Melissa Auf der Maur – Part 2 – No Treble

In this edition of Wonder Women: Stories From The Women Who Play Bass, we continue exploring the backstory of Melissa Auf der Maur, bassist and vocalist for Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins. She also established a successful solo career with the release of Auf der Maur and Out of Our Minds.

Last month’s feature covered Melissa’s childhood and backstory up to the time of joining Hole. Melissa debuted with Hole on August 8th,1994 at the Reading Festival in England, playing for 65,000 people. Melissa toured with Hole from 1994 to 1995, supporting their Live Through This album release. The band was still grieving from the recent passing of their former bassist, Kristen Pfaff. Additionally, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love was grieving the death of her husband Kurt Cobain.

Melissa stayed with Hole for five years, as per a contractual agreement. Melissa not only helped fill the void left by Pfaff… she added backing vocals to Hole’s next release, doubling Courtney’s vocals and layering multiple harmonies. Melissa credited her choir background; “…because of my choir days and my wonderful Welsch choir teacher, I had an ear for harmonies and on Celebrity Skin…there is me doubling her once to three times and then there is two to four or five harmonies of me… so I have more of my voice on that record than I do even my solo record. They wanted a lush sound and I was the… angel to the wild screamer. So we just coated everything with my voice… I had a great time working on that record…”

Celebrity Skin, released Sept 8, 1998, proved to be the band’s most commercially successful album. It sold over 1.4 million copies in the US alone and the album charted very well internationally. In the middle of the summer of 1999, while touring Canada, Melissa realized no one had remembered that her five year contract had expired. Courtney Love was getting more calls to appear in movies… which appeared to be causing delays in booking upcoming tours for Hole. Melissa related “…this is the best we’ve ever been…and on that tour it dawned on me that the five years had just come up… and that nobody had addressed my contract or asked me to continue and I just had this flash… I’m like that’s it, I gotta get out because this is it… we had been offered all these huge tours… it was summer and we were supposed to do these fall tours… a Europe tour… she was not committing to anything… I fulfilled my commitment and I have to move on because I can’t sit around and it’s not fair to music… it’s not fair to other aspirations that I might have…”

Within a week of getting home, Billy Corgan called. Bassist D’arcy Wretzky left the Smashing Pumpkins the same week Melissa had left Hole. Corgan had once told Melissa “’You’re going to be in my band one day”….and now his words were coming true. In October 1999, Melissa Auf Der Maur joined the Smashing Pumpkins for the international Machina/The Machines of God tour from December 1999 to December 2000.

Melissa shared this of her experience with the Pumpkins, “I’m so glad I did it as far as a musician. It was very intense. It was more music than I’ve ever played in my life and it was very demanding… Sharon Osborne was their manager, and the meeting for that contract was Ozzy Osbourne pouring me tea and being like “Yeah, just sign this, it’s fine.” And the weekly thing was so high… I was like, ok, if I work for one year straight, I’ll make more money than my five years in Hole. Are you fucking kidding me? OK I’m actually gonna make money because I didn’t make money in Hole, and I’m actually going to learn music in a way that I have never learned music before… and I happily signed it with crumpets and Ozzy Osbourne and had a really cool year long vacation… intense in terms of demanding. The first week of rehearsals Billy told me the rules, which were: you don’t get sick, you can’t make a mistake, and there’s no days off. I said OK, I can do that… and I did.”

The Pumpkins disbanded in 2001, and Melissa eventually returned home to Montreal. She was planning on quitting music, returning to photography and possibly getting her Masters degree. And one event changed everything.

“I quit music when I left the Pumpkins… this is crazy… my relationship to music is so not down to earth. I need to take a break and I went back to photography… I took a picture… pretty much a roll a day… during all my years in Hole and the Pumpkins… so I have 30,000 photographic negatives of my six years… those years I was in there… and I decided I should look through it… make a photo book… return to language of images, but also return to my voice and myself and take a break. I had a photo show opening. It was September 10, 2001 in Brooklyn. I had friends come from Montreal and LA. It was a really big moment for me. I had a solo photo show at the Sweet Gallery in Brooklyn. I was like I’m gonna be a photographer… maybe I’ll go to do my Masters now… and I was returning to that. And then after the show we all went to karaoke in the Village… it was a really fun night… all these friends… and I was like I done with music. I’m gonna do this.

And then 9/11 happened the next morning… it was just very strange… turning point. I was living in the Chelsea hotel. I watched the burning towers from the roof and… I don’t know, I don’t know what happened… but while I was living that year at the Chelsea hotel, it occurred to me that I am luckiest person I know that was given this like once in a lifetime one in a million music career… and to not continue making music would be really disrespectful to my opportunity and to music itself. And I started… doubting this notion of like I’m just gonna leave that. How could I leave something that I am so devoted to… but also that I’ve been so lucky… at the time like that the time is now… why would I stop now? And this might be the last time in my life I have the energy to make rock music the center of my life.”

She launched her solo career with the debut album Auf der Maur, released by Capitol Records in February 2004, showcasing her talents as a songwriter, vocalist and instrumentalist. By 2010, 200,000 copies had sold worldwide and the album peaked at 187 on the Billboard 200.

Auf der Maur continued to push creative boundaries with her 2010 album Out of Our Minds, a multimedia project that included a short film and graphic novel, highlighting her passion for integrating various art forms. In January 2011 Out of Our Minds won the Best Indie/Alternative/Hard Rock Album at the Independent Music Awards.

She is also the Co-Founder/Director of Basilica Hudson. The venue, located in Hudson, New York, was offered to her and her husband, indie film maker Tony Stone. Melissa shared this story about how they became venue owners; “…this guy who owned this big factory who asked me and Tony to take it over for him because he had seen it as like this possibility for the center community space he was… part of the first wave of New York city expats who were moving to upstate New York… we were part of the second wave of artists and people looking to not live in New York city… so he had been here already for 10 years when he offered us in 2010 to take over the building… I used to jam in this room for my second solo record… I rehearsed in this room and then he just made us an offer we couldn’t refuse… he’s like you guys got to take this building on and do it… neither of us were looking for brick and mortar but being a musician and a filmmaker to have brick and mortar… was a very unexpected and exciting turn of events…”

Today, Basilica Hudson is a nonprofit multidisciplinary art center that welcomes over 20,000 visitors each season to genre-pushing music festivals, large scale marketplace events, regular film screenings, an artist in residency program, a new weekly concert/art series in the Gallery Building, public installations and other community gatherings.

Several news sources recently speculated on a photo published on Instagram, from Courtney Love’s Instagram account, @_fromhertoeternity. A picture was posted with Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur, captioned, “Courtney Love and @xmadmx Melissa Auf Der Maur in London, June 13, 2024 having a blast —first time in studio together in 24 years.” It’s currently not clear what they were working on, or even if they were recording together.

As mentioned in part 1 of this feature, Auf der Maur participated in an interview with the Women In Rock Oral History project, reflecting on her life and music career. There seems to be a sense of freedom in the stories she shares, especially given the passage of time. It is a long interview, but it’s an interesting watch.

Melissa Auf der Maur on the Web