Discoveries - female bassist Melissa Auf der Maur

From: Saturday Night Magazine, 1995-05-01
Date added: 2004-12-14

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"One night, in Australia," Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur remembers from the recent tour, "I got a nosebleed on stage. I must have hit my face on the microphone. Anyway, I went off to sit and recuperate for a moment. Courtney killed a little time with her acrobatic routine. But someone got hold of one of her shoes and threw it back on stage, and it hit me right in the head. I was dragged off the stage, bleeding, and taken away in an ambulance. It was hilarious."

Melissa Auf der Maur joined Courtney Love's band last August, two months after their former bassist, Kristen Pfaff, keeled over (permanently) from a heroin overdose. The previous April, Love had been widowed by Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana, who shot himself in the head.

Auf der Maur, a Montrealer, has been playing bass guitar for five years, since she was eighteen. She was serious enough about it to persuade her father Nick, the Montreal journalist and boulevardier sans pareil, to buy her a bass of her own for her twenty-first birthday, and then an amplifier, too, a few days after that.

"My mother inspired me to do exactly what I liked to do," Auf der Maur says, speaking of Linda Gaboriau, who was once Montreal's first female rock-and-roll disc jockey and is now a successful translator of French theatre. "When I picked up the bass, there weren't too many girls around playing," Auf der Maur recalls, but she helped put together a Montreal club band called Tinker all the same. One night, they opened for the up-and-coming Smashing Pumpkins, at a club called Metropolis. Principal Pumpkin Billy Corgan later recommended Auf der Maur to Courtney Love.

Within weeks of the audition, Auf der Maur found herself playing to 60,000 fans at England's Reading music festival. Hole has since toured North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. They've played on "Saturday Night Live," recorded an acoustic concert for MTV's "Unplugged," and appeared, lip-synching, on London's "Top of the Pops." The album they are currently promoting, appropriately enough entitled Live through This, has gone "gold" in Canada (over 50,000 copies) and in the U.S. (over 500,000 copies). Rolling Stone called Hole 1994's band of the year.

The music is "Seattle Grunge." Spin described a recent Hole show in Vancouver as a "turbulent set of polished punk rock and nougaty new wave." (They liked it a lot.) "I've come to play a big part vocally," Auf der Maur says of her contribution. "Courtney's vocals are harsh, and mine are high and sweet. We're very different, and it makes for an interesting dynamic."

Courtney Love as a single mother and other personal topics are not open for discussion. "All I will say is that Courtney is a genius and madwoman," Auf der Maur offers. "And I can't emphasize enough how surreal this whole thing has been. I remain completely me, of course, just on a different planet."

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