Girl from the North Country: Melissa Auf der Maur

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, February 25, 2011

By the time these words hit the page, the big thaw will, hopefully, have at least shown a few encouraging hints of its desperately awaited arrival. Hudson Valley winters are famously merciless, but this one has been uncharacteristically brutal. As of this issue’s mid-February writing, we have endured seemingly endless weeks of temperatures in the 20s and down into survival-suit levels, and we’ve been clobbered with enough snow to threaten the heights of our surrounding Catskills and Berkshires. It’s really been one for the almanacs. And by now, enough is enough. Please.

For singer-songwriter Melissa Auf der Maur, however, even such a cruel local winter as this is barely a blip on the barometer. “It’s like a summer holiday for me,” she says, with a laugh. Auf der Maur, the former bassist of two of the biggest alt-arena acts of the 1990s, Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, lives in Hudson but grew up amid the routinely subzero climes and far lengthier winters of Montreal. “Hudson’s just four hours south [of Montreal], but it’s such a big difference, weather-wise. You can’t even compare. This is really my kind of climate, though. I love it. Being a photographer as well, I really like the light we get here in the winter.”

Auf der Maur is the only child of two who were paragons themselves. Her father, Nick Auf der Maur, who died in 1998, was one of Montreal’s most colorful, larger-than-life characters; a fedora-wearing, Gitane-smoking boulevardier and reporter-turned-politician who regularly held court in the city’s downtown bars. Her American-born mother, Linda Gaboriau, is an acclaimed literary translator and music journalist, and the first female rock DJ on Canadian airwaves. “My dad only liked classical music, and didn’t think any music made after 1917 was good,” the bass player recalls. “But I used to love listening to and looking at the albums my mom brought home—the Stones, Dylan, Jimmy Cliff. And all of the people she knew from her job, like Leonard Cohen, to me they were just her friends.” Her parents eventually separated, and her mother took her on an extended global sojourn, during which the pair lived in “a circus caravan in Wales, a red post-office box truck in Morocco, and a hut in Kenya. But after I got malaria for the third time in Kenya, my mom decided it was time to head home.”

Back in Montreal, Auf der Maur attended the progressive FACE (Fine Arts Core Education) School, where she sang in its classical choir. The nagging need to radically define herself apart from her celebrity parents’ worlds led her to bands with a Goth aesthetic—the Sisters of Mercy, the Cure, Jane’s Addiction. She also discovered photography. “I was your typical arty kid working stuff out, I did a lot of crying in the darkroom while listening to the Smiths,” she says, rolling her eyes. The interest in picture taking developed into a major at Concordia University, and by the early ’90 she had already been DJing off campus at renowned rock ’n’ roll hang the Bifteck for a couple of years. Deducing that the scarcity of local bass players could offer an opportunity to join a band, she started learning the instrument and was soon taking part in post-Bifteck jams with other aspiring rockers.

One of them was guitarist Steve Durand, now a producer and a recent Hudson transplant himself, with whom she formed a trio called Tinker. The band didn’t make much of an impact outside of Montreal, but looking back, Durand isn’t especially surprised that Auf der Maur went on to bigger things. “At the time with the band I was more focused on the local level, but Melissa always had a larger perspective,” says Durand. “And even back then she was a really inspiring musician.”