Melissa Auf der Maur’s Chronicle of Nineties Rock
Thirty-two years ago, in the summer of 1994, Courtney Love staged a remarkable comeback. Earlier that year, her band, Hole, had released a furious and galvanizing album called “Live Through This,” but it had arrived in shops only four days after Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few months after that, Hole’s bass player, Kristen Pfaff, died from a heroin overdose. And so, when Love appeared onstage at the Reading Festival, in August, no one knew what to expect. “Oh, yeah, I’m so goddam brave,” Love sneered. (She seemed to be preëmptively making fun of anyone who would make fun of her.) And then she introduced the band’s new member. “That’s Melissa, fuckin’, last name is French,” she said, turning toward the bass player. “What is it?”
“Auf der Maur,” came the phlegmatic reply. “ ‘On the wall,’ in German.”
“Auf der Maur,” Love repeated. “ ‘Off the wall,’ in German.” Like a number of Love’s utterances, this one seemed accidentally perfect. Her new bandmate, who only a few weeks before had been observing the American alternative-rock explosion from afar, in Montreal, was no longer above the fray—she was in it.
Or maybe partway in it. “As a new member of Hole, who didn’t play on the ‘Live Through This’ album, I feel half in and half out of the band, a wandering visitor who’s not quite sure how long she might stay,” Auf der Maur remembers. She had met Billy Corgan, from the Smashing Pumpkins, at a show in Montreal, and he had suggested her to Love, who didn’t so much recruit Auf der Maur as draft her: Auf der Maur had misgivings, but Love forcefully overrode them. Starting with that performance at Reading, which was ragged and triumphant, and continuing for the next five years, Auf der Maur toured with Hole, and she played and sang on the band’s 1998 album, “Celebrity Skin.” She was a sphinxlike presence onstage, but also a bona-fide rock star, with celebrity friends and besotted fans. (At one Hole show, concertgoers in the front row held up a banner that read “MELISSA IS HOT.”) In Montreal, she had been at least as serious a photographer as she was a bass player, and probably more so. And so she resolved to document her time in the spotlight. “I had two tools: my camera and my bass,” Auf der Maur told me, during a recent phone interview. She had acquired a new camera not long after joining the band. “I remember being on Canal Street and asking for the most durable point-and-shoot Nikon. I knew I was on assignment.”
Decades later, she has turned that assignment into a book, “My ’90s Rock Photographs” (AGO/DelMonico), which brings together about two hundred images from her archive of more than ten thousand; it will be published next month, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. There are images of friends and fans and, inevitably, of Love, a transfixing and disruptive presence wherever she went. Precisely because Auf der Maur was not entirely part of the maelstrom that surrounded Hole, she was able to see it clearly, and apparently to survive it intact. “That camera—and that outsider’s lens that I came in with—was my protector,” she told me. “Everyone on tour knew me as the person with the camera.” Many of her images were self-portraits, taken in an era before the term was commonly shortened to “selfie.” Auf der Maur had thought a lot about the relationship between artists and muses. Her mother, Linda Gaboriau, is an accomplished literary translator who had sometimes served as a photographers’ muse, and as an art student, Auf der Maur had been struck by her own resemblance to the muses of Botticelli and Gustav Klimt. A rock star is inevitably both an artist and an object, and Auf der Maur’s photography makes this dual role explicit: in these images, just about everyone seems a bit starstruck.
At the moment when Auf der Maur joined Hole, she had a sense that something important was happening in the world, as one generation’s subculture was becoming the next generation’s mainstream. In the Montreal underground scene that nurtured her, Hole might as well have been a pop group, and she told me that, to some of her old friends, her decision to sign up with Love was “the equivalent of me joining Céline Dion.” For the better part of a decade, a vaguely defined but fierce alternative culture had been thriving in clubs and record stores and magazines; now, in the aftermath of Nirvana’s rise and implosion, this cloistered world was being dragged into public view, as formerly independent-minded bands signed big record deals and went off in search of big audiences. In these photographs, you can see Auf der Maur trying to figure out what to make of the swirl of adoration and ambition that had suddenly engulfed her—“the power of our youth movement being absolutely co-opted,” as she puts it. As with any explosion, the energy and the destruction were part of the same process. To many of the people involved, it all felt revolutionary, although in retrospect it’s easier to see the continuities between Auf der Maur’s generation and other ones. The photographs are full of young people doing the things that young people have always loved doing: making music, making noise, having fun, dressing up, getting in trouble, trying to survive.
One thing they are mainly not doing, of course, is documenting their lives. Love was an early adopter, and Auf der Maur captures her talking on a cellphone the size of a walkie-talkie, and also keeping a tour diary on a Macintosh Powerbook. But mostly the fans at shows reach out empty-handed—no cellphones, hardly any cameras. “I remember seeing the joy in these girls’ faces, and seeing them blossoming because I turned the camera on them,” she recalls. “Now everybody can be seen. You can post everything online, equally.” In the book, Auf der Maur portrays this as an unhappy development. There is a handwritten postscript at the end, asking, “can we promise each other to keep the analogue dreams of music, art + people alive? to resist the digital tentacles that are sucking our time + magic together?” But, of course, these photographs also show why, in the years that followed, those “digital tentacles” got so powerful, displacing the magazines and radio stations that helped shape nineties rock. We found new, more efficient ways to satisfy our desire to look and to listen, to be seen and to be heard; new ways to lump and split our social tribes; new ways to see our darker selves under bright lights and recoil in horror. “When they get what they want, they never want it again,” as Love sang, with Auf der Maur adding harmony, at that show in Reading, and countless times afterward.
Auf der Maur quit Hole in 1999, and spent a little over a year touring the world as the bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins, after which she embarked on her own career as a musician and artist. (She is the co-founder of Basilica Hudson, an art and music space in Hudson, New York.) In her time with the Smashing Pumpkins, her photographic setup grew more ambitious. She mounted a camera on her amplifier so that she could more easily take pictures from the stage, using either a timer or a foot pedal attached to a long cable. In one of those photographs, from the summer of 2000, Corgan is at the microphone, dressed in black and bathed in red light, with his back to the camera. Auf der Maur, in white, is twisted away from the audience, staring intently at the lens. “I would look at the camera and send a message to myself in the future,” she told me. “I was saying, ‘Here I am, I fucking love my bass, I’m playing in my favorite band—but this will be over soon.’ ”
