Canadian Gothic

Melissa Auf der Maur, who rocked the bass in Hole, goes solo this month in high style.

From: W, 2004-05-04
Date added: 2004-05-25

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Some say letter writing is a dying art, practiced mostly by older folks who have resisted the easy gratification of e-mail and instant messaging. Certainly one might not expect a flame-haired rocker, a girl who once shared stage space with Courtney Love no less, to be the type to take pen to paper. But bassist Melissa Auf der Maur is something of a latter-day lady of letters, and her penchant for pen pals is just the start of her appeal.

This month, Auf der Maur releases her eponymous solo debut on Capitol Records, stepping out of the stage-left shadow into center spotlight. For the project, she called in help from her vast network of music and fashion friends. In the studio, her supporting case included Josh Homme, former frontman of Queens of the Stone Age; Hole’s Erik Erlandson; and James Iha, ex-guitarist for the Smashing Pumpkins, with whom she played on the band’s final tour in 2000. On the fashion front, rock’n’roll couturier Zaldy toned down some of the raunchier looks he’s done for the likes of Christina and Britney in order to fit out Auf der Maur for her videos and tour.

Introduced through their mutual friend Rufus Wainwright, one of her childhood pals, Auf der Maur asked Zaldy to “create these fantasy characters I have in my music.” It helped that he shares her love of all things romantic and gothic. He translated her very specific vision, one that combined military, equestrian and Renaissance elements. As Zaldy puts it, the result is “nothing girly, but completely feminine and uniform.” That means lots of form-fitting shapes, cutout leathers and laces, all done up in a palette of forest green, bloo red and tan. “She’s not afraid of being aggressive and sexual,” he says. Indeed, the overall effect is akin to a Viking goddess unleased, wielding her bass like a sword.

“I’m so excited to showcase his stuff,” Auf der Maur gushes, understanding that it’s tough for new designers to get attention. “I wish a backer would come in and say, ‘Okay, here’s the money to do it. Just be Zaldy.’” But then, she has made a habit of supporting up-and-coming talent. While touring with Hole in 1997, she stumbled upon L.A. designer Michelle Mason, whose bent for reworking vintage pieces with a slightly bohemian flare caught her eye.

“I saw her clothes and freaked out,” Auf der Maur recalls. “I wrote her a letter saying, ‘You make clothes for me. Who are you?’” Mason went on to customize Auf der Maur’s tour getups during her final Hole days. “I’ll always choose a small designer over one everyone else is going to have,” she says. “And it turns into wanting to support them.” Others to benefit from her eye for style include Elisa Jimenez and M.R.S.’s Molly Stern, both of whom she now considers friends.

In 1997, while doing a shoot for Hole’s album Celebrity Skin, stylist Arianne Phillips pulled in a few looks from Belgian wunderkind Olivier Theyskens, then just 21 years old. “I had never seen anything like it—a huge, corseted gown all in latex. It looked like it had been made 200 years ago by a futuristic Victorian vampire,” Auf der Maur says. “I put it on and nearly fainted.” Auf der Maur sent a Polaroid of herself in the dress to Theyskens with a note: “You make the clothes of my dreams.” Admiration went both ways, and for his spring 1999 show—his second season but first major runway presentation—Theyskens asked Auf der Maur to walk. On tour in England, she Chunneled over to Paris and lived the life of a supermodel, if only for a day. “Backstage, it was quite silly, a panic of ‘Hair! Makeup! Get naked!’” she says, laughing.

“She really got into the mood,” Theyskens says of Auf der Maur’s catwalk debut. “She’s very beautiful and cool.” Surely with her slender figure, porcelain complexion and riot of curly red hair, Auf der Maur can easily play designer muse, especially for those with a dramatic, gothic sensibility. Mason notes that at first glance, Auf der Maur “looks like she walked out of another era; she’s ethereal.”

“Her style is an extension of her musical ability and her talent. It’s just an aesthetic language that she possessed naturally,” says Phillips. “She has this wonderful mixture of femininity and balls-out rock’n’roll strength.”

Similarly, Auf der Maur attacked her musical solo debut with equal parts beauty, brains and brawn, muscling through a lineup of hard rock sounds and thundering bass licks. Financed by money she earned in Hole and then with the Smashing Pumpkins, she controlled every aspect of the project.

“It’s really hard not to romanticize doing a solo album,” says Iha, who, to stave off touring boredom while on the road with the Pumpkins used to check out local malls—specifically Sunglass Huts—with Auf der Maur. “It takes chutzpah to get up the energy to emerge from playing bass in two major bands, get together an entire album of your own songs and then to be the frontperson, too.” But he has no doubts she’ll do fine. “She knows the drill.”

Nerve is possibly Auf der Maur’s greatest asset. How she got her break is music is the stuff of rock legend. When the Pumpkins played in her hometown of Montreal in 1990, no more than 30 people showed up. “With the first song, I was blown away,” she says. “They were dramatic and grandiose, romantic and psychedelic.” One of her friends, however, was less impressed and chucked a bottle at frontman Billy Corgan. An old-fashioned bar brawl ensued.

“The bottle changed my life,” Auf der Maur says. When she went backstage to apologize to the band, she and Corgan swapped addressed and struck up a pen-pal friendship. Three years later, when the Pumpkins, by then a mega-act, returned, she asked if her six-month old band, Tinker, could open for him. Corgan agreed, saying, “You’re going to be in my band one day.”

As fate would have it, though, his friend Courtney Love needed a bassist first. By then, Love was rock’s most famous widow. Her husband, Kurt Cobain, had killed himself, and Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s original bassist, had died of a heroin overdose. Stepping into Love’s post-Kurt world was no easy task. “It wasn’t like I joined a band,” Auf der Maur says. “I joined a very intense, emotional situation, and I needed to be respectful.” But for all of Love’s notorious misbehavior, Auf der Maur is utterly grateful for Love “creating this space for me and taking a chance on me. Who the hell was I? A 22-year old who had only been in a band for six months.”

She also notes that her five-year tenure in Hole formed her artistically and emotionally. “It demanded that I find myself, hold my ground. In that kind of environment, if you don’t know who you are, you can evaporate,” she says.

Hole introduced Auf der Maur to the world of high fashion. Until then, she’d had her own one-of-a-kind style, trolling local secondhand stores and flea markets in search of “that gem hidden in the crap.” Enter celebrity stylists, videos, glossy magazine shoots and weekends chez Versace. “Courtney was very into fashion, so we’d get these massive piles of clothes to go through,” she says. “That was a new perk that I never had living back in Montreal.”

But right now, Auf der Maur says her favorite designer is a seventysomething Montreal cobbler she calls John the Greek. He’s had a store in her childhood neighborhood for as long as she can remember, but only recently she went in and ordered two pairs of custom, knee-high laced boots that she rarely takes off. “He’ll be my shoe master if I ever start my own line,” Auf der Maur says, hinting that she may one day join the musical designer club. “I’m never going to buy anyone else’s boots again.” She thanked him with a bottle of port and, of course, a note that read, “Thank you, John the Greek. For as long as you are here, I will be coming back to you.”

- Nandini D’Souza

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