Ten years earlier, Kim Gordon\u2019s career began during New York\u2019s post-punk era. Her book, Girl In A Band<\/a> (2015), recently re-released as a tenth anniversary edition, chronicles her time with Sonic Youth, and charts her role within an alternative scene that shaped and influenced independent music culture across the United States. <\/p>\n By the early 1990s, she was something of a godmother figure for Auf der Maur\u2019s generation of women. <\/p>\n Review: Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir \u2013 Melissa Auf Der Maur (Atlantic); Girl in a Band \u2013 Kim Gordon (Faber)<\/p>\n Introverted individuals with distinct perspectives on the peculiar challenges of the rock industry, Gordon and Auf der Maur appear to have benefited from a stability missing in many of their peers. <\/p>\n As bass players, they avoided the spotlight until embarking on their solo projects. And with backgrounds in the visual arts, they each had access to independent creative identities away from the stage, which no doubt minimised the pitfalls of rock stardom.<\/p>\n Kim Gordon\u2019s career began during New York\u2019s post-punk era. As a music journalist throughout the 1990s, I interviewed many of the people in their stories, including Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, Thurston Moore and Kurt Cobain. I witnessed their complex politics and fierce power plays, some still ongoing<\/a>. <\/p>\n Once or twice, I was personally impacted<\/a>. <\/p>\n For example, a very high profile singer tried to persuade other women not to speak to me for my first book<\/a> because my magazine profile of her was badly altered by a male editor. Another musician blamed me for publishing personal details in an interview after I\u2019d given her full copy approval. <\/p>\n It was, as Auf der Maur says, a time of \u201cmessy humanity\u201d, low-level trust, and delicate egos. <\/p>\n It was also, as she points out, the last analogue decade: a time before the music scene was transformed by the internet, when rock culture appeared to be finally embracing powerful women and female agency. But in my experience, and as each of these books reveals, it was never that straightforward. <\/p>\n Musical callings and romantic dreams<\/p>\n An artistic free spirit raised in Montreal by unorthodox, creative parents, Melissa Auf der Maur first saw Hole and Smashing Pumpkins within a fortnight of each other in July 1991. Both bands played at the legendary punk club, Les Foufounes \u00c9lectriques<\/a>, where she worked part-time while studying photography. <\/p>\n More impressed by Hole\u2019s calm, centred bassist, Jill Emery, than the band\u2019s infamous, volatile frontwoman, Auf der Maur was truly starstruck by Corgan. She introduced herself to him after he was bottled on stage by her roommate. Watching him play, she experienced a \u201cnew musical calling\u201d. Four months later, she travelled to a Pumpkins show in Vermont and spent the night \u201csoul fucking\u201d him in his motel room.<\/p>\n \u201cI am you and you are me,\u201d she remembers Corgan saying to her, in what sounds like a rock-starry show of narcissism towards an impressionable fan. But for Auf der Maur, who occasionally veers into grandiose claims, the encounter was a \u201cromantic dream come true\u201d and \u201ca turning point [\u2026] musically, personally and cosmically\u201d. <\/p>\n More tellingly perhaps, though she describes Corgan as eventually exerting \u201cmore influence on my life than anyone other than my parents\u201d, Auf der Maur didn\u2019t question his patriarchal power dynamic for many years \u2013 despite being in one of rock\u2019s most notorious female-fronted bands. <\/p>\n But Corgan\u2019s hold extended to his former girlfriend, Courtney Love, long after she left him for Kurt Cobain. When Hole\u2019s second bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died from an overdose, it was Corgan who decided Auf der Maur should be the replacement.<\/p>\n Melissa Auf Der Mar was marginalised as Courtney Love\u2019s \u2018good girl\u2019 in the autocratic Hole. The Hole drama<\/p>\n Life in Hole was nothing if not dramatic \u2013 and Auf der Maur\u2019s account harbours no illusions about the difficulty of working with a grieving, traumatised widow. <\/p>\n But her empathy and compassion keep her story from collapsing into the critical terrain so often provoked by the outspoken, uncontained Love who attracted considerable vitriol, particularly after becoming involved with Kurt Cobain<\/a>. <\/p>\n Auf der Maur is also more forgiving than drummer Patty Schemel, who paints a harsher picture of the ambitious, tempestuous singer in her brilliant memoir, Hit So Hard<\/a>. But she was very aware of her marginalised position as Love\u2019s \u201cgood girl\u201d in the autocratic Hole. She had no artistic freedom in the band and eventually grew frustrated with her unfulfilling situation. <\/p>\n After five years in Courtney Love\u2019s orbit, Melissa Auf der Maur wanted out. After five years in Love\u2019s orbit, Auf der Maur wanted out. By 1998, the singer\u2019s Hollywood film career had catapulted her into a different stratosphere of celebrity culture, further widening the existing chasm between her and her band members. <\/p>\n And the glamour and excitement of big festival billings and hit records were not enough to prevent the bass player from feeling ultimately \u201cdisillusioned and disconnected\u201d.