Melissa Auf der Maur | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan
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How did a $1 Tuesday night show spark a rock friendship?
The bass is the instrument that is unnoticed, but no one can live without.
As I was playing, a beer bottle smashed against my guitar. Yes. So even though I'm in the crowd choking Bruce to the ground, like this. The best. I got back on stage, picked up a guitar, and finished the song.
That is when you captured my heart. I remember you said, wow, one day maybe you'll play in my band.
Okay, here we go. We're going to get to the tough.
I've been waiting 25 years to ask you these questions. And here's your new book.
I have lots of deeply penetrating questions and concerns.
Your spirit is squeezed into those pages. It's the origin story of me and you.
All right, so let's an origin story. So we'll start with Nick and Linda.
Oh, yes. Thank you.
Take me to Nick and Linda.
My parents. I love that you remember that, yeah, they're without... You know, I always say that you and Courtney were my grunge parents and that my parents... I live in omnipresent shadows of my cool Montreal parents, both music journalists, culture journalists, activists, like everything good 70s, 60s counterculture raised me with the idea that... The golden thread to a purpose in life is just to know what you, Melissa, loves, needs to do. Never work for the man, never work for anybody else, but your vision of what the world needs. And so they're the best role models. My father died, as you know, like super long ago, but with him, I feel like the baton was further past that I really look up to my parents.
And they were the best role models for what I feel like the 21st century needs more of, which is unique individualism.
Talk a bit about, though, your dad's sort of cult personality in Montreal.
Yeah, okay. Well, that's also what's interesting is because I grew up in the shadow of a larger-than-life person. My father was a journalist turned politician, but also a man about town, ran out of... A bon vivant. A bon vivant, boulevardier, smoking, drinking, intense lifestyle, not unlike the people of the rock bands that you and I were not. But the people, other people in rock bands.
But this might have something to do with us ending up in those bands with those people. Yes, it's true. Or even romantically being involved with those types of people.
Yes, it is true, actually. So he was both, like, remarkable and impossible. And he, you know, I grew up on the campaign trails, you know, election nights.
What was his political platform?
He was proud. He was an independent and he founded about 10 different Montreal independent movement parties. And every time he left a party, they'd say, Nick, you're so inconsistent. He's like, the parties change. I don't change. And his thing was entirely the people have the power.
Yeah.
Corporate government don't trust them. So he was just like he was a radical socialist who wanted to fight for the people.
I didn't know this, or if I did, I'd forgotten, but I saw some allusion in doing the research to interview you about this kind of traveling with your parents, like gypsy life.
What almost made Melissa Auf der Maur decline joining Hole?
That's my mother, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that?
So my father injected me with all the political, public-facing stuff, and my mother injected me with the, no man is ever going to define who you are.
She got that one through.
Yes. She had me as a single mother because she didn't tell my father I was born until I was two. So they had a romantic weekend. She had what she wanted. And before I met my father, I had lived in a circus caravan in Wales, a British post office truck in Morocco, and a hut in Kenya, Africa with chimpanzees. My mother was a radical independent psychologist. hippie woman who brought her little girl on that trip. And I spent my second birthday, St. Patrick's Day, 1974, in Africa. Like, I have the photo of my birthday party in an African tribe of children and me, which is, I think, where I got injected with the travel nomad came from my mother. And my father, public mania, you know, he gave me that ability to walk into the spotlight with you.
Yeah.
Yeah. I met you, I think you were 19 or 18.
Yeah, probably.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did a $1 Tuesday night show spark a rock friendship?
0:00–3:15
2
What almost made Melissa Auf der Maur decline joining Hole?
3:15–6:39
3
What was the impact of Courtney Love's Hollywood pivot on the band?
6:39–9:07
4
How did the Smashing Pumpkins shape Melissa's music career?
9:07–14:03
5
What challenges did Melissa face while touring with the Pumpkins?
14:03–20:13
6
How did personal losses affect their musical journeys?
20:13–26:15
7
What insights does Melissa share about the 90s rock scene?
26:15–33:08
8
How does Melissa reflect on her legacy and the future of music?
33:08–1:30:21
Speakers
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