Melissa Auf der Maur has spoken out about Hole‘s “unfinished business” in a new interview.
The musician played bass in the band between 1994 and 1999. She also played with the Courtney Love-led group in 2012.
Speaking to Stereogum, Auf der Maur discussed her views on Hole’s legacy and the way it’s been handled. Told that she had said in the past the band had “unfinished business”, she replied: “For sure. I actually feel pissed off, and it’s no one’s fault – except for kind of, maybe, mismanagement or hard-to-manage artists.
“Hole’s legacy lives in the gutters of YouTube. It had been like 10 years since I’d played with Hole when YouTube was created. I was, for the first time, able to look at some of the powerful live things. I realised, ‘Wow, nobody knows this.’ There’s no ‘Best Of’.”
The bassist continued to say she has 35,000 negatives from her time in Hole and that she had been “slowly scanning them” onto a computer. “I like the idea of helping remember things and put memories together,” she said.
She added: “There was actually a show I had with [Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘] Nick Zinner at a very interesting photography museum in Cleveland, Ohio, called Transformer Station. He and I had similar work, it was from my archives of life on the road in the ’90s. I’m really excited to make a package of it. I have really fond memories.
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“I’m working with a very old friend of mine and [Love’s], called Joe Mama-Nitzberg, who was one of Courtney’s oldest friends as a teenager. They came up together in the San Francisco punk rock scene. He now lives in Hudson and he’s a very big friend and supporter of Basilica [Hudson, the arts centre she founded in upstate New York]. And we’re going to direct a very strange soiree. I’m really happy to be able to do that for the legacy of Courtney and Hole.”
Auf der Maur and Mama-Nitzberg will hold a tribute to Love at Basilica Hudson on October 27. It will be hosted by Michael Stipe, Chloë Sevigny, the National’s Aaron Dessner, Ryan McGinley, Yelena Yemchuk, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
Speaking about the event, she said: “Courtney deserves a creative bouquet of honouring. She’s one of the most misunderstood, wild card, strange individuals, and Hole’s legacy is important to me, as far as it being looked at with the respect it deserves and the impact it made. The impact is very real. The #MeToo moments, Courtney was always saying this stuff.”