What I found so powerful about Melissa Auf book is the tenderness of her memory. Maybe it comes from looking through a lens for so long, capturing thousands of moments, learning how to truly see people. She doesn’t soften the chaos of the ’90s, she reveals the humanity inside it, finding something in people they might not even see in themselves.
Reading it, I realized she was doing that long before she ever wrote a word of this book.
Hell, She even did it to me.
In the spring of 2000, I was a freshman in college, there on a baseball scholarship, but already feeling the pull of something else. I was writing for the school newspaper, taking my first photography class, trying in my own clumsy way to tell stories through songs.
The professor who ran the college newspaper took a liking to me and asked if I wanted to represent our school at a college newspaper conference in Minneapolis in March.
I had no interest in going to the newspaper conference, but after doing a little digging, I realized that one of the most important bands of my life was doing a meet and greet that same weekend, just down the street from the hotel where the conference was being held. The Smashing Pumpkins would be at the downtown Sam Goody.
That was all I needed. I took the free trip from my professor and headed up to Minneapolis. I went to the conference for about an hour, did a classic Irish goodbye, and walked straight down Nicollet toward the record store.
By that point, The Smashing Pumpkins’ records had been a lifeline for me. I was a weird kid from a small town in Iowa, sitting in my bedroom dreaming of being a rock and roller. I had bootlegs of the Pumpkins playing their first tours to a handful of people, and now I was watching them become this massive thing, filling arenas, due to the brilliance of albums like Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, two of the greatest albums of the ’90s, and well maybe ever.
Their music was the first that ever made me cry, the first time I felt truly seen by something outside of myself. I know that sounds weird, but it gave shape to all that confusion and longing, and made me believe there was something more out there waiting for me.
Over the course of those years, watching the Smashing Pumpkins change lineup after lineup taught me something I didn’t fully understand at the time. Jimmy would be gone, then he’d come back. D’arcy would be there, then she wouldn’t. It was this constant shift in something I loved so deeply. And at first, it felt like loss.
But over time, I started to understand that even the most magical things, especially the ones built on relationships, are going to change. They evolve. They fall apart and come back together in new ways. And if you really love something, you don’t hold it to what it was, you learn to love what it becomes.
The Pumpkins showed me that. That the magic doesn’t disappear, it just takes on a different shape.
Melissa Auf der Maur.
I mostly knew Melissa from seeing her on MTV, standing just off to the side of the chaos that was Courtney Love. While everything around her felt wild and unpredictable, Melissa always seemed glazy-eyed in this almost dreamlike way, but grounded at the same time. Watching everything. Taking it all in. There was something protective about her presence, like she was holding the center while everything else spun around her.
The first time I ever saw Melissa not on TV or in a magazine was at Edgefest in Somerset, Wisconsin, where Hole was playing on a strange lineup. One day was all heavy rock bands, the other leaned more alternative. It was a weird split. My friends and I weren’t really into most of the bands on the heavy day sponsored by the rock station, but we still went and saw Green Day and Def Leppard and a bunch shit bands that we didn't care for. The whole thing felt like a total bro zone, like a mini Woodstock ’99 dropped into Wisconsin.
Hole played on Sunday, the alternative station day. Think CAKE, Moby, The Offspring, Local H. Looking back at that lineup now, I can’t believe we went. There wasn’t much in the way of indie or underground rock, but somehow we found our way there anyway, cause we had gone the year before and it ruled.
My best friends and I hadn’t been to that many shows yet, but I knew enough to know this felt different. There was a strange, electric tension hanging over the crowd.
When Hole took the stage, Courtney Love came out, put her foot up on the monitor, and within seconds pulled her top aside, exposing one of her breasts in defiance of the sexist screams coming from the crowd. I remember looking at my friends and just kind of shrugging like, okay, ah here we go.
And then the band hit.
For the next 40 minutes it was just this full-force assault, loud, fast, unrelenting. Courtney was ferocious. Not just chaotic like she seemed on TV, but commanding. Focused. There was a power there I hadn’t understood before. And she was doing it all while wearing pink butterfly wings.
The band behind her, Melissa included, locked in and drove it forward like a storm you couldn’t step out of.
When it ended, I remember thinking, Oh damn, I get it now.
And then right after Hole's set, the radio DJ grabbed the mic and said, “What did you think of Hole? We all know Courtney killed Kurt.” And this wave just hit the crowd. Cheers, Boos.. It was so jarring, so ugly, like he was trying to provoke something or get a reaction. I remember just standing there thinking, what the hell was that? I was confused and kinda scared a riot was about to start.
Reading Melissa’s book now, that moment at Edgefest lands so differently. Because you start to understand the weight Courtney was carrying. Losing her husband, losing a bandmate, raising a child, being scrutinized constantly, battling addiction, trying to hold onto ambition and identity in a world that wanted to tear her apart.
It’s honestly kind of unbelievable she made it through.
And what Melissa does in her memoir is something so beautiful. She doesn’t flatten those moments into gossip or spectacle. She gives them context. She gives them humanity. She shows the ambition, the contradictions, the vulnerability, the strength. She lets people be complicated and still worthy of love.
Back to my newspaper conference I was skipping out of, the line to meet the Pumpkins stretched through the skywalks of the downtown mall, snaking on forever like it had no end in sight. I brought my camera, thinking I’d document it for class. Nobody back at Des Moines Area Community College was going to have photos of real rock stars. Most of what I’d shot on film up to that point was blurry pictures of my friends and indie rock bands around Ames and Des Moines.
This was going to be different. I was going to photograph real rock stars, some of the biggest in the world. I might as well been a journalist for Rolling Stone ..
I took photos of the kids in line, faces full of anticipation, nerves, devotion. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was documenting something Melissa had been capturing so effortlessly in her own photography, the humanity around the music.
And then I got to the front. Where the The Smashing Pumpkins were seated in a row... No James Iha but the rest were there.
And there she was.
I had never seen anyone like her in real life. Her skin almost glowing under the fluorescent lights, her eyes bright and kind, her long curly hair, and this aura around her that didn’t push you away, it pulled you in. She looked holy, almost like a religious figure you’d see on a candle in a Mexican grocery store, burning so bright into me. Even in one of the photos I took of her, it looks like there’s a fiery glow around her presence. Fucking intense.
She looked up at me and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Patrick,” I said. “It’s so nice to meet you, Melissa.”
She smiled and said, almost flirtingly, “Patrick, you must be Irish like me.”
“VERY Irish,” I said with a smile.
She leaned over to sign my poster, and I remember, very clearly, that I could see straight down her shirt, almost to her belly button. I was trying not to be corrupted by her looks, but at the same time, I was completely mesmerized.
She looked back up at me, and our eyes met again.
“Patrick, it was so wonderful meeting you.”
For a second, it felt like we were the only two people in the room.
Reading her memoir now, I understand that moment in a way I couldn’t then.
That wasn’t an accident.
This is her gift. Connection!
Melissa Auf was the first rock star I ever met.
She wouldn’t be my last.
But reading her book, I felt connected to her in a strange, almost unexplainable way. Because we both had that same audacity, to walk up to the people who meant everything to us and tell them so. No hesitation. No fear. Just honesty.
She took that pressure off of me in this big life moment. A few moments later, I got the opportunity to tell Billy Corgan thank you for writing the soundtrack to my life, and that I thought Adore was a beautiful record. He put his permanent marker down and shook my hand.
So what I'm saying in life... go ahead ruin the mystery. Tell somebody how amazing you think they are. Thank them for making the art that they made.
Melissa, thank you for this incredible book, and for making me believe I could talk to anyone I admired.
