Melissa Auf der Maur

From: Toro, 2003-11-01
Date added: 2003-12-25

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The woman before you played a thunderous bass guitar in two of the 90's biggest rock bands, Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. But Melissa Auf der Maur's supporting-role days are done. Once her big-label solo album hits the racks in early 2004, this Black Sabbath-loving choir girl from Montreal will finally take center stage.

When I suggest meeting in a bar named Else's, Melissa Auf der Maur gently demurs. Else's is the adult-casual bar in Montreal's terminally cool Plateau neighbourhood, where she would have to air kiss half the room before she got past the payphone. She knows and is known here. Instead we hit a cavernous taven, where Auf der Maur once displaced the regular clientele of coke dealers and coke comsumers at her own wild New Year's eve bash. The jukebox is blaring Quebecois rock classique. I order a quart bottle of beer: melissa has a bloody ceasar because she " can't get them in the states". But Melissa Auf der Maur hasn't returned to her hometown from new york for the drinks. In fact just about the last thing she is looking for here is a party. Montreal is where her career began and she left behind an ample number of friends and backbiters here during a seemingly glide through the phases of stardom. Auf der Maur had what it took noot simply to survive but to prosper in the two biggest rock pyschodramas of the 90's - Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. The bassist and singer will need every ounce of that fortitude as she makes the boldest move in her career yet: launching her first solo album into a bare market. She has returned to Montreal for the sanity and comfort of home she needed in the calm before the storm.

Gender has become the topic - the central topic - as she sips her Caesar and discusses her future. Auf der Maur has the ample backing of L.A. music industry mandarins Elliot Roberts and Andrew Slater as she prepares to do what she can't believe remains an issue in 2003: rock au feminin.

Auf der Maur is an expression of Haute thrift shop in clothes she claims barely cost as much as our drinks. She is frank, calm, drawly, more earthbound then her airy public image would suggest, as logical as she is astrological. The album simply titled "Auf der Maur" and scheduled for release in March is "heavy rock music with a girl who sand in the choir and has a good ear for 3-part harmony. Sabbath is more of an influence than, say, the Stones." Sabbath, and the year she spent as the Smashing Pumpkins touring bassist, cramming to learn 80 of their rock dramadies. She calls her solo release a "left and center rock album" and openly wonders at her chances. "Maybe a crazy woman is more obvious in rock music then me". And she would know.

Melissa Auf der Maur first appeared with Hole in front of a crowd of 80 000 at the '94 Reading festival in England. (Was she nervous? "No I felt nothing") Prior to playing foil to rock's most female troublemaker, Courtney Love, Auf der Maur had played in the Montreal indie band Tinker. (She had taken up the bass after an X-boyfriend's condescending taunt "unless you have studied rock and roll , you don't get an opinion")

She and Tinker were on the bill in 1991 when a promising Chicago band, the Smashing Pumpkins, came to town. Her roommate - a local musician, one of about 30 people at the show - insulted the visiting band's lead singer and Auf der Maur assumed the role of ambassador, apologizing after the set on behalf of the entire city. In that moment , she announced her schism from the church of holier-than-thou indie artists. The singer, Billy Corgan, was suitably impressed. Having also caught Tinkers set, Corgan was impressed by Auf der Maur's unprecedented combination of talent and decency. The great Pumpkin faciliated an intro to Courtney Love, who was down one husband and bass player that year.

Though it requires little effort to envisage Auf der Maur as a grounding, stabilizing presence for Hole's lead Hecate, she left the band after 5 years, in July 1999. Courtney and Melissa are not close. "I saw her once in the 4 years since", when Love invited her to a birthday party for her daughter Frances Bean Cobain. "She's a unique, special, strange woman who played a huge part in my life." Melissa says of Courtney. She hopes Love "gets happier". Her stint in social studies with Hole was followed by a master's degree in arena rock with the Pumpkins. In her hometown there was grumbling. Auf der Maur (incidently means on the wall not off the wall) was a newly minted style queen in American glossy magazines. She was also shaming the defeatist streak in her hometown rock scene.