<\/p>\n Her decision to quit was compounded when she fell in love with ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, now with the Foo Fighters. His long-running rift with Love had previously made him \u201coff-limits\u201d.<\/p>\n But before she was released from her restrictive contract with Hole, Corgan was back in touch, asking her to replace D\u2019arcy Wretzky in Smashing Pumpkins for a year of intensive touring. Wretzky\u2019s sudden departure is glossed over in the book as a \u201ctouchy subject\u201d, though she played with the Pumpkins for 11 years, and was reputedly a friend of Auf der Maur. <\/p>\n I remember Wretzky as a quietly intelligent individual with a striking stage presence, but Corgan\u2019s domineering personality and punishing work ethic apparently proved too much<\/a> for her. <\/p>\n And Auf der Maur makes no secret of Corgan\u2019s ruthlessness. At her first rehearsal, he issued her with three rules: \u201cOne, you can\u2019t make a mistake. Two, you can\u2019t get sick. And three, there are no days off.\u201d <\/p>\n Melissa Auf der Maur makes no secret of ex partner and bandmate Billy Corgan\u2019s \u2018ruthlessness\u2019. Away from Grohl, who was also on the road with his band, she was bound to a gruelling schedule at the hands of a man she now saw as a moody overachiever. In response, she began to change her perspective. <\/p>\n Corgan\u2019s partner at the time was the gifted photographer Yelena Yemchuk<\/a>, who, Auf der Maur notes, had become \u201ca bit of a kept woman\u201d. Knowing Grohl wanted marriage and children, she witnessed Yemchuk with \u201cher beautiful talent trapped in the bell jar of Billy\u2019s world\u201d with growing alarm. <\/p>\n As the two women became close, together they realised they needed to \u201cstep out of the shadows of these bigger, more successful men\u201d and forge their own paths. <\/p>\n With the culmination of the Pumpkins world tour in 2001, Auf der Maur was 29 and finally ready for a new direction. She left her relationship with Grohl and turned down Corgan\u2019s invitation to collaborate on a new project. She finishes her book with a glimpse into her next chapter: motherhood, and a grounded life of artistic ventures in upstate New York. <\/p>\n It\u2019s more of a beginning than an end.<\/p>\n Feminism and challenges with men<\/p>\n The first time I interviewed Kim Gordon was over the phone in 1990. At the time, she was the bass player with Sonic Youth, the seminal no wave band she co-founded with her husband, singer\/guitarist Thurston Moore, in 1981. Hinting at what I suspected was sometimes a lonely situation, she told me that while the band\u2019s relationship was essentially a beautiful one, her male colleagues could be \u201cso non-communicative\u201d. <\/p>\n Three years later, I had a second, longer conversation with Gordon in her New York apartment for my aforementioned book, during which she elaborated on her original theme. Being in a band with men could be challenging, she said, because \u201cthere are some really boring aspects to it\u201d and \u201cno matter how much of a new man someone thinks they are, they\u2019re just not!\u201d<\/p>\n Gordon\u2019s experience is summed up by both the content and title of her acclaimed memoir. With a new foreword by her friend, celebrated American writer, Rachel Kushner<\/a>, and an additional closing chapter where Gordon reflects on the intervening decade, the latest version of the book is testament to its ongoing relevance for feminism, popular culture and music history. <\/p>\n Infused with the visceral, embodied sensuality of her artistic perspective, Gordon\u2019s memoir details her upbringing in Los Angeles with her schizophrenic brother, Keller, whose moods clouded her early life, and whose death in 2023, aged 74, she recounts in the new edition. <\/p>\n It charts her pivotal move to New York as a 27-year-old in 1980, her involvement with the city\u2019s post punk arts and music scene, her relationship with Moore and their resulting career with Sonic Youth. <\/p>\n Crucially, it details