Melissa Auf der Maur, the Canadian bassist best known for her stint in Courtney Love’s Hole, has written a memoir, and has been talking to the Guardian about it and her time at the centre of 1990s alt rock.
She stepped, knowingly, into the eye of a hurricane; the biggest rock story in a generation. Auf der Maur joined Hole in mid 1994, just after previous bassist Kristen Pfaff had died of a heroin overdose and, of course, just a couple of months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
Bassists are often known for their solidity, but Auf der Maur sounds like exactly the sort of bandmate Love needed at that time. “Courtney was not OK,” she remembers. “She was grieving, she had a young daughter to raise alone, and she was on drugs. On top of that, she was the most famous widow of the most famous dead rock star in the world. She was a raging, rolling tornado.”
Of the record labels who were supposed to be in charge, she says: “No one was taking care of these people who were in major trauma. No one was helping them. They were just pushing Courtney and her daughter on tour, which was insane.”
“Was Courtney impossible, difficult, a drug addict, terrifying, and even mean sometimes? Yes, she was. But it took me one second to understand that she was also a survivor.”
After Auf der Maur left Hole in 1999, she dated – of all people - Dave Grohl (a regular critic of Love around this time). “I had assumed that having both of us come out of such dramatic, painful experiences in Hole and Nirvana, we’d share in a ‘let’s get out of here. I’m done with this party’ way of living. But he had unfinished business in show business,” she says, adding she thinks he wanted a “wife waiting for him back home, while also being a gigantic superstar.”
The pair went their separate ways, but of Grohl these days, Auf der Maur says: “He really is very sweet-hearted and pure,” though adding: “I don’t know how pure you are after a lifetime of fame.”
As for Love, Auf der Maur says: “I’m incredibly proud of a woman who should be dead, who instead is evolving.” Her new songs, she says, “are going to be a gift for anyone who wants to understand a woman like her – and it’s essential that we have a better understanding of complex women like Courtney”.
Auf der Maur’s book is called Even The Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir and is out on Thursday 19 March.