"I finally feel like I can come back to this city and not be infuriated by the close-mindedness of it. For the past 9 years I would always come away very frustrated." She measures her distain as she mentions those "integrity-oriented Montreal artists" who rejected her for her musical ambitions. She had listened to the Pixies, Jane's Addiction, the Pumpkins and "the progressive modern thing that was happening with melody" and had been inspired. Her critics called her work "flashy American rock music and whispered: "sell out". "I felt sometimes like I was a Celine Dion to them," the flake princess who tripped over the cystal slipper of stardom.

The same critics also mistook her ease in front of the flashbulbs for presumption, but her disarming ease in Celebrity Skin was the bequest of her father, Nick auf Der Maur. Not every 10-year-old girl's name makes it into a major daily newspaper's editorial cartoons: in a famous Aislin drawing in the Montreal gazette, a cop arresting her rabble-rousing father, a well-known local journalist, asks "by the way Nick, how's Melissa?" Nick kept the art department and the police department busy and he kept Melissa's name in print. Newspaper columist, city councillor, agitator, gadfly, boulevardier, he was a rockstar of a different era." i will always be Nick's daughter in this city" she says. If anything- and especially given the rockstar context - his daughter has been utterly genteel by comparison.

"I think it's a great thing that I've done to the states and I fly the Montreal flag, and I reflect the beliefs that I cultivated and nurtured here," she says. "I worked my ass off even when I lived in this city. And quite often I feel there is disrespect coming from the mere fact that I left." Auf der Maur has also been accused of "joining an American corporate evil. To this she replies "I spent every penny I ever made self-financing my record." She quickly found out how little clout or even politeness her rockstar status buys in L.A.'s business corridors. Was every flack in the music industry a boor? "yeah," she laughs, "especially the people who were associated with Hole." She means the industry fixers who had to crash heads with Hole's shameless and opinionated front woman, who always entered howling." They had to be tough, crazy, misogynistic assholes to deal with that band, so I had the worst encounters with horrible men who had complete disrespect for my age, sex, even my nationality." From her perspective, Courtney Love's excesses were justified because she was "trying to create female singers in a dead landscape of no women. So whether the music was up my alley or not, I was very proud of the mission that Courtney was on."

In her way, Auf der Maur is making it her own mission to because she has head the same dismissals. "Woman in rock music? Not going to happen. Same old fucking story. Melissa listen to K-rock, do you hear one female voice with heavy rock guitars? The attitude is that female vocals in rock music still don't make any sense to people and they never have, they never will. But my theory is that the best rock music is made by men who are channeling their feminine side, and women who are channeling thier masculine side." "It's like, men play rock music, any guy who loves rock music thinks men can only do it 'cause its a testosterone thing. That's like saying, men cannot love, men cannot be a parent, it's crazy."

She was determined to protect her album from per-emptive prejudice. She has presence, she has charm. She knew what she wanted and reached out for Chris Goss, "the teddy bear of stoner rock" and the producer of Kyuss and QOTSA. She assembled the heaviosity dream team of studio players from Helmet, Rocket From the Crypt, And Kyuss, plus Twiggy Ramirez(Marilyn Manson), Eric Erlandson(Hole) and former Tinker bandmates Steve Durand and Jordon Zadorozny. Though she sings like a choirgirl, some of the tracks have as many as six layers of buzzing Sabbath-like guitars.

Only once recording was complete did she shop her songs around, with this proviso in prospective suitors. "This is the album, you are not going to change it." and she didn't want to be signed by some labels "junior hipster" ; she wanted the president. She got one when Capitols Andrew Slater signed her. She has some big boys in her court now, supporters who she believes have seen past both the supposed deficits and advantages of being a woman in rock. Interestingly, two of the songs that made the final cut on her solo album date from a long -ago tinker session. She and Steve Durand wrote them when they were unknowns on the Plateau, before Courtney Love called. "that innocence that we had was a blinding purity." She's counting on the audience to hear it.

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