Melissa Auf der Maur’s ’90s memoir revisits the magic of analog

By the summer of 1994, Melissa Auf der Maur was entrenched in the pain, resilience, and dysfunction of Hole, whose Live Through This tour was both an exorcism of grief and a crusade for representation in an abyss of men. “No one seems to see what I see in Courtney [Love], a raw and wrecked woman doing her best to stay alive with purpose,” she writes midway through Even the Good Girls Will Cry, her new ’90s memoir. As a bassist and altruist, Auf der Maur was an anchor within the turbulence, who habitually grabbed her camera — a 35mm point-and-shoot — and snapped photos of the shows for posterity.

“Looking at the faces of those people that caught Courtney [stage-diving], the people who watched this, no phones, it’s just a present, magic experience where they are receiving you,” Auf der Maur recalls from her home on a Friday afternoon, a couple of weeks before its release. “In every photo I take of the crowd, there’s someone — it’s like a Where’s Waldo — that sees my camera and is making eye contact.

Read more: In conversation with the Linda Lindas and Hole’s Patty Schemel

“These people need to be seen,” she continues. “They’re the reason we’re here. Without them, there is no music. They’re the most important subject of my book, other than me and my band. The power of those crowds gave me life. You go to a show, and it gives you a portal to believing in magic and believing in yourself.”

Auf der Maur is intensely qualified to speak on their behalf: Being a fan cracked open her whole career. The previous year, the bassist wrote a letter to Billy Corgan, after witnessing the Smashing Pumpkins frontman get hit by a beer bottle in Montreal, which led to her band Tinker opening for them. Soon, Corgan suggested her to Love, going on to experience a series of dizzying, and frequently unexpected, moments: meeting Stevie Nicks; playing Lollapalooza; befriending B-Real of Cypress Hill at said festival; being served tea by Ozzy Osbourne; and falling for Dave Grohl, where they faxed each other love notes. The book documents that whirlwind period — a decade that shaped her — in searing brilliance and zen honesty, replete with memorabilia from her own archives that previews her next project: a ’90s photo exhibit. Though mired in grief, rage, and warmth, Even the Good Girls Will Cry isn’t just an ode to analog. Auf der Maur never allows the reader to forget the decade existed in great duality — the darkness of drug addiction running alongside an explosive lineage of bands that’ve influenced generations.

In the book, you mentioned picking up copies of NME and being a real consumer of music culture. What do you remember about that era of Alternative Press?

Well, the reason I mentioned NME is that I grew up with British press. Canada, as I’m sure you know, is part of the monarchy essentially. All the record shops had British music press, so the weird thing is I didn’t come across Alternative Press until the ’90s when alternative American music captured my heart. Once the alternative music scene of the U.S. exploded, then yes, I of course remember Alternative Press, but mainly my biggest memory is photographing for Alternative Press. I did a whole five-page spread, which I have in my archives. SPIN Magazine had me photograph Lollapalooza, but Alternative Press was the only one that gave me creative freedom of anything I wanna do. I have the tear sheets because I was trying to work as a photographer.

What do you think journalists got wrong when they wrote about you?

I mean, I was living in the shadow of Courtney, so nobody really got me at all, and that’s fine. I was just a mystery. What they got wrong was her with the insane, women-hating misogyny of the world at large that has not gone away. I witnessed a world treat this woman like garbage. Is Courtney Love difficult and unspoken? Yes. Does she have drug addiction? Yes. Has she ever denied that? The evil treatment of her and the lack of compassion, and most insultingly, the lack of awareness of her power as a lyricist, performer, pioneering feminist, I am still burning with rage at what was not captured in our fearless frontwoman, but mostly in the legacy of Hole that I worked really hard to uphold.

I gave all of myself for five years, and the way that they obliterated her from history as an artist of deep merit and let all the men and the ghost of her husband overshadow the entire story of her is where they got me wrong. Hole’s legacy is lost in the gutters of YouTube, and the industry totally dropped it. A lot of people probably underestimate the power of the band in general and what we did as musicians, our commitment to our craft, our commitment to our everything. So if they got her wrong, they got me wrong.

