Melissa Auf der Maur saw herself spending her whole life in Montreal. “I was very happy,” she recalled recently in a generous phone interview. “I was studying at Concordia [pictured], I was playing with my band [Tinker], I didn’t really have the ambition to conquer the world. »
When Billy Corgan, with whom she had begun a letter-writing relationship after the Smashing Pumpkins’ visit to Les Foufounes Electriques in 1991, suggested that she go to Seattle and audition for the Hole band, the 22-year-old replied thank you, but no thanks.
“And it was my dad who said to me, ‘You should think about it. Call the Big Pumpkin back and tell him you’ve changed your mind, ”said the musician, a few days before the 25th anniversary of the death of her father, Nick, on April 7, 1998. Big Pumpkin? The author of these lines laughs. “Yes, that’s what he called it!” That’s my spitting dad. »
City councillor, journalist, pillar of the bars on Crescent Street, close friend of the big shots as well as the penniless, Nick Auf der Maur is above all the greatest Montreal columnist not to bear the name Pierre Foglia. An event in his memory will be held late Friday afternoon at Winnie’s, downtown, around several vodka-cranberries, his favorite poison.
Although he was not a rock lover, unlike Melissa’s mother, translator Linda Gaboriau, it was Nick Auf der Maur who gave her daughter her first bass, an Esquire purchased from York Music , a gift for his 21st birthday. “I went to see him on Crescent,” recalls the then-DJ at Le Bifteck, “he took the money out of his wallet and I went straight back to the store. »
In 2010, Melissa Auf der Maur and her husband, director Tony Stone, founded the Basilica Hudson, an arts and dissemination center located in the Hudson Valley. To this time-consuming project was added at the same time another, even more demanding one, that of parenthood: their daughter River is now 11 years old.
But Melissa, the musician? “It’s one of the great mysteries of my life,” breathes the 51-year-old whose most recent album, Out of Our Minds, was released in 2010. went to the end of my dream with the music, that I had to take a step back. I wanted to recreate here everything I loved about Montreal in the 1990s, a truly alternative, different place, far from the crap of Ticketmaster and the majors. »
But all these years later? “My body is really sad,” she says. My mind and soul are very confused about my decision to stop playing music. »
It was during the pandemic that Melissa Auf der Maur measured for the first time the depth of the void that this absence digs in her. “I was starting to miss my bass and the magic of creation,” says the one who is currently working on writing her autobiography as well as a joint musical project.
In addition to wanting to “honor the music that changed [her] life”, Melissa Auf der Maur hopes with her book to help rehabilitate her comrade Courtney Love, one of the most divisive figures in rock history, whom dad Nick has already defended itself. In 1996, the Montrealer took to the stage of the Rialto Theater to interrupt a conference held by journalists Max Wallace and Ian Halperin, two of the main propagators of the thesis of the murder of Kurt Cobain by his widow.
“Even in her most difficult times, even at the height of her addiction issues, I always supported Courtney, because the double standard she was subjected to was so obvious and brutal”, regrets the one who still speaks to her regularly, although that a Hole reunion is not on the table, Mrs. Love having an aversion to any form of nostalgia. “I saw her self-destructing while they were throwing bullets at her on stage and calling her a murderer. »
In 2019, while Kerrang! marked the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s death, Melissa signed in its pages a letter protesting against the deification of the leader of Nirvana. “Kurt Cobain was brilliant, he changed my life and my generation, she says on the phone, but in what kind of culture is he who abandons his wife and daughter who becomes the hero of the story? ? »
Someone recently asked Melissa Auf der Maur if, as legend has it, she actually did her school homework, with her father, on the counter of her favorite bars. “It’s not wrong, she laughs, but for me, it was nothing serious. “If she claims to have adopted a more orthodox conception of parenthood, she retains from her father his efforts to instill in him a confidence that escaped him, at a time when she suffered from painful shyness.
“I also remember that one election night, she continues, her voice heavy, I asked him why he was investing all this time, when he risked losing and being disappointed. He said, “Because I don’t trust those assholes.” »
The lesson was obviously not only political. “What he wanted to tell me is that your life is up to you. It’s up to you to live your own adventure. »