In the 1990s, Melissa Auf der Maur played bass in two of the decade’s most notable rock bands: Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. Her new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, documents this wild chapter in her life, as she navigates the heightened emotions and destructive excesses of Courtney Love and learns to wrangle the controlling influence of Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins). Ten years earlier, Kim Gordon’s career began during New York’s post-punk era.

Her book, Girl In A Band (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. By the early 1990s, she was something of a godmother figure for Auf der Maur’s generation of women. Review: Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir – Melissa Auf Der Maur (Atlantic); Girl in a Band – Kim Gordon (Faber) 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.

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. 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. Once or twice, I was personally impacted. For example, a very high profile singer tried to persuade other women not to speak to me for my first book 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’d given her full copy approval. It was, as Auf der Maur says, a time of “messy humanity”, low-level trust, and delicate egos. 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. Musical callings and romantic dreams 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 Électriques, where she worked part-time while studying photography.

More impressed by Hole’s calm, centred bassist, Jill Emery, than the band’s 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 “new musical calling”.

Four months later, she travelled to a Pumpkins show in Vermont and spent the night “soul fucking” him in his motel room. “I am you and you are me,” 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 “romantic dream come true” and “a turning point... musically, personally and cosmically”.

More tellingly perhaps, though she describes Corgan as eventually exerting “more influence on my life than anyone other than my parents”, Auf der Maur didn’t question his patriarchal power dynamic for many years – despite being in one of rock’s most notorious female-fronted bands. But Corgan’s hold extended to his former girlfriend, Courtney Love, long after she left him for Kurt Cobain. When Hole’s second bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died from an overdose, it was Corgan who decided Auf der Maur should be the replacement.

The Hole drama Life in Hole was nothing if not dramatic – and Auf der Maur’s account harbours no illusions about the difficulty of working with a grieving, traumatised widow. 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. 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.

But she was very aware of her marginalised position as Love’s “good girl” in the autocratic Hole. She had no artistic freedom in the band and eventually grew frustrated with her unfulfilling situation. After five years in Love’s orbit, Auf der Maur wanted out. By 1998, the singer’s Hollywood film career had catapulted her into a different stratosphere of celebrity culture, further widening the ex