation, she says at the end of the line, but in what kind of culture is it the one who abandons his wife and daughter who becomes the hero of the story? ? »
IMAGE FROM A VIDEO
Melissa Auf der Maur and Courtney Love at a stage reunion in 2018
Courtney has given the world a gift of anger and beauty whose significance is yet to be understood. She wasn’t always polite, but who changed the world by being polite?
Melissa Auf der Maur
revenge of the timid
Someone recently asked Melissa Auf der Maur if, as legend has it, she actually did her school homework, with her father, on the counter of her favorite bars. “It’s not false, she laughs, but for me, it was nothing serious. “If she claims to have adopted a more orthodox conception of parenthood, she remembers from her father his efforts to instill in her a confidence that escaped him, at a time when she suffered from painful shyness.
PHOTO DENIS COURVILLE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Melissa Auf der Maur, in front of the alley bearing her father’s name, in April 1999
One day, my father whispered in my ear: “The quieter ones will have more to say later.” And that made me understand that being an observer is also a form of intelligence and power.
Melissa Auf der Maur
“I also remember that one election night, she continues, her voice heavy, I asked him why he was investing all this time, when he risked losing and being disappointed. He said, “Because I don’t trust those assholes.” »
The lesson was obviously not only political. “What he wanted to tell me is that your life is up to you to take charge of it. It’s up to you to live your own adventure. »