Melissa Auf der Maur still has her address book from the ’90s. And right now, it’s sitting on a table at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) along with her vintage cameras, first cell phone, chunky tape recorder and about a dozen old-school flippable photo books. “This is how people lived,” says Canada’s most famous grunge rocker (if you don’t count the godfather of grunge, himself, Neil Young), who played bass guitar in the bands Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins from 1994 to 2000. Picking up the palm-sized notebook, with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus on the cover, Auf der Maur says, “This is literally the opposite of an iPhone” and points out: “There’s the phone number for Geffen Records, there is Dave Grohl’s … All of the ’90s is in one phone book.”

For those unfamiliar, Melissa, 54, is the child of the late legendary Montreal bon vivant Nick Auf der Maur and Boston journalist and award-winning translator Linda Gaboriau, who moved to the city in the ’60s to join the separatist movement. Their daughter – “the product of a one-night stand,” says Melissa – is a red-headed beauty not unlike the women found in Botticelli’s artwork. When, as a child, she came across those paintings, Auf der Maur finally saw herself in culture, and it led her to the photography program at Concordia University, where she took pictures of herself collaged with the painter’s masterpieces. She had become her own muse, a selfie-taker long before there was a term for it. 

But then destiny called – literally, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love rang Auf der Maur’s home phone numerous times in 1994, until the 22-year-old finally picked up and went to Seattle to meet her – still wary of joining a band who were in mourning for their previous bassist (Kristen Pfaff had just died of a heroin overdose) and for Love’s husband Kurt Cobain (who had killed himself four months prior). 

She did, though, join the travelling circus. And while on the road with a band that was blowing up – and rewriting what it meant to be women in rock – they were also raising Love and Cobain’s two-year-old child, Frances Bean. “It takes a village,” says Auf der Maur now, while looking at a photo of her holding Frances in the backseat of a limo on the way to the 1995 MTV Video Awards. Through it all, the bassist shot a roll of film every day with her Nikon point-and-shoot, documenting life onstage and off, often getting it processed at one-hour photo labs while on tour.

The resulting images add colour and texture to the already legendary story of her rise to rock goddess/warrior stature. Here are the Cole’s Notes: Auf der Maur goes to see an unknown Chicago band called The Smashing Pumpkins in Montreal in 1991; her roommate throws a beer bottle at them; she apologizes to the lead singer Billy Corgan at the side of the stage and then again in a letter that she sends to his record company’s P.O. Box. Inspired by the band and their girl bassist, she picks up that instrument; starts her own band, Tinker; and writes to the same P.O. Box again asking if Tinker can open for the Pumpkins the next time they come to town. Corgan agrees. And, after her set, he tells her, “Maybe some day you’ll play in my band.”

Just six months later, Corgan recommends his Montreal acquaintance to his ex-girlfriend Courtney Love – who’s searching for a bassist. Fast-forward five years, Auf der Maur leaves Hole and joins The Smashing Pumpkins on their final tour. 

There’s plenty more sex, drugs, famous friends, peace, love, rock ’n’ roll and drama to the story, which can be found in Auf der Maur’s recent memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry – which also recounts the endings of both bands, and our protagonist’s decision to flee to upstate New York where she put down the bass and the camera, got married to indie filmmaker Tony Stone, had a daughter, River, and founded a nonprofit arts centre in the Hudson Valley. “I cut all creative expression pretty much out other than creating a beautiful child, creating a neighbourhood I could believe in and giving a platform to emerging artists.” 

Now Auf der Maur’s back, with a visual representation of what she calls the “last analog decade.” Four hundred of her thousands of photos are on display at the AGO (currently open for members; public access Sept. 8) – many of which are reprinted in the exhibit’s accompanying coffee table book, My ’90s Rock Photographs and will also be part of an upcoming CBC/NFB documentary. Dressed in a vintage one-piece salmon-coloured jumper and suede mini boots, she chatted with Zoomer at the gallery, first riffing on her approach to fashion and then walking us through a decade of zeitgeisty music history.

RETRO REWIND 

“Time travel exists. In my mind, I have lived in all periods of all time. My fashion falls somewhere between the Renaissance and Twin Peaks – and all the many decades that have come and gone in between. I like a little Victorian. I like a little ’40s. The ’80s as they honed into the ’40s. I like ’80s meets Hollywood. I like Blade Runner mixed with one of a kind – as long as it’s timeless.”

PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

“I really picked up a camera when I was 13 because I was shy and I didn’t know how to express myself. So photography was my first way of having some kind of agency and confidence in my own expression. I was very much hiding behind a camera. Then I found the darkroom and hid in there. But photography gave me a window into myself.”

LA BELLE VIE

“In this exhibit, I wanted to tell my origin story of my parents and my city of Montreal. An ode to the city that really did raise me. Not only did my parents create me, but they are huge influences. They were both journalists. My mother was the first female rock disc jockey on the Montreal airwaves. My father was a journalist and he had radio shows. They were very, very passionate about culture, about their generation and about politics. They were vibrant people who captured the world around them and expressed it and shared it publicly. So my parents were incredible, but they were very busy expressing themselves and doing their lives. And I had to find my life – and my city gave me that.”

POWER COUPLE

“I often say Billy Corgan and Courtney Love are my grunge parents. But it wasn’t until this year, after I guested on the Pumpkins set at Lollapalooza – and Courtney reached out saying she really wanted to have been there – that was the first time that me, Billy and Courtney were all on one group thread. It has never happened in the history of our existence until a month ago. And it was very, very special because I realized I’ve never really even been in the same room with them together.”

LIVE THROUGH THIS

“It felt like a movie. This is your life, your destiny, to crawl down the escalator of the Seattle airport, and I see the women at the bottom. I realize that it’s my destiny to join this band – for women in music; and for women in art across the board; and for those particular women in front of me, those individuals. [Points to a photo taken from an upstairs window looking down at the garage where Cobain killed himself.] This is when I was staying at Courtney’s home in the guest room in the wake of his death. I go straight into the personal realm.”

THE GIRL WITH THE MOST CAKE

Me and Courtney had a very unique dynamic where I quite literally was the good girl to her bad girl, and we balanced each other out. But we presented the same ideas, to look at a different role for a woman on the male-dominated landscape of rock music. Courtney is the smartest person in every room and she was ahead of her time and she was not afraid. Most people are afraid to call people out. People are still afraid right now. But she was just calling out the injustice to everyone and everything and the patriarchy of everything, which now I feel is more widely known. The world wasn’t ready yet.

REALITY BITES

Our ’90s alternative youth culture was hijacked. Our generation is a bridge: what we had, that was our own and it hit the mainstream and got co-opted by everyone who was trying to figure out how they could make money off of it. It’s a real loss of innocence that happened to our community and to our generation at large – and then to everyone for all time now. Once we turned into that Y2K and digital tentacle reality, we became trapped in the abusive system of just mining our attention.

DON’T LOOK BACK 

By building a castle of the ’90s: a memoir, a photo book, a gallery exhibit and a documentary film using my archives, I am now letting go of the ’90s. I wrote this for my daughter, who’s turning 15 next month, to purge the ’90s out of me so other people could swim in it, love it, reflect on it, be in it, enjoy it – and so I can move on into a future without the baggage.

MISS WORLD

Looking at these photos, I know that the 22-year-old who went out on this mission – and was so passionate to write about it in my journals and to photograph it – is the one who has brought me into my really resilient middle age. I will rely on my younger self to remind me what it felt like to be a person hunting for their voice.