Sur le mur

I translated this from French(well the online translator did half but I had to do the rest manually), so I apologize if some sentences are crooked or whatever.

From: Le Presse, 2004-05-01
Date added: 2004-05-06

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When Melissa Auf der Maur entered to the Coffee of the New World with her large and silhouette frail as reed, her skin as white as milk, the camelias jumping off her clothing like dandelions and her wrists the size of ossicles, I thought I was dreaming.

Was this really the same girl? She who imposed each time she went on with her bass? She who immediately found her place in Hole, then Smashing Pumpkins, two alternative cults? She who sang with Indochine, posed for Rolling Stone and who in certain Parisian circles passes for a goddess of the alternative scene? The same girl? Really?

Melissa sat down or rather yielded into two, removed her scarf, released her long puffing out russet-red hair and immediately launched out into a long speech to the glory of Montreal and Journees de la Culture, of which she is the anglophone spokeswoman.

I immediately concluded that in spite of appearances, it was indeed the same Melissa, the daughter of Nick (Auf der Maur) and Linda (Gaboriau), a 30 year old woman fragile and strong at the same time, English and French, rockeuse and romantic, sober and spiritual, soft and rebel and I pass from there.

"Yes absolutely, it increased. I embrace all that. The light and the night, the good and the bad, the man and the woman. I am all that at the same time and I intend well to remain it."

The conversation started on hats of wheels. I needed only to launch a word - any - so that Melissa seizes some like balloon and leaves to run in all the directions without never forgetting the first goal of the operation: Days of the culture.

Even if Melissa left Montreal more than eight years ago, that she's seen in New York more often than in Montreal and that she will not be downtown the September 27, 28 and 29 to celebrate the Journees de la Culture, she agreed from the start to be the spokesman of an event which, for whatever purpose it may serve, is unknown to Anglo-Montréalais.

"It is precisely for that reason that I accepted, she pleads. At the beginning, I had never intended to speak about the Journees de la Culture. My English friends either. When I was called, I said myself that this was the occasion, or to never take part in the bringing the two communities together. It is a cause which holds me with heart in so far. When I grew up in Montreal, I would have liked to have French-speaking friends but never did. The relations were too strained or I was embarassed too much, I don't know. What's certain is that integration into the French-speaking scene is something which I missed." Melissa Auf der Maur however did not grow up in the west of the city. She grew up on Esplanade street, in front of the Royal mount, between Outremont and le Plateau. Except that she attended F.A.C.E. universitey, then Mind, two schools which, in spite of their bilingualism and their opening, in spite of them the myth of the two lonelinesses lingers on.

Her friends, names like Rufus and Martha Wainwright, the children of Kate McGarrigle. They belonged to the broad circle of friends of her divorced parents, as well as the children of Leonard Cohen.

With her mother being a journalist and translator and a father chronicler, activist and fast liver, Melissa couldn't possibly have become accountant or notary. Sooner or later she was ensured to be grabbed by the arts. That moment occurred rather early. As well as her education at F.A.C.E., she already studied the piano, the trumpet, choir singing and was split at the time of a virtual solo on low imaginary. At 14 years, she attends the Electric Pussies, and haunts the spectacles of Montreal Rock'N'Roll thanks to the many contacts of her father and the Chom-Fm corridors where her mother was Montreals first femal rock DJ. She also remembers that when her mother spoke to her about Hendrix or Janis Joplin, it was to boost her self-esteem: 'I can do that too!' The influences which will work its life set up slowly. Melissa is not a baby-boomer nor even a member of Generation X. She belongs to the following generation, not a very popular troop but it did incarnate in the grunge movement and the music of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain.

But even when Nirvana were at the top of their glory, Melissa, always somewhat advanced on its congeneric, preferred the Smashing Pumpkins to them, then still unknown.

The bass player of the Pumpkins was a woman by the name of D'Arcy Wretzky. Melissa worshipped her, without even suspecting that ten years later, she would be asked to replace D'Arcy on the scene.

