A self-portrait by rocker Melissa Auf der Maur taken in 1996 “in bedroom of haunted house” in New Orleans.Melissa Auf der Maur/Supplied
Minutes before our Zoom interview is set to start, Melissa Auf der Maur e-mails to ask, “How do you feel about just an old-fashioned phone conversation?” adding, “I prefer that.”
Auf der Maur’s small request becomes the perfect entry point for speaking about her new rock memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry. It is a book about the shift from the 1990s, “the last analog decade” – the age of phone calls – to our dizzying, ultra-digital present.
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Ours is an uncomfortable era for an artist who’s spent most of her life insisting on the primacy of physical, unmediated “real human exchange.” First, growing up as an avid music fan in the cozy cultural scene of Anglo-Montreal; later, as a member of Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. And more recently, as the founder and curator of Basilica Hudson, a non-profit art centre in upstate New York.
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Even the Good Girls Will Cry is in line with Auf der Maur’s preferred mode: sharing deeply and undilutedly through a physical medium. It is also animated by a fear: that her 14-year-old daughter is inheriting a world in which real human connections are increasingly scarce.
“The top layer of the algorithms and the YouTube sick beauty routine insanity that is happening for teenage girls now is the opposite of what we were, and it’s upsetting to me,” Auf der Maur says.
She laments “the 21st century of Sephora, plastic blow-up doll pornography, sicko presidents of the U.S.” – a landscape where young people are shaped by corporate forces hostile to the values that 1990s alternative culture tried to protect. The memoir, dedicated to her daughter and her daughter’s friends, is an “attempt to reach back into that magic, fertile era of being a woman where we actually thought that things were gonna get better and better and better.”
Courtney Love on stage at Lollapalooza in the 1990s. "Because I was the bass player, not centre stage, because I came in after the deaths [of Kurt Cobain and original Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff], after the music explosion, I had an interesting, objective lens,” says Auf der Maur.Melissa Auf der Maur/Supplied
But Even the Good Girls Will Cry is not a nostalgia trip. One of its strengths is that Auf der Maur presents the last analog decade as bubbling with contradictions. The single daughter of radical artist parents, Auf der Maur came of age in a fiercely anticorporate scene. She had been trained to follow the “indie ethos of the nineties to not sell out. Success was weighted with guilt and shame.” That is a difficult position for an artist, and Auf der Maur’s initial response to the opportunity of a lifetime, playing bass for Hole – the loud, scandal-laden band of frontwoman Courtney Love – was a measured “no, thank you.”
By the time Auf der Maur entered the scene, ultimately accepting Hole’s invitation in 1994, she was consciously stepping into “the eye of the storm,” as she calls it. Alternative music had broken through into the mainstream. The recent deaths of Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, and Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s previous bassist, weighed heavily. Auf der Maur chronicles the spinning, turbulent winds around her: Love’s overbearing ways, the omnipresence of drug addiction, the public’s hostility toward Love. Most interesting is Auf der Maur’s deep awareness of her “insider-outsider” position, as she sat in that eerily calm storm’s eye. She writes of the “intricate, self-protective armour” she made for herself, one that she could “tighten or loosen up, depending on the circumstance.”
Courtney Love on a laptop at Lollapalooza in 1995.Melissa Auf der Maur/Supplied
Importantly, the “absurd grunge Cinderella, who’d found herself with VIP access to the ball,” as Auf der Maur calls herself, felt compelled to obsessively document it – via journaling and her beloved medium of photography. “Because I was the bass player, not centre stage, because I came in after the deaths, after the music explosion, I had an interesting, objective lens,” she says. This allowed her to “step into the future and tune into a storytelling perspective.” She didn’t necessarily know what she was seeking to capture but says, “I knew I was inside witnessing real, very complex things that I would not be able to understand and unpack until time had passed.”
Three decades on, the unpacking has taken place. Auf der Maur’s memoir centres on the monumental shift that took place at the turn of the 21st century. “Our generation, the last analog decade, witnessed the painful birth of the new world,” she says. “That’s why it was so inspired and so loud. Like, both warning that we could see what was happening, and mourning the inevitable loss of our innocence.”
“We got bought by the exact same things that we feared,” she says. “They tricked us, they owned us.” Auf der Maur witnessed Hole’s shift as the band began work on their second major-label album, Celebrity Skin, the “corroded soul of a band willing to follow whatever it takes to be ‘big.’” She was horrified by the sums of money being put into production and the use of Pro Tools for digital polishing. “What about the human touch?” she asked. “Won’t it wipe out the magic?”
Photography was a beloved medium for Auf der Maur, and a way to document her place in grunge.Melissa Auf der Maur/Supplied
After a decade-plus out of the public eye – time spent raising her daughter, running her art space and taking a year-long memoir-writing workshop – Auf der Maur is not here to merely mourn the nineties. In fact, she is hopeful. She is uplifted by the number of female artists accepting music awards these days. When I ask whether her daughter’s generation of girls has someone to look up to the way I did to nineties alternative musicians, she very enthusiastically extolls the talent and integrity of Billie Eilish.
Auf der Maur believes in an inherent quality in humans that steers us toward the good. “What I do know is that the power of art, love, friendship, magic, music, analog existence, walking through the woods, being with your cat by the fire – that is timeless and eternal and with us. That is not threatened.”
Another self-portrait, this one from New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 2001.Melissa Auf der Maur/Supplied
Being someone who believes that the answer to the digital hellscape is not withdrawal but presence, Auf der Maur has written a memoir she sees as part of a larger galaxy of real human exchange. For her book tour stop in Toronto, starting March 20, she will take over three days of the Wavelength Music festival, with events including a reading and midnight DJ set. This September, her exhibition, My ’90s Rock Photographs, opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario, scored with her old four-track recordings and field recordings from nineties tour footage.
As for how this will help in our battle against the forces of evil, Auf der Maur has one hope: That people of any age, any generation find what “makes them feel like they’re supposed to be alive.”