her influence in the Riot Grrrl movement, and her side projects, Free Kitten<\/a>, with best friend Julie Cafritz, and fashion label, X-Girl<\/a>, with Daisy von Furth, all of which afforded her the female companionship she lacked in Sonic Youth. <\/p>\n \u2018Painfully protracted\u2019 marriage breakdown<\/p>\n Kim Gordon\u2019s memoir tells of her painfully protracted marriage breakdown with bandmate Thurston Moore, following his affair. It also tells the more universal story of a painfully protracted marriage breakdown and a couple\u2019s failed attempts to save their relationship, following Gordon\u2019s discovery of Moore\u2019s affair. The book refrains from specifying dates, but by the time she found out through texts and emails, her husband had been unfaithful for several years. <\/p>\n The woman in question, who is not named in the book, was Eva Prinz<\/a>, who became Moore\u2019s second wife in 2020. At the time of the affair, Prinz was married to her second husband. She had previously been involved with one of Sonic Youth\u2019s collaborators. <\/p>\n An editor for an independent publisher, she had initially approached Gordon about a potential book project<\/a> in the early 2000s, but Gordon had passed it onto Moore, with fateful consequences. <\/p>\n Sickened by Moore\u2019s long-concealed infidelity with someone well known to their inner circle, Gordon was left to navigate the devastating impact on her family, her career and her sense of self. Given the pivotal nature of this episode, it seems fitting that she starts her story here, at the end of a significant personal and professional era, with Sonic Youth\u2019s final performance in 2011.<\/p>\n According to Gordon, this last appearance in Sao Paulo, Brazil \u201cwas all about the boys\u201d. Struggling to hide her misery, anxiety and anger on stage, while her ex regressed into an adolescent display of \u201crock star showboating\u201d, she was tempted to verbalise her fury on stage. But she didn\u2019t want to follow the unboundaried example of Courtney Love, who was then ranting and raving her way around South America on tour with Hole.<\/p>\n \u201cI would never want to be seen as the car crash she is,\u201d writes Gordon. \u201cI didn\u2019t want our last concert to be distasteful when Sonic Youth meant so much to so many people; I didn\u2019t want to use the stage for any kind of personal statement, and what good would it have done anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I would never want to be seen as the car crash she is,\u2019 writes Kim Gordon of Courtney Love. Distance as power<\/p>\n Gordon is highly adept at balancing between strong emotion and careful restraint. Throughout her book, she considers herself honestly, but thoughtfully. She conveys a quiet self-possession and enigmatic presence, writing as she speaks: with intelligence and a guarded openness. It\u2019s how I remember her: warm enough to gift me a pair of John Fluevog<\/a> sandals straight from her own closet, yet somehow always slightly removed. As Kushner says in her introduction to the memoir, \u201cdistance is the power of her performance\u201d.<\/p>\n Now 72, Kim Gordon has been a touring musician for almost 40 years. Having made multiple forays into the worlds of fashion, art and film, since Sonic Youth she has launched two experimental bands with male collaborators, Body\/Head<\/a> and Glitterbust<\/a>, been nominated for two Grammy awards<\/a>, and released three highly acclaimed solo albums as a formidable frontwoman<\/a> with an all-girl band. <\/p>\n These days, Gordon performs as if her life depends on it. With her second chapter well underway, she\u2019s on fire \u2013 and cooler than ever. Let\u2019s hope a second memoir is in the works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1990s, Melissa Auf der Maur played bass in two of the decade\u2019s most notable rock bands:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-389485","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/file-20260410-57-ki8j6i.jpg\")
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\n Evan Agostini\/AAP<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/file-20260410-57-w5o9g1.jpg\")
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\n Jonathan Mehring Blixah\/AAP<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/file-20260410-57-vjnxp2.jpg\")
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\n Bebeto Matthews\/AAP<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/file-20260410-71-o9wa6t.jpg\")
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\n Jim Cooper\/AAP<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/file-20260410-57-yfez3q.jpg\")
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\n Jonathan Mehring\/AAP<\/p>\n