What really struck me as I was reading the book was your observation of her being incredibly wounded at that point — and the shows serving as a manifestation or an exorcism of her grief.

And that she needed this to survive. I wanted to support this woman who had nobody but her band and the audience that loved her. Her parents were useless, and the media was often useless. It was the music fans and her band that kept her alive. I’m proud to have been a part of anyone’s survival. I think I say it in the book: Music saves lives. It saved her life, but it saves depressed teens in their bedrooms. It saved my life, not that I’m even a depressed or suicidal person, but life is sad. Life is hard, and if you have a soundtrack of people that speak on your behalf and say things that you don’t even know you feel, but you feel seen by the power of a song, this is why we do it. This is why music fans and music-makers need each other.

There was another chilling part that I had to put down when you were talking about Big Day Out — how everyone didn’t have to hide their addiction anymore. You walked into your dressing room trailer and saw a group of people nodding off and syringes on the table. What was your emotional response to revisiting that memory, decades later?

One of the biggest wounds in me that I had to confront in the book was when I lost my best friend Patty [Schemel, Hole’s drummer] to addiction — and it’s the worst part of the story. My father’s death and losing Patty, losing her on the record [Celebrity Skin] and losing her to drugs. That scene you’re describing is the moment that I realized it was happening to the extent it was happening. Fortunately for me, but unfortunately, I had to disconnect. I had to protect myself, not be in denial, but be aware that to be able to get through the day running alongside people who more or less have a death wish, you have to protect yourself to not go down with them. It was an unfortunate loss of innocence moment where one of the worst things I had to do was turn away from the pain, in not just my band members and the bands around us, but in the youth of our generation.

How did you deal with having to narrate that part for the audiobook?

Great question because when I wrote this book, it was obviously a big lift — years of writing and emotional upheaval — but it wasn’t until I read the audiobook that I realized the hard parts were still to come. When I sat alone in a room for eight days, reading my life to myself and uncontrollably crying in areas… That was one of the ones I could not get through without crying. In that moment, I realized I was still gonna be facing difficult times. Even going on the book tour, talking to journalists, these things will continue to hurt, and that’s when I realized that, in fact, putting the book out is also gonna be hard. There might be more tears, and there are also my friendships and the people in the band and the people that I’ll be connecting with through this process.

Speaking of, I loved reading about how you hit it off with B-Real from Cypress Hill.

Isn’t that a cute one? I loved being able to show how eclectic the ’90s were and how unexpected it was. It says a lot about what was disappointing to me in the ’90s was that there should have been more camaraderie between all these like-minded, alternative freaky art people, but it was B-Real that was protective of us when shotgun shells were thrown on the stage by shitty dudes in the crowd that wanted to blame the wife. And it’s the fact that he was the only one that came to protect these women who were on tour with a little girl [Frances Bean Cobain]. I don’t smoke pot, but I smoke pot with him just to bond with him. They’re sweethearts. I got to go on his podcast [in 2023], and I brought my daughter to meet him.

What did you make of the trip-hop scene? I don’t think I saw that mentioned in the book.

Do you remember in the book I talk about at the end of the ’90s, I walk into the dance tent [at Glastonbury], and I see Fatboy Slim? It really stopped me in my tracks, and I humbly understood that there’s a new world coming that this purist bass player rock girl doesn’t know. Trip-hop has got cool elements for sure, but there’s something about the electronic components that alienated me. I remember being at one of the first Portishead shows in LA, being witness to what was the new music, but all I saw — which I’m sorry, but I was right — was the rise of the machines. It doesn’t mean those artists weren’t incredible, but I did not like the encroaching machine, and I got nervous that we were gonna lose our analog magic. I saw it as a warning sign, and I checked out.

Did you get Courtney, Billy, or Dave’s blessing to include some of the memorabilia?

Yes, I got in touch with everyone a couple of years ago when I started writing the book. What’s beautiful is even though I’ve gone in and out of touch with all of them, the sacredness of our bonds through love and through music, they trust me. They gave me their blessings right away. They know I’m not here to exploit anything for money or for power because, in fact, that’s why I left all of them. I did say, “I’m gonna tell the truth, but I love you. You know that.”