Major leagues

In the alternative Montreal scene, the history of Melissa's rise to fame, not to mantion her popularity in the major leagues is very well known.

All began one evening at an Electric Pussies gig, somewhere in the beginning of the Nineties. The Smashing Pumpkins play there in front of 20 people, around which Melissa is found, their number 1 fan. At the end of the evening, Melissa notices leader Billy Corgan is somewhat disseapointed, and Melissa decides to go to comfort him. While talking, she announces her dream to him: to open for the Smashing Pumpkins with her own band, Tinker, one day.

So when Corgan returned in Montreal the following year, he did not forget Melissa and invites her and Tinker to perform their first show. And when the year is coming to an end, Hole's bass player takes a drug overdose and dies, af which Corgan strongly recommends the name of Melissa Auf der Maur to Courtney Love.

After her arguments had been put aside, Auf der Maur was Hole's new addition.

And within a few days, the Montreal girl is to be found in front of an 80 000 people crowd and slides in a world of fric, ego trips, alcohol and hard drugs. The change of environment is at the very least dazing. Melissa does not lose her cool for as much. As a good small steady and professional soldier, she delivers the goods as promised.

She must moreover deal with the tormented nature of Courtney Love, the widow of Kurt Cobain, a gifted artist but completely neurotic.

But do not expect Melissa to break sugar on its former owner.

"My experience with Hole was a formidable lesson of life, which has made me stronger, which enabled me to see the world, to meet heaps of people, to earn my living well and to travel first class. As for Courtney, she showed to me the capacity, the ambition and the confusion which settles when the celebrity creates music."

Their rupture was not more serene. One month after announcing that she was to leave Hole and fly on her own wings, Melissa again took service, to take part in the good-bye tour of the Samshing Pumpkins, right after the famous D'Arcy left.

"I think that Courtney understood that I could not let such an occasion pass, especially as I was still indebted to Billy Corgan who after all gave me my first chance. At the same time, and let us say that since, one really doesn't speak to oneself any more."

A solo album

Today, Melissa Auf der Maur is free like the air. She definitively gave up the high life to record her first solo album.

The death-blow arrived on September 11, 2001. At the time, the bass player lived in the mythical Chelsea Hotel, New York in search of strong feelings and inspiration. As of the impact of the first plane, she precipitated on the roof. She looked at the two towers burning of a stupefied air. Then during three days, she went voluntary to help the rescue squads.

"Until this moment of my life, I had served others by delaying the things which I wanted to do myself. I dreamed to make a solo album but I said to myself, I will wait. I have time. Not until that day I understood that life was short and that it was necessary to do what one had to do, now. Not tomorrow. Now."

A few days later, she plunged herself into the writing and recording of an album which will be released next spring under the title of 'Auf der Maur', a Switzerland-German name which means "On the wall".

Melissa chose her surname for her sonority, its graphic quality and for its side hooker in Van Halen.

She thought a moment only the European public (which she knows well) could see an allusion to the Berlin Wall. When I make a remark to it, she falls from the naked ones. Very quickly however, she starts to extrapolate on the symbolic meaning of the thing.

"In this content, the expression on the wall is appropriate to me perfectly. To be on a wall, it is as to be between two chairs, two dualities. It is a little the history of my life. Between two cities, two countries, two cultures. As long as I manage to find my balance between it, it is a situation which I like."

Melissa hopes to found a family and to have children one day. But before crossing that wall, she has still things to be proven. Lately, she's rented a apartment on Le Plateau, only blocks away from good friend Rufus Wainwright. In New York, they live together but in Montreal, it is each one at home.

Melissa hopes that one day she'll be able to spend more time to Montreal than she currently does. On the blow, I wonders whether she's sincere or diplomatic. But then I thinks of her mother, an American who fell in love with Montreal 20 years ago and who refused to live somewhere else. One also thinks of her late father who, during several decades, attached the cosmopolitan face of Montreal to him. With a similar heredity, Melissa won't be able to do without Montreal for a very long time without difficulty.

- By Nathalie Petrowski
The Press

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