Melissa Auf der Maur Opens Up About Courtney Love, Dave Grohl, and How She Survived the ‘90s
Melissa Auf der Maur, bassist for alternative bands Hole and Smashing Pumpkins talks about her bestselling memoir, joining a band of “grieving drug addicts,” and why she was always a “visiting tourist in her own rock star life.”
Auf der Maur has spent decades at the center of some of rock’s most mythologized moments— on stage with Hole weeks after Kurt Cobain’s death, touring arenas with the Smashing Pumpkins, and falling in love with a pre-megastar Dave Grohl. Yet for most of that time, she kept remarkably quiet about all of it. Now, with her bestselling memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir out and a companion photo book My 90s Rock Photographs close behind, the Canadian bassist sat down with Justin Richmond on the Broken Record podcast to finally tell her story in full.
Auf der Mar’s conversation with Richmond is revealing, as she brings a level of care, intelligence, and honesty to a chapter of music history that has been endlessly mythologized and frequently misrepresented.
From Montreal Bohemia to Hole’s Darkest Hour
Auf der Maur traces her origin story to Montreal’s vibrant underground arts scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, where her parents, both immersed in the creative world, encouraged an unconventional path. Her band Tinker landed an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a fan letter sent to a P.O. box, and it was there that Billy Corgan spotted her talent on bass and eventually recommended her to Courtney Love. Her first show with Hole? In front of 65,000 people at the UK’s Reading Festival in August 1994.
On Courtney Love: ‘A Force to Be Reckoned With’
Auf der Maur’s portrait of Courtney Love is neither saintly nor a takedown, which makes it one of the most compelling accounts of Love’s complicated genius to date. She describes joining a band whose frontwoman had lost her husband and her bassist in the same brutal spring, and was simultaneously being accused of orchestrating Cobain’s death by the tabloid press.
Auf der Maur has described Love’s performances in that period as “full of unpredictable body movements, accusations, and screams, laced with dark humor”—a woman howling into the darkness to keep grief at bay. On the podcast, she reflects on how her relationship with Love has evolved over the decades that followed, moving from turbulent professional partnership to something more complex and enduring.
Her description of the dynamic is characteristically precise: both Courtney and Billy Corgan, she notes, have observed that she never fully gave herself to either band. That distance, she explains, was intentional and a form of self-preservation. “I was a visiting temporary member,” she said.
The Dave Grohl Chapter
One of the memoir’s most talked-about threads is Auf der Maur’s relationship with Dave Grohl—her “first love”—which unfolded against the surreal backdrop of the post-Nirvana period, when Grohl was navigating his own grief and building what would become the Foo Fighters. The Broken Record episode revisits that chapter with warmth and perspective.
“With my first love, Dave, it was: ‘What? That jock? That guy is the guy I’m gonna fall in love with?'” she said in a recent interview tied to the book. “It’s never what you expect.” The relationship, which she chronicles with what Goodreads reviewers have called “raging intimacy,” places Auf der Maur at the center of what she describes as a “soul constellation” linking her with Corgan, Love, Grohl, and Cobain—four figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined in one of the most documented moments in modern music history.
Photographer, Curator, Survivor
What makes Auf der Maur’s story distinctive is the dual lens she brought to her entire career. A trained photographer who saw music as her second calling (not the other way around), she documented everything: the tours, the chaos, the backstage grief, the celebrity collisions. The companion photo book My 90s Rock Photographs is drawn from that archive, offering an insider’s visual record of an era most people only know from the outside.
Since leaving the music industry’s major-label orbit, she has co-founded Basilica Hudson, a multidisciplinary arts center in New York’s Hudson Valley that has become one of the most respected independent cultural spaces in the Northeast. The throughline, she explains, is the same impulse that kept her camera in her hand throughout the ’90s: a commitment to art that isn’t corrupted by commerce.
Richmond asks her on the podcast about how alternative music’s mainstream breakthrough changed everything and her answer, shaped by thirty years of hindsight, is among the episode’s most resonant moments. She came of age at the exact moment the underground went overground, and watched both the liberation and the cost of that transformation up close.
The full Broken Record episode with Justin Richmond is available now on all podcast platforms.