It ended up being this special tea-time moment with Courtney. Legally, if you reproduce lyrics or a full letter from someone, you have to get them to sign off, so I had to get Courtney’s legal signature to reproduce those two beautiful letters she wrote me. On one occasion, because I went to London and sang on her new record, I decided to get not only her blessing but her signature to print those two letters. I had her read me, in person, on her couch, having tea, the Beauty Manifesto because I think that’s one of the most brilliant examples of how ahead of her time and how generous she is. She was warning me and every woman out there of what the traps of beauty can be. She, of course, wrote that in a moment, faxed it to me, and forgot, but I kept all my archives. I found it as it was fading, and I had her read it to me in person last year, and it brought me to tears.

In my book, I wanted to reframe the misogyny that burned her at the stake. What’s so cool is over the course of the whole book, you’re believing and trusting the bass player. But what do I do at the end of the book? I get the readers to read her own words that show that she really is an honorable person. I get to actually show her power in her own words. I know a lot of people who have read it were like, “Wow, she actually proves herself.”

I have to say that after 200 pages of dread, all the darkness that followed Hole, where everything feels “slightly hopeless,” writing that Dave Grohl was the first to bring you to climax was gold.

Did you laugh?

Yes!

OK, good. I’m like, “Of all people, why is this fucking guy the guy? He’s not even my type! He’s just a dumb jock. How did this happen?” I love it. You’re only the second person that’s dared to bring this up, and I dreaded putting it in the book. I’m like, “Fuck, am I gonna be asked this question?” Luckily, most people are too shy. What I want to tell you as a young woman: I did not put that in there so Dave could feel proud. In fact, I would rather not share that part of our personal life. I put it in there so that women can actually understand how mysterious sex and love are and to remember that our very sexuality and our biology have only been written by men, for men, and that women’s sexuality is the eternal mystery.

I had to include it to be able to show people it’s actually weird, but not weird, that some women don’t have orgasms with men till way later, and then even weirder, with a stranger. Why did that happen? That’s the mystery of life. My daughter’s only 14, but I wrote this book for her. I dedicated it to her and all the girls. We have to do this for each other. Even though there’s literally rapists and predators running the United States of America, women’s liberation is happening within us still. There’s a lot of movement, even though society is going backward. Women share their stories, and that can empower us to find our way.

Do you find that you’re tapped in with the new generation of alternative bands? Where or who do you get music recommendations from?

In terms of my own at-home listening, I have my own indie, weird, alternative, super underground shit, and then I have, via my daughter, entered the Billie Eilish world. I’m the cool mom that brings her to see Tate McRae, Olivia Rodrigo. Obviously, Billie Eilish is my favorite — the greatest voice of her generation. It could be scientifically proven that Billie Eilish could not exist in the ’90s. She has been loved and protected and empowered in a way that women have not seen. That’s why she resonates so deeply with girls.

In the past few years, I started DJing the after-parties at our arts center [Basilica Hudson]. It mainly turns to the ’80s because I love Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy. There’s a very particular line of electronic, new wave, dark pop that I love from the ’80s, and through that algorithm, I have found a pretty cool new underground… This one particular band that nobody seems to know is a guy in his early 20s in Russia, in a basement, that makes the coolest electronic dance goth music: akiaura. Then this other one that I don’t know if you’ve heard: Deb Never.

I got to interview Deb Never a few years ago. She’s exactly how you think she is. Very grounded.

I’ve been meaning to write her a fan letter. When I love a song, I’ll listen to it for five hours straight. I’ve actually been doing a lot of this final promotion press stuff, listening to Deb Never’s “Out of Time.” It’s a comfort for me. I used to do it as a kid with certain songs when I’d have cassette singles, and I’d have them on auto-reverse on my tape deck. Look for akiaura and the particular track is “Sleepwalker,” but it’s the slowed remix on their EP called Ketamine Girl. That’s my new music report for you.

Well, I’m really excited for your photo show. Is that what you were teasing that inspired all of the Hole reunion headlines?

Oh, I don’t know. That was just my New York Times piece and Courtney being a little witchy poo shit disturber. She’s making waves and making noise and music, and reunions are a magic like love and orgasms. You have no fucking idea what’s going to happen.