A ’90s Rock Memoir
By Melissa Auf der Maur
This is the must-read rock and roll memoir of our time.
Auf der Maur’s fame came suddenly, and she sets the reader up to expect as much. The book immediately places us behind the scenes as she gears up to play the Reading Music Festival. She was 23 and on a world tour. The Reading Festival was her seventh concert with the infamous rock band Hole. Over the course of the book, we find out just how this happened.
“I felt like an absurd grunge Cinderella, who’d found herself with VIP access to the ball.”
Auf Der Maur deftly and vividly chronicles the ’90s music scene as both the bassist for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. Her intimate narrative puts readers in her head as she seemingly comes out of nowhere to join not one, but two predominant bands of the millennial generation.
Her origin story is extremely admirable. She initially learned to play the trumpet, but took a hard pivot in college and fell in love with the local music scene. She became friends with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, and opened up for the band when she barely enough songs to form an album. It was Corgan who gave her a reference when Hole was looking for a bassist. She had been playing bass for about a year at this point.
Auf der Mar had planned to be a photographer, so the book is sprinkled with photos that capture the moment. But that training also gave her a keen sense of observation and an uncanny knack for translating her memories into words. She knows how to place the reader in a scene. Auf Der Maur dives into not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there. This is what separates her from many other memoir writers. Not only was she new to being a touring musician, she was suddenly thrown into the center of the ’90s rock scene.
She offers a candid look at the behind-the-scenes work it takes to make an album, which contrasts with the energy, excitement, and hurry-up-and-wait nature of being a musician. There are moments that are so impossibly ’90s that anyone who lived through the time can relate. Getting a one-way ticket to a city you’ve never been to with a friend you met at a bar, with money you don’t have, to a concert you don’t have tickets to was so ’94.
Perhaps the most surprising take was Auf der Maur’s very, very empathetic view of Courtney Love. She counters the prevailing narrative about her bandmate, who went on tour with a two-year-old mere months after her husband died, as did the original Hole bassist.
Joining a band that had just suffered two major deaths created an intensity that made me feel I had to honor both the living and the dead and push my own feelings and experiences to the background.
One drawback is that she alludes to the drugs and dysfunction of her band but doesn’t dive too deeply into exactly what happened. Maybe this was out of respect for her fellow musicians, but the reader can feel the editing gaze of an NDA in the background.
The references to fame and other things coming at a steep price also don’t delve into what that means. Same with the Smashing Pumpkins. She rushes through her time with them, undoing some of the details that made the book so solid.
Perhaps because the time passed and blurs for the author, I feel she kind of yadda-yadds the best part. Hole was on tour for a year in the book, and she barely mentions what happens. It is exhausting just to read the schedule of someone who went on tour for a year, but besides the pictures, what that actually felt like was noticeably absent.
The book ends as she reflects on the future and makes her own name in the music scene. A perfect bookend to one of music’s greatest eras.
It’s rare to find such a wide-eyed and joyous retelling of a career, and I genuinely loved being along for the ride. My biggest frustration is that I wanted even more: more of the touring, more of the chaos, and more of what it actually felt like to live through this extraordinary moment in music history. But perhaps that is also a testament to how good the book is. I simply didn’t want it to end.
If you appreciated Kathleen Hanna’s ‘Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk’, you’ll want to rush to read this as soon as possible.
