Soul Music

Melissa Auf der Maur sets sail on her own, purveying beefy songs with vamp-y intentions.

From: LA Alternative Press, 2004-12-10
Date added: 2004-12-14

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Talk to former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur for even the briefest amount of time, and the stunning redhead will no doubt mention her subconscious. “I am a strong believer in more people listening to their deep inner-voice or sub-voice — because that is the truth,” she says. “The intellectual brain has the potential to destroy any real feeling.”

While her statements may make her sound a bit spacey, she’s actually acutely self-aware, channeling her inner visions into seriously heavy rock ‘n’ roll that strips her bare and reveals intimate gender issues and passionate political frustrations. “I wanted to represent my view on life, beauty, music, hate,” she says. Take one long look at her record, the self-titled “Auf der Maur,” due out May 18 on Capitol Records, and the details of her life — her strange first meeting with Billy Corgan, her fated letter to him later, her time in Hole and then the Pumpkins, and finally her debut — and it becomes increasingly clear why she’s so spiritual and why her songs are so revealing. Ask her about it all, though, and she’ll explain that her whole existence is a fairytale, bound together by music, a fairytale that found her playing in two of the 1990s’ most successful bands but actually only appearing on one record, Hole’s “Celebrity Skin.” All the more reason Auf der Maur’s debut solo album is both a career and personal milestone for her. “I see music, love and religion as all the same thing. At an early age, music gave meaning to my life,” she says. “It gave me power and brought people together. It gave me a direction and community. And I think that everything that ended up happening stemmed from my incredible early love of music.”

It may therefore come as a surprise that Auf der Maur’s songs aren’t rosy, psychedelic or even, really, all that sophisticated. They’re not classic rock rip-offs or overtly self-actualizing — the standard output of lifelong music-lovers. Instead “Auf der Maur” is a dense rock record, swarming with big guitars, rumbling bass lines and pounding drums. It’s a kick-ass, up-yours assault, one that finally announces exactly who Auf der Maur is, while unquestionably establishing her as a major figure in the rock world.

And, lord, can she thrash. “Followed the Waves,” the album’s first single, shreds with eerie shrieks and relentless riffs, chanting vocals and a thunderous ripping bottom-end. Unlike today’s garage-rock revival, which at times favors cuteness and image over sweat and feeling, Auf der Maur’s record throbs, bursting with her marrow. Oddly enough, though, her songs come closer to the slamming man-music of A Perfect Circle (who she just opened for) or Queens of the Stone Age (whose guitarist Josh Homme and producer Chris Goss guest on her record) than they do to the all-female punk of Sleater-Kinney or Bikini Kill.

“Real heavy rock has always appealed to me,” she says. “I like big, grandiose-sounding music; I always have. Long live the lo-fi thing for those who love it. But I’m up there making big music for people who love that.” But that’s really only a slice of it. Because perched above all the thumping is Auf der Maur and her sweet, if slightly narrow, alto. Her voice caresses and nurtures, matching her sonic masculinity with softened, womanly sensibilities. Well-placed harmonies and lovesick, slightly raunchy lyrics (“I will taste you, I’ve got a big mouth”) forefront her femininity, slipping a seductive, vixen sexuality into the songs. Auf der Maur is tangibly androgynous: she creates beefy songs with vamp-y intentions and a wonderful tension (or “duality” as she calls it) that traces and sustains the set.

“I feel comfortable having the heavy distorted guitar because I balance it on the other end with ethereal three part harmonies that to me create a full world,” she says. “The heavy primitive masculine thing and then super-ethereal feminine thing. I’m struggling with this in my life too. I want to be this ethereal, spiritual person, but I also like food and sex.”

Her record gets even headier. In exploring and expressing this internal dialogue, Auf der Maur somewhat unwittingly tapped into a certain strand of contemporary American zeitgeist: a growing disgust with conservative policymakers. For although on the surface her music’s slogging energy and juicy vulgarity are more sexually confusing than politically charged, that visceral rawness did in fact emerge out of protest. She is quite open (conversationally, not lyrically) about her mounting disgust with right-wing practices, a bitterness that consequently fueled her guitar onslaught and that ultimately sent her back to her hometown, Montreal, permanently. And so Auf der Maur comes to symbolize a pent-up rage — both hers and her likeminded fans — that could only be conveyed through sweaty, hedonistic, net-less rock. “Being in this country has kicked me in the ass to make this record,” she says. “And somewhere in my abstract, surrealist, political perspective of rock music, I’m trying to make a little bit of a difference.” It was a similar musical idealism that years ago dragged a young Auf der Maur, then the bassist in her first band Tinker, to a club in Montreal to see up-and-coming rockers the Smashing Pumpkins. And so begins the stuff of rock legend.

As it happened, there were only a handful of others in the audience, but, reportedly, that didn’t stop Corgan from being Corgan. So in hopes of deflating the now-infamous frontman, a friend of hers flung a beer bottle at him, prompting a fistfight. Later in the night, an appalled Auf der Maur apologized to Corgan for her friend and her city — apparently she made quite an impression, because a few years later, Auf der Maur sent Corgan a letter, asking if Tinker could open for the Pumpkins during their next visit to Montreal, and, amazingly, Corgan agreed (later predicting that someday she’ll play in his band). Six months later, though his group was still intact, Corgan called Auf der Maur on behalf of his friend Courtney Love — Hole’s bassist Kristen Pfaff had just died of a heroin overdose. Auf der Maur took the job and played in the band for the next five years before leaving in 1999 — coincidentally, the very week Pumpkins bassist D’Arcy Wretzky quit. Corgan came calling again, and Auf der Maur finally joined his band, just in time for their farewell tour.

What’d she learn from it all? “Basically band meetings. Anybody, anytime, any complaint: voice it,” she says. “The more talking the better — there’s nothing weirder than the unspoken problems that occur in a band. It’s my new-age band-therapy. ‘Let’s have a seat here. Are you happy? Are you OK? OK, good.’”

Few musicians — even the most whispery of singer/songwriters — are as sweetly transparent as Auf der Maur. Her collection spans a lifetime’s worth of songwriting — tunes written for Tinker follow those penned during her time in Hole and so-on, up until the period just before recording. Even the session players — who in addition to Goss and Homme, include friends, Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, Kyuss drummer Brant Bjork and Tinker bandmates Steve Durand and Jordon Zadoroznky — speak to a lifelong project. The record, then, in its monumental glory, reaffirms Auf der Maur’s very existence and, surely, sends her digging even deeper into her subconscious